It took me a long time to feel comfortable enough to say the words "I am an artist." How can one be considered an artist when all they do is mess around with fabric and beads and paint? Certainly I can be described as a "crafter"..... someone in the same group as a kid playing with feathers and paper plates in kindergarten. But an artist?

Artists are the elite. Artists make magic with their ideas. Artists enlighten and inspire; their work advances civilizations. The Renaissance changed society culturally, partly because the artists and sculptors of that time dared to do something different, dared to take what they were doing just one step further. The techniques and artistic concepts of today could not have evolved without such bold ideas in the area of art.

Have I ever done any of that? Have I inspired minds and nations with the stroke of my brush? Have I even made an impact on those around me with what I've created? Am I ever worthy of the title Artist?

Art is a concept, an idea, a movement. A huge waste of time from the perspective of the hunters and gatherers of the world. But dreamers are just as important to the human tribe. Dreamers bring about change and new ideas. What the dreamers create will eventually encourage the hunters and gatherers to improvise, to experiment.

I am an artist because I dream. I inspire and am inspired. I see the beauty found in the tiny details of everything around me. I find joy in taking risks and experimenting with my work. I enjoy the process as much as the finished piece. I suck up inspiring books and pictures and works of art from the world around me and I translate that into my own voice. I take the raw ingredients and I mix them around. I add a touch of magic from my own ideas and I watch what I've made evolve into something new and filled with life.

I may not come to inspire nations. I may not have a sculpture or a painting hanging in the Louvre. But I am an artist none-the-less. When I am not dreaming and creating, a piece of my heart begins to throb, so I carry my inspiring voice with me wherever I go. When I'm at work, I always have a notebook nearby to sketch ideas that come to me like lost children. I house them within the pages of my journals and they wait to be translated into real life. How can I not be an artist when it is in my blood, my soul?

Some useless contemplation

I seem to have settled into the mess that is my spare room and my life. I've taken a break from many projects and plans because of a need to reorganize, and when life's gotten in the way of that reorganization, I've just let it all lie, let the dust settle, let the soft couch take my tired body and cradle it as I watch old episodes of Law and Order. I don't know if it's laziness or a forced acceptance of ennui.

My brain is still silently buzzing, and I still manage to get out my creative outbursts with short visits to my journal, cutouts and glue stick in hand... but I'm sure a vast wave is slowly building, coming closer and closer to the shore, ready to crash down upon all the innocent and unsuspecting sunbathers, maybe taking a few annoying children on their floaty rafts and giving them a satisfying faceplant in the harsh sand.....

What I meant to say was that I'm sure such little endeavors will do little to abate the inevitable overflowing of frustrated energy that always comes after a long period of nothingness. One creates, one makes, one experiences, throwing all into a feeling, an experience, an existence of doing. Eventually that flame burns out, having sucked up all the fuel and oxygen and bringing itself to a gasping, suffocating end. But there's always a little something that needs time to build up again, think new ideas and look at new viewpoints. That little something will slowly but definitely grow into the next avalanche of creation. And the cycle continues.

I've worried for some time that I've stretched myself too thin, branching out into so many different mediums of expression, but I think that when I do feel that mental ache from too many arms going in too many directions, thin and fragile like a spider's legs, these periods of calm, these eyes in the massive storm of my inspirational drive, are what help "bulk up" those thin projections. My connection to these different ideas and forms of expression just gets stronger, waiting to flex itself at the next incoming wave.

This is a bunch of useless, but enlightening contemplation.

Do beginnings and middles lead to eventual ends?

I started working on my first official art quilt today. This is the one where I sat down with a sketchbook and decided it was going to be completely original, with no input from outside sources. It started from a doodle I did during class, and evolved into a sketch, then a collection of colors, then a bunch of shapes.



I feel rather proud with how it's coming along. I have some great ideas for how I'm going to quilt the lines on the tree and the leaves, and how I'm going to stitch the feathers. This art piece is intended to be a gift.

In addition to this, I started a fabric art book class at Doll Street Dreamers. I'm really excited about this, because I love adding to my arsenal of creative techniques. The first lesson already has some great stuff in it.

Balance with chaos

Initial color layout of the table runner. Any opinions?

I had some rules to begin with. No repeat patterns together, no repeat colors together, maintain a repetitive order, pair chaotic patterns with calmer patterns. Once I had it laid out specifically to that recipe, then I mixed it up a bit, pairing some like colors, some like patterns, and taking my few blue diamonds and scattering them in a random fashion. (I also needed two of the blues to complete the middle orange chevron row since the set of oranges was lacking in the larger floral print.)

One of the reasons why a project like this can be daunting to me is I have an insane fear that I am horrible at matching colors. Like, when I was in elementary school, if it wasn't an easy two-color combo like red/green or black/white, I would hesitate to dress in anything polychromatic because I was afraid of being laughed at. (I was always laughed at anyways. I was a bit of a loner in grade school...)

This fear of color followed me into my adult life. I wear a t-shirt with jeans because jeans are the universal matching pants. I rarely put on makeup. And when it comes to the color compositions of my projects, I just about have a heart attack sometimes, even with a pre-matched jelly roll where all the work's been done for me!

I need order and rules to be able to feel confident that I made something work. I followed the directions, so there's no way I screwed it up. And yet, how am I to insert my own signature into something if all I'm doing is following rules, even if they're my own rules?

The whole time I was setting out the pieces of the runner, three words were repeating in my head. Balance with chaos. Balance out the colors with a sense of ordered chaos and it will come out fine. For a perfectionist like me who expects no mistakes from herself being confronted with the real world fact that nothing is perfect, being able to embrace chaos and order and balancing between the two is so relieving.

I think I've finally put words to this thought in my head on how exactly I can approach the concept of color and layout without eating my own hat in frustration. And once I put something into solid words, words that can be written on a page, repeated like a mantra, stored to memory in its exact form, then I do so much better when it comes time to retrieve the information and apply it. Words are like rules. They can not be broken and thus are impervious to imperfection.