Intimidation and Insight

Let's start with intimidation. With what was left of my week, I was determined to get out in the nice weather and sketch. I had a place I wanted to capture, and although the view itself was not complicated, the location would put me in full view of traffic along a busy street. Now this would not be the first time I've sketched outside in areas where people and cars might be passing, but for some reason, I found myself intimidated by the thought of doing it at this spot. I'm usually pretty good at just gathering myself up and making myself get on with it, but it took me three days to get over this intimidation. First day, I left all my sketching supplies at home and merely "scoped out" where to position myself for the best view. I was hoping to find a spot where I could sketch from the car - much less intimidating and something I do often - but there was no place where I could get the proper angle. Nope, I was going to have to do it from the sidewalk. Day two, I balked and opted to sketch instead from my front steps again. I'd been eyeing my neighbor's rattan lounge chairs and decided to "warm up" on them.

That turned out to be more difficult than anticipated. Lots of odd angles and trouble getting sizing right. I was so frustrated with how it went that I ditched my original intention to add colored pencil. As an afterthought, I loosely added some tree branches which really seemed to help the overall picture. But boy, this was doing nothing to help alleviate my feeling of intimidation. Luckily, when I looked at it the next day, it looked better than I remembered, and knowing I just had to go do it, I packed up my collapsible stool and sketching supplies and took off for my chosen location across the street from a bus stop shelter flanked by big trees sporting some of that bright spring green I've been seeing and wanting to capture. Did I feel conspicuous? You bet. Did I dread that passing cars might honk at me? Yes, but not a one did. Did I quickly relax into the task at hand, starting with the shelter itself, oblivious to most all around me? Exactly, as how it usually happens. And this fairly easy subject came together with not much problem, a very satisfying session.

I'm sure I've said this before, but I'm not much of a fan of this particular sketchbook's toned tan paper, and a part of me wished I'd just used a sketchbook with white paper. Kind of a live and learn how to work with it. And the rollercoaster of emotion my sketching activities put me through sometimes surprises me, that how can I be so adept one session only to struggle the next. Well, to be honest the same thing happens to me with my quilting. One hopes to build on success, but it's not always a given from one project to the next. And too, if you're not consistently practicing, there are going to be rusty moments.

My studio gallery with quilts both mine and friends showing our quilting paths

 

As for insight, I had an odd experience last week. I'm nurturing a newish friendship, one of my yoga classmates that helped me in the weeks after my back surgery. This out of class time opened the doors to learning how much we have in common and that we wanted to keep doing things together after I no longer needed her help. She had mentioned hoping that she could see more of my quilts than just the ones hanging downstairs and I thought that would be fun too. My upstairs though, particularly my studio, has been off limits to guests for quite awhile, but heck, if I waited until I got it into shape, she might never get to see it. So I just told her to put her blinders on and ignore my piles. But as I moved from design wall to gallery wall to framed work leaning against the bookcase to the quilt on my bed and on the upstairs walls, I experienced something different, a realization how all these quilts represented not just my history as a quilter but also the history of quilting itself during the last 25 years. Showing them to someone mostly unfamiliar with quilting, I realized she would not know that this one's fabric was generated during a surface design experiment phase, and this one a snow-dying phase, and this one the result of burning holes in sheer leaf shapes added for a 3-dimensional touch, and this one stamped with a leaf shape I carved myself. And batiks, do you know what a batik is and it marked a new buying craze for me. Oh, and that small one, it's from when making fabric postcards was all the rage, and these slightly bigger ones are during a journal quilt phase. 

I could go on, but perhaps you could look at your own quilts and see the influence of fads and experiments and the art quilt movement in general. I'm not sure why it hit me the way it did, but it all made me feel a bit unsteady, one who always felt she knew where she had come from and where she was going with all this. Maybe it's because I've not had to talk about my quilting history and techniques for quite some time? Did I feel like a relic? Or did it emphasize how I've gone from one thing to another without settling on any one technique or style? Honestly, this was a totally new experience, and I'm still uncertain what it meant. The insight is limited.