I’m participating in a series of 10 workshops offered through Springboard for the Arts, called The Business of Art. This is part of their Artist Development Project, funded in part by The Minnesota State Arts Board, through grants established after the citizens of Minnesota passed the Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment in 2008. The project offers professional development workshops and education opportunities statewide for individual artists of all disciplines.
At this week’s session, entitled Your Promotional Toolkit, we put pen to paper toward the purpose of crafting a three-sentence artist statement. It’s challenging. This is the kind of snippet you can use on a short resume, in an elevator, and/or at a party. The goal is to generate an image in the mind of the listener and to arouse curiosity about your work without waxing into verbose art-speak. You can see my new mini-statement next to my photo at right.
I got to thinking then … why not a Haiku artist statement? From three sentences down to seventeen (or so) chirps? I can’t really see myself responding to the, “so what do you do??” question with this, but it would suit my medium!
Willow over water:
Egret eyes the minnow.
Me? Sweet lure of cloth, paste, soy.
June 2008 Great Egret
Last weekend I participated in a natural pigments class given through Phipps Center for the Arts in Hudson, Wisconsin, taught by painter Gloria Adrian. The Phipps hosts an ongoing conversation on sustainability and the arts, called What We Need is Here, (after the Wendell Berry poem).
Gloria brought many samples of colored clays and dirt from the region, and some coal in the form of “coke.” She taught us how to make egg tempera, and then we played with the pigments for a few hours, painting samples on gessoed board. I brought some washi pasted with a couple of my patterns, and some soy milk. These samples don’t look like much yet because I need to build up more layers of pigment and let the paint cure before washing the paste out. Generally, the pigments we tried had more sediment than the ones I use (from my teacher, John Marshall-on this page he describes the sources of the pigments he sells). The local dirt and clay colors are beautiful and muted. I look forward to trying them on fabric! Gloria also shared another great resource for artist materials including natural pigments, Kremer Pigments. They are based in Germany but also have an outlet in NYC.
pigment samples
The brilliant rust and ultramarine are pigments out of a jar, very similar to what I use, but from Kremer. The ultramarine contains some proportion of lapiz lazuli. I think the egg tempera adds a yellow cast to the pigments.
The samples in the jars below are all from local dirt, clay, and rock.
local dirt samples
When I heard it was the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, I skimmed my scanned family photos to see if I could find one from 1970. Lo and behold, I found this photo of the only family vacation we took after some of my siblings were “adults.” I was 13 going on 14. This was taken in the summer of 1970, shortly after my brother Skip got back from Vietnam (he’s the one in back sporting his Army hat). My dad took us (except #1 son, who was starting his career as a Prof.), to Bayfield, Wisconsin, gateway to the Apostle Islands, for a week. I remember the sailing, the fresh air, and playing (beating) my siblings at Blackjack. An earthy (and watery) crew we were. (I’m the one on the far right with the silly hat.)
Bayfield 1970
This afternoon, 40 years later, I sat on my patio and stripped the windfall branches that fell from my neighbor’s birch tree. Birch is supposed to yield some lovely earthy pinks, according to Jenny Dean’s book, Wild Color. Over the coming weeks I’ll play with this and see what happens. Still too chilly today to revisit my (2nd) vat of freeze-dried indigo.
windfall white birch branches
