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elisemSo after doing those haiku earrings and really having to be dogged about it and not give up, as I said in the last post, I went back to the workbench to work on necklaces and something was different.
Not everything. There were plenty of constants: I still love mixing stone and glass, I have experimented with sparer forms at times, swinging from knotted cord with a few stones in the beginning to the lush early pieces to sparseness again and back and forth and back and forth. I still like doing longer pieces, as they have swing and movement. But there was something new about doing this. It was most noticeable in how I was seeing, which means how I was noticing things in the beads and the juxtapositions of them, and that means there was a difference in how I was composing.
Now's not the time to give you the whole long spiel on how I compose, but suffice it to say that I do not start out with an idea in my head and then go find beads. No, I find some beads and ask them what they want to do, and then do my best to let them have that kind of fun. Grab bags delight me, because two or three beads rolling up against each other give me new ideas all the time. What I do is more aptly called co-creation than design, I think. Anyhow, the important thing is that I use my artistic sensibilities to see how it's going, rather than to dictate and impose how it's going to go.
The piece I did after the stroke that's like my very early sparse work is called "What We Don't Know About Each Other." It's got particular meaningful beads, but I used them differently than I would have before the stroke. Before I would have separated them by beads almost their size, as in a piece like ... hm, I will have to find an example, but the necklace would have been thicker. Instead, these bigger beads are placed just exactly so, and separated by tiny beads.
What seems different to me is that I am seeing meaningful beads vividly right now, and I don’t need to pull back from that in my designs. Or maybe it’s not pulling back that I was doing, but letting them get cluttered. Working out the language will probably take a while, because the experience is still in progress, and how do I describe it when I’m in the midst? Well, I guess that’s what I’m trying to do here.
There are some other examples as well, chief among them being a bunch of opal pendants I made, but I don’t have photos of them handy at the moment. What they are based on, though, is chunks of boulder opal: matrix with veins of rock running through them. I took those, which were drilled as beads, and put them on some twenty gauge sterling silver wire as pendants, and twined them in more silver wire with some Czech pressed glass flowers I’ve been saving for a long time because I loved them so much. The flowers are transparent blue/aqua/purple, and the color variations in each one are lovely and random and good in all the ways real flowers can be when the color melts delicately from one shade to another. If you could see them here, you’d see that the sweep of flower-bearing“branches” of silver wire are less fiddly than I would have done before, more sure, less full of after-the fact ornamentation.
Maybe I’m working on that thing they talk about where the calligrapher practices for a long time in order to be able to draw a circle freehand. I’m not drawing circles, but my curves are not semi-obscured by other ornamentation the same way they might have been at certain times in the past. I don’t dislike what I made before, but this is a new way of doing it for me, and it really pulls me.
Art After the Stroke, Part One: Seeing Every Thing
Art After the Stroke, Part Two: Counting Flax Seeds
Art After the Stroke, Part Three: Frozen in the Fields of Plenty
Art After the Stroke, Part Four: And By My Eyes Be I Open
... and more to come.
Not everything. There were plenty of constants: I still love mixing stone and glass, I have experimented with sparer forms at times, swinging from knotted cord with a few stones in the beginning to the lush early pieces to sparseness again and back and forth and back and forth. I still like doing longer pieces, as they have swing and movement. But there was something new about doing this. It was most noticeable in how I was seeing, which means how I was noticing things in the beads and the juxtapositions of them, and that means there was a difference in how I was composing.
Now's not the time to give you the whole long spiel on how I compose, but suffice it to say that I do not start out with an idea in my head and then go find beads. No, I find some beads and ask them what they want to do, and then do my best to let them have that kind of fun. Grab bags delight me, because two or three beads rolling up against each other give me new ideas all the time. What I do is more aptly called co-creation than design, I think. Anyhow, the important thing is that I use my artistic sensibilities to see how it's going, rather than to dictate and impose how it's going to go.
The piece I did after the stroke that's like my very early sparse work is called "What We Don't Know About Each Other." It's got particular meaningful beads, but I used them differently than I would have before the stroke. Before I would have separated them by beads almost their size, as in a piece like ... hm, I will have to find an example, but the necklace would have been thicker. Instead, these bigger beads are placed just exactly so, and separated by tiny beads.
What seems different to me is that I am seeing meaningful beads vividly right now, and I don’t need to pull back from that in my designs. Or maybe it’s not pulling back that I was doing, but letting them get cluttered. Working out the language will probably take a while, because the experience is still in progress, and how do I describe it when I’m in the midst? Well, I guess that’s what I’m trying to do here.
There are some other examples as well, chief among them being a bunch of opal pendants I made, but I don’t have photos of them handy at the moment. What they are based on, though, is chunks of boulder opal: matrix with veins of rock running through them. I took those, which were drilled as beads, and put them on some twenty gauge sterling silver wire as pendants, and twined them in more silver wire with some Czech pressed glass flowers I’ve been saving for a long time because I loved them so much. The flowers are transparent blue/aqua/purple, and the color variations in each one are lovely and random and good in all the ways real flowers can be when the color melts delicately from one shade to another. If you could see them here, you’d see that the sweep of flower-bearing“branches” of silver wire are less fiddly than I would have done before, more sure, less full of after-the fact ornamentation.
Maybe I’m working on that thing they talk about where the calligrapher practices for a long time in order to be able to draw a circle freehand. I’m not drawing circles, but my curves are not semi-obscured by other ornamentation the same way they might have been at certain times in the past. I don’t dislike what I made before, but this is a new way of doing it for me, and it really pulls me.
Art After the Stroke, Part One: Seeing Every Thing
Art After the Stroke, Part Two: Counting Flax Seeds
Art After the Stroke, Part Three: Frozen in the Fields of Plenty
Art After the Stroke, Part Four: And By My Eyes Be I Open
... and more to come.
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no subject
Date: 2011-06-18 11:39 am (UTC)But, even more, thanks for quoting that song! Now I'm about to go hunting for Holly Near CDs in my collection; I'll never forget getting to sing along with her on that one in concert. I think I've actually got her and Ronnie Gilbert duetting on it somewhere.
[ETA: And yes, I know it was Ferron who first sang Testimony; it's just that I was a baby dyke when I first heard her sing it, and I'll always have Holly in my ears when I think of it now... ah, I see it's on Sky Dances; I LOVE that album!)
no subject
Date: 2011-06-18 08:56 pm (UTC)I'm not sure I'm expressing exactly what I mean. I appreciate these posts, is what I'm trying to get at :)
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Date: 2011-06-19 10:31 pm (UTC)And I am absolutely squirming with anticipation over those opals...