SECOND TRIP TO THE VAULT

Caged Crosses - 1979

Terry Jarrard-Dimond

wire - woven tape - string - 24 x 24 x 6

Today I am posting the second installation of work from my personal "vault". The pieces I am sharing today were made in 1979 - 1981 and all are three-dimensional works using welded fencing wire with fabric or some other material with a textile reference such as string, metal shavings, woven strapping and excelsior.

This work developed from my desire to make work which had dimension and welded wire or fence wire is ridgid and it was a natural solution for me as it has the ability to be worked into volumetric forms. The top piece is from an early group of 4 pieces which were very spare. The wire was made into very open structures and then "filled" in with woven tapes and cords. The patterns created on the wall from these additions was an important part of the piece as a whole.

Untitled - Date Unknown

Terry Jarrard-Dimond

wire - paint - excelsior - fabric - 16 x 12 x 2 inches

This small work is not only made with wire but filled with wire. The edges of the wire in the center have been painted red. The smaller box on the top left edge is filled is wood shavings and a bit of turquoise fabric.

The themes of work in this series range from windows to boxes. Looking out a window or into a windown was explored. The use of the box as a metaphor for people, situations and memories. The materials themselves were often the source of the idea for the work.

View Through Cleopatra's Window - 1981

Terry Jarrard-Dimond

wire, fabric - sheet aluminium - 34 x 32 x 6 inches

Now part of The State Art Collection

View Through Cleopatra's Window is one of the three works purchased for inclusion in The State Art Collection which was established by the South Carolina Arts Commission. This collection is now housed at the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia, SC.

One of the more extensive groups of work in this series used torn strips of commercially printed fabrics as seen in View Through Cleopatra's Window. These strips were wrapped, woven or tied to the framework along with shapes cut from sheet aluminium.

View Through A Windowbox - 1981

Terry Jarrard-Dimond

wire, fabric - sheet aluminium

This detail might give you a better idea of the density of the fabric and the compactness of the space. This is a detail from another piece in this series titled View Through A Windowbox.

Untitled - 1979

Terry Jarrard-Dimond

wire - gauze - string - 42 x 42 x 8 inches

When you enroll in a graduate program I believe it is necessary to become the student no matter where you believe yourself to be in regards to your art. This is hard for many artists. They feel they have achieved a level of competence with their work and it can be hard to accept the amount of input that you receive in this type of environment. I understood this and that knowledge allowed me to experiment and grow. As you progress in your studies and your insigh int your work deepens and you gain confidence it becomes more difficult to listen to or even allow as much criticism as you often receive. You learn to take yourself more seriously and trust your ideas which is exactly what should happen. You become approporately more protective of your ideas and your work and it is this belief in your work which helps you go out into the world and do your work. The piece pictured above was the result of my very first experiment with wire.

I made this piece one Sunday in my studio at school. I was alone and when I put it up and I sat and studied what I had made I knew it was important. While it is not "a masterpiece for all times" (not much graduate work is), the piece was pointing me in a direction that I pursued for some years. Before I left the studio that day, I carefully took it down and put it out of sight. I was not ready to share it with anyone and did not want to hear anything - good or bad - about the piece. I needed to absorb what I had made and what it ment to me without any outside interference. That was during my last semester of school. I knew I was ready to graduate.

Yellowcomb

This is a photograph taken inside a studio Tom and I shared. Tom built this building up in the mountains and we used it for about 10 years. My area was in the front of the building and his was in the back and you can see some of his paintings in the background. This shoot was taken in about 1993 and I'm working on some paintings for a portfolio of textile designs I was preparing for a job interview.

Thank you for spending time at Studio 24-7! I love hearing from you and Remember....

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New Interview

What Isn't Seen - 2010

Terry Jarrard-Dimond

43.25" x 56.5"

Handpainted fabric, monoprinted, pieced and machine quilted

You are invited to visit the blog of Lynette Haggard to read her interview with me.

Lamination Completed

Abandoned - Terry Jarrard-Dimond

Acrylic Paint, Polyester Fabric, Mixed Papers

This is the completed version of my lamination experiment which I presented recently. I am surprised and happy with the results and will try to follow this process again to see what happens.

After I posted the first article, I decided to burn out most of the areas where the polyester fabric was exposed. This resulted in uneven edges and a somewhat open structure. The remaining fabric/acrylic curl-up and I then knew I would need to attach it to a substrate of some type.

Unfinished paper collage

Looking around in my studio for a solution I found some of the unfinished work I did in the Fran Skiles Workshop I attended last fall. I realized that the color, especially around the outer edges, was similiar to the color in my lamination and decided to use the collage as a support surface. I attached the lamination a little off-center and down which shows more of the collage on the top edge and right side.

Detail 1

The dark area at the bottom has had the exposed fabric removed. The white areas at the top are the fabric. I am very interested in the scuffed/worn appearence of the surface.

Detail 2

In this detail you can clearly see the texture of the surface. I attached the lamination to the paper with acrylic medium.

Detail 3

You can see bits of the imagery from the paper collage through the holes of the lamination.

Detail 4

This is a detail of the bottom right corner.

After the two layers were attached and dry I applied 2 layers of satin acrylic medium. The piece looks like a chunck of the wall of an abandoned building. For me the process is an amalgimation of some of the work we did in Fran's class, some of the processes we did in the Golden Acrylic Workshop I attended and lamination processes.

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Washed Peas and Carrots

My last post featured "failed" fabrics which I reprocessed using leftover dye and print paste. Here are the results.

The picture at the top features two of the pieces which I plan to use together. My biggest surprise was the one on the right. Check out the previous article and you will see that it appeared that the design was going to merge and by a black mass but it washed out beautifully.

When washed there is good detail.

This is the bottom edge and it is one of my favorite surprises. I love the way it fades out.

Detail of Left Side.

Gerhart Richter Inspiration Fabric

I am not excited about how this looks. It is a small piece of fabric but I may work on it some more. I also have a final piece I am working on from the original Inspiration fabric but I hope to enter it in a show which requires not publishing your work previously so I'll have to save that to show you later.

Last but not least are the two pieces that are bilaterally symmetrical. If you recall I painted the one on the right and then took a print from it with the fabric on the left.

The areas that didn't print are really interesting. Makes the fabric look cracked and worn.

Well I am signing off for a couple of weeks as I make my trip to Germany to see Color Improvisations. I'll be back around July 20 something. I hope you have enjoyed this article and will come back again later in the month.

I appreciate your visiting with me and love hearing your comments.

Counting Your Peas and Carrots

Richter Inspiration Fabric with Zigzags

Have you ever observed someone eating who has a "thing" about making their food come out even so that they have the same number of bites of the various items on their plate? I call this the Peas and Carrots Syndrome or PCS for short. I'm not sure if this is due to enjoying the taste of the food items together or maybe they have been told to "clean your plate" and this becomes a little game to make everything more fun.

I don't have PCS in relation to food but I do have it in relation to dye concentrate, print paste and soda soaked fabric. Yes dear reader, after I have concluded my planned dye work I often have leftovers and for some unknown reason I feel compelled to "clean my plate" and use as much of these items as I can before giving up and putting things away.

So here is how it went today. I had a large stack of failed mono-printed fabric I made during cold weather. Last week I soda soaked them and today decided to revive them and paint them all with black stripes. I completed this and realized that I had lots of dye concentrate still on hand...too much to waste and not enough to put in the fridge (not really but that's how my mind works). I still have a few pieces of the Richter Inspiration fabric I have been working with so I took a small piece of that and painted some zigzags. Then I decided I needed a companion so I pulled out another piece of failed fabric....this one a deconstructed number. I didn't have enough dye and print paste mixture so I made some more and painted the second piece. I liked it and had an idea for another piece so I pulled out a third piece but had to mix more dye which I did. This was followed by a fourth piece but I decided to mix a different color. I put too much dye on it so I then had to find a 5th piece which I laid face down on the fourth piece and made a print.

Companion Piece - Too much dye.

Deconstructed Failure with Print Paste then Thickened Dye Applied on top.

I pulled a plastic fork through the paste and dye which makes the striations.

Detail

What you see here is actually the back of piece number 5 which is laying on piece 4. The dye and the markings you see have soaked through from Piece 4.

Mono-printing fabric to fabric!

This may a new technique : )

This picture might give you a better idea of what is happening. I am pulling up the corner of the top piece of fabric and you can see the bottom corner of piece 4.

Wow! I have 5 small pieces plus the larger planned pieces. I used almost all of my print paste, all of my mixed black dye and a good portion of a couple other things......I still had to put some items in the fridge but not as many as I might have had to do were it not for my PCS.

The great thing about this is that when I work this way I feel totally free to experiment and try things I might never have thought of. Often the fabrics are what I call "special" as they have been processed two or more times. They have accrued value through use of material resources and my time but if I don't invest a little more of each of those things I will never use the fabric.

The jury is out on my 5 experiments. One looks like it will bleed to black and the others...well, we'll just have to wait and see. The aren't great as they were very wet and laying flat under very bright lights but I hope they allow you to have a peek at my "Peas and Carrots."

Thank you for dropping by. I love hearing from you and home you'll come again.

Gerhard Richter Inspiration: Stage Two

Stage Two - 28" H x 25.5" W

Deconstructed Printing, Monoprint, Stitched

This is my third posting relating to work inspired by Gerhard Richter. I began by monoprinting a 45" x 45" piece of fabric which has been cut in a number of pieces and I am making new work from that and incorporating additional fabric. My use of the idea of "Stage One" and "Stage Two" references the ongoing use of the original fabric.

In "Stage One" the fabric was presented in relation to a very dramatic fabric with heavy black painting and I used intense stitching on the "Richter" fabric to emphasis shapes and colors. For "Stage Two" I am using a larger cut of the fabric and I have combined it with a light fabric with a rough spiral design. The second fabric was made using the Deconstructed Printing process. This relationship is more unified in that it is more likely to be read as one rectangle rather than a diptych. The surface of the work is very active but feels light and the many layers of dye and dye markings are emphasized by the stitching.

I choose to quilt the left side with straight line stitching and the right side with organic free-motion stitching. I wanted to acknowledge the differences in the two fabrics but still keep the stitching "in the background" and allow the surface and color be the most important of the composition.

Detail 1 Stage Two

Free-motion quilting with multiple colors of thread.

Detail 2 Stage Two

Straight-line stitched with off-white thread.

Due to the slightly larger size of this piece, I have decided to use a facing rather than frame the work as I plan to do for Stage One. I have begun to add the facing but as I look at the image as presented here, I may go back and alter the composition by removing a couple of inches from the top. It just doesn't look comfortable yet. I'll let you know if I do that.

I still have more of the Richter inspired fabric so there is more to come. If you haven't visited his website please do. It is wonderful work.

Thank you for visiting and I love hearing from you.

Richter Inspiration: Stage One

Richter Inspiration: Stage One

26.5" w x 16.5"h

Richter Inspiration: Stage One is the first in a group of works I plan to make from fabric I monoprinted and presented in my last article.

During the past year I have made many small works within a 12" to 14" square format. The original piece of fabric I started with here was 15" square. I considered some of the ideas I had for taking the piece forward and decided that since I liked the markings on this piece I wanted to enhance it with very intense stitching and pair it with another piece of fabric that would have very high contrast .

I liked the feeling of the shapes on the both sides which seemed to to rising upward. On the right they appear to be landforms and on the left they are more cloud-like. It appears to be a universe where the sky is to the side rather than overhead.....I felt a rectangular format for each side would reinforce this feeling so I added a panel onto my original cut of fabric and cut the right side to match.

Detail of stitching

Detail of stitching.

I sorted through some of my fabrics and found a piece which had been hand dyed in several colors and painted with black dye. This fabric alone was not a standout but I knew that eventually I would find where it belonged.

Detail of right side of diptych.

The color in the fabric is more intense than the above photo shows. I altered the composition of the marks by adding two swatches which were applied with raw-edge applique.

Here you can clearly see the raw edge applique.

I am now ready to start Stage Two. While I feel the stitching on this piece is successful, I really loved the smooth face of the fabric before I stitched on Stage One. With that in mind, one of the things I plan not to do in the next piece is intense stitching. Everything else is still on the table.

Thank you for stopping by and please come again. I love hearing you.

New Flour Paste Formula

Some time ago I did a couple of pieces using Flour Paste as a resist. I loved the results but the paste itself was difficult to apply and the window for application was very short. You can see those results Here. Next I tried a Potato Resist which also gave good results but I found it just seemed unnecessarily messy to apply, especially if you wanted to spread it to a large area.

Both of these resists give interesting results so I was interested when I read an article on my friend Judi Hurwitt's blog. Judi has been experimenting with this paste and gave the formula in a recent article so I decided to give it a test.

Judi's formula is: 2 cups water to 1 cup flour. Whisk these together and apply.

I like to work large so I laid out a piece of fabric that was 45" x 45" expecting to use part if not all. In light of this, I doubled the amounts of water and flour to:

4 cups water

to

2 cups flour

The ingredients blended together nicely but I felt it was too watery so I added additional flour until it was like thin pancake batter. I estimate that I added 1 additional cup.

The fabric had been soda soaked and dried and was then pinned to a fabric covered support board. I applied the paste to the fabric by pouring across a width of about half the fabric and then spread it with my trusty bondo scraper. Working my way across and down the fabric, this amount of paste covered an area of 29" x 45". Because the paste is so fluid it would be possible to mix and continue to cover your fabric if you choose to do so.

This mixture was a pleasure to spread. It is easy to create thick and thin areas and I could see that the fabric underneath was already absorbing the water from the resist so I knew it would dry quickly. After the paste was applied I used a chopstick as a drawing tool and drew into the paste. As predicted, it was drying fast and I worked quickly to make my marks. It is not an issue of not being able to continue to draw into the paste but it does start pulling up off the fabric as it dries more.

Marks in wet resist

Marks in wet resist

Marks in wet resist

I left this in an unheated studio with a fan positioned to aid the drying and by the next day it was dry to the touch. I did leave it until the afternoon before I applied dye. The surface is really beautiful. It is smooth and leathery where there were no marks and a great ivory color. There was only a small amount of crazing so I did scrunch the fabric up some to add cracks.

I mixed a medium shade of moss green and thickened it with print paste. This was brushed onto the surface. The application on this surface was much easier than onto my first flour resist piece.

Thickened dye applied to dried resist.

Thickened dye applied to dried resist.

Thickened dye applied to dried resist.

Again, this dried very quickly. It took only about 24 hours to dry. I did check the back to see how the dye had penetrated the surface and decided to pick off some of the flour resist and apply more dye. In the final piece you can see some larger areas of the green and these are the areas I opened for more dye absorption.

I only waited 4 hours before removing the resist and dye. I loved the surface on the piece and would have just left the paste on if possible. At this point I am not sure if I will add more color to the fabric, try to finish the piece as a whole cloth composition or cut it into pieces to be used in other compositions. I will definitely use this resist again and this study proved that experimentation is often required to get a mixture adjusted to a usable state.

Thank you for stopping by and I love to hear your comments. Please, if you try this resist , let me know how it works for you.

Does Your Quilting Support Your Ideas?

Work in Progress

approx. 16" w x 21" h

My blog entry for today is a simple piece touching on the topic of quilting, the actual stitching of at least two layers of fabric (or other material) together.

When I first began to quilt I tried my hand at hand quilting and used very traditional quilt patterns. As my work developed and I realized my quilt work was going to become my artwork, I began to see that these traditional patterns carried with them the history of quilt making in exactly the same way as traditional patterns of piecing did and they did not apply or support my work.

Next I began to learn the difficult skill of machine quilting. It has been a real journey for me and I have experimented with all kinds of techniques, thread types, various machines and ultimately discovered that most often simple straight line quilting most supports my ideas. Notice I say supports.

Here is an example of my quilting on a large composition.

Passion

This piece has been selected for Artist As Quiltmaker 2010

I have used multiple colors of rayon thread which enrich the overall color and complexity of the piece as well as creating a rich surface texture. It enhances the piece but does not overpower the composition or become the first thing you notice. In this example you an see that thread colors do not always run across the entire face of the fabric so there is an additional plane of pattern which lays on top of the primary composition. I often use rayon thread as it adds a nice shine and the color range is excellent. In most cases I choose to use solids colored thread. On occasion I do use variegated thread but I have to be very careful. If it is a type of thread where the color changes are very regular, it creates a unwanted moire' pattern which possibly does not happen when you quilt with complex patterns. The straight lines are also a nice counterpoint to the soft contours of the large shapes. Had I overlaid this piece with a more complex quilt line, because of the broad expanses of fabric, the quilting would have taken center stage and that is not what I want.

detail of composition with variegated thread

This example not only shows the moire' pattern I spoke of but the actual color changes in this thread were not a good choice. It is distracting and becomes too important visually.

For the piece pictured at the top of this page, I choose to use a variegated thread from Aurifil's line which is called Acquarelli. This small collection of threads are variegated but not in a regular repeat and it works beautifully for my straight lines. Below is a detail and up close you can see where the colors change but it does not create a pattern. This is a beautiful line of threads and I would love to see them add to this collection.

detail of work in progress

I have seen beautiful, sophisticated compositions ruined through poor choices of quilt lines most often lines that just don't relate to what the artist has created. I suggest using your computer to 'test drive' line work or create a small test piece. Over time you will begin to get a feel for what works for you and supports your art best.

Thank you for visiting studio 24-7 and I love hearing from you. Monday I will be presenting Nancy Natale and her excellent encaustic work. Hope to see you then.

Hand Cut Dots

Cut Dots

15 x 15

A few weeks ago I posted an article which featured 'dots'. Some were created through soy resist and some were painted onto the surface with dye. The overall color of the fabric was yellow.

First work using dots.

I wanted to work with this process more but still have not been able to get into the cold wet studio. Finally it came to me that I would just cut dots from fabric and sew them onto a yellow ground.

I began by cutting dots in black, white and a deeper shade of yellow. The white dots were to simulate the resist areas of the original fabric and the yellow were "just because". I laid some white dots out and then removed a few and added some of the yellow ones.

Next I added some black dots but the mix just did not please me.

I decided that the white dots were too high value so I cut some gray dots that were closed in value to the yellow. I inserted those and added more black. Now I felt the composition was looking like a color blindness chart. This kind of arrangement might not be a bad thing to explore but it was too far away from my original vision so I removed all the dots except the black and made the decision to go right to the sewing machine and sew them on rather than arranging them and then sewing. That is how I proceeded , throwing in 3 yellow dots to create some open space.

The first dot piece also had additional bits of fabric applied to the face and stitched but I opted not to introduce those elements on this work. Something else to explore another time.

The original project had featured 'rice stitch' and I wanted to find a substitute for that stitch. After some experimentation I came up with using the zigzag function and that I like a great deal. The image at the top of the page is the final results and here is a nice detail which shows the stitching.

Cut Dots detail

These small works are very charming but I am convinced that the power of this type of composition is in the overall size of the piece and the scale of the elements in relation to the size. I think there is the potential of interesting images which might emerge through scale and repetition. What this means to me is I have to do this larger....much larger. I'm adding that to my list.

Thank you for dropping by. I would love to hear from you.