{"id":2053,"date":"2013-05-28T12:04:40","date_gmt":"2013-05-28T17:04:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/?p=2053"},"modified":"2013-05-28T12:04:40","modified_gmt":"2013-05-28T17:04:40","slug":"from-visual-diary-to-material-form","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/?p=2053","title":{"rendered":"From Visual Diary To Material Form"},"content":{"rendered":"

Commenting today on the SAQA list on an issue we’ve been covering there, Laura Wasilowski’s comments reminded me I hadn’t dropped in on her blog in a while, and while I was diverted I found a thought provoking recent post on why an artist should have a sketchbook <\/span><\/a><\/span>with her at all times.\u00a0 Laura’s work is characterized by lots of lovely simple repeated shapes with crisp clean lines, and always in\u00a0her signature wide-ranging colour palette of modern clear bright colours.\u00a0 The few open pages of the sketchbook she photographed to illustrate\u00a0her post show the\u00a0firm decisive hand that graphically captures\u00a0her favoured organic\u00a0shapes and patterns.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Laura is a busy teacher across the USA, and commented that when she\u00a0travels from home\u00a0these days she regrets having to leave so much of her materials for creativity at home – we can no longer\u00a0pack the kitchen sink to take with us on a plane!\u00a0 However, creativity never really rests for an artist – despite what we might seem to be doing at any time, there’s always something going on up top, even if we are away from our own tools of trade.<\/span>\u00a0<\/em> \u00a0 Laura finds travel provides\u00a0valuable time for sketching ideas in her book which she always has with her.<\/p>\n

It set me thinking about my own process.\u00a0 I thought I’d write a little about it, since I am always interested in what other artists do to get their ideas from brain to paper or fabric.\u00a0\u00a0Lots of my ideas get to some note form\u00a0on paper, a list, a sketch, an important word perhaps, and the majority of these jottings wait in limbo there for\u00a0days, weeks, \u00a0months, years even, before taking on some form in fabric and thread.\u00a0 As examples, take this collage of several pages from a blank page notebook I’ve been using on and off since my son gave it to me c. 1992\u00a0 \u00a0 I\u00a0 still use it sometimes – pencil diagrams are augmented with words, lists, quotations or a phrase of an idea, also in pencil – I keep my eraser handy but ideas no matter how inconsequential they seem at the time once jotted down tend to stay – its only diagrams that might be amended.<\/p>\n

\"Collaged<\/a><\/p>\n

All from typical pages, each group\u00a0sums up the ideas in my head at the time. In the UL image, for example are diagrams exploring my ideas, and words suggesting approaches or possibilities which shortly after I put them on paper became the working diagram for\u00a0‘Ora Banda’ (1992) \u00a0my first quilt in Quilt National, 1993.\u00a0 These diagrams are really as far as I ever go in making<\/em> a’pattern’.\u00a0 At that time I was using the ruler to cut shapes and precise 1\/2″ strip inserts.\u00a0 Some time I will explore the development of the curved wandering strips that appearted in much of my work 1993- 2002, when my strips became freehand, too.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"Ora<\/a><\/p>\n

The LL photo was one called “Waterweave” which\u00a0I think I only have on a slide back in Australia (note to self – get it scanned next time you’re there)\u00a0\u00a0 See the K1P1 annotation?\u00a0 I don’t really need reminding of the image that set this one off, but in a very large ad across the bottom of the newspaper page there was a line drawing of one of our famous Antarctic explorers, Douglas Mawson I think, pictured wearing a really thick sweater with folded over\u00a0ribbed collar\/neck,\u00a0 fisherman style – Knit 1, Pearl 1 ….\u00a0 have I ever mentioned that to me a line means a potential seam?\u00a0 <\/span><\/em>These days that process also happens in digital form on my computer screen.\u00a0 I don’t currently doodle with a Wacom tablet or anything – but I do manipulate photos I take, for even a ‘bad’ photo\u00a0can be useful as an aide memoire – and I do a lot of\u00a0deleting, too, once I have thought about what a pic actually says when I see it on screen.\u00a0 Many saved\u00a0ideas wait at that point, page or screen, \u00a0for some time, perhaps years,\u00a0 before taking some form in fabric and thread.<\/p>\n

Last year I blogged about a group of quilts<\/span><\/a><\/span> based on the patterns\u00a0of sand ripples.\u00a0\u00a0It was for an exhibition for which entry was by proposal – my proposal included a couple of collages to show how the surface textures translated to image in\u00a0 previous works:<\/p>\n

\"Earth<\/a><\/p>\n

I was proposing designs based on sand ripples – so here I collaged some of my photos<\/p>\n

\"SAND-001\"<\/a><\/p>\n

and then that collage was manipulated with an editing program to give the appearance of being pencil sketches:<\/p>\n

\"sand-web<\/a><\/p>\n

My point is that my visual diary, my sketch book in effect, \u00a0is in two parts – or perhaps it’s in transition from paper to digital form.\u00a0 It really doesn’t matter – because as I wrote in a blog post last year\u00a0\u00a0“Writing about photos I’ve taken….. helps ideas crystallise in my mind as well as provide a record, and so blogging regularly is probably the closest I’ll ever come to journalling. \u00a0Some artists put almost as much time into journalling as they do into their art and living itself.”\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0You can read that post in full\u00a0 here<\/span><\/a><\/span>\u00a0.<\/p>\n

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Commenting today on the SAQA list on an issue we’ve been covering there, Laura Wasilowski’s comments reminded me I hadn’t dropped in on her blog in a while, and while I was diverted I found a thought provoking recent post on why an artist should have a sketchbook with her at all times.\u00a0 Laura’s work […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[168,165,204,295,166,179],"class_list":["post-2053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-beach","tag-creativity","tag-from-image-to-form","tag-inspiration","tag-keeping-a-record","tag-lines"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6uxpF-x7","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2053"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2053\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3595,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2053\/revisions\/3595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}