Art Archives - Page 22 of 27 - Sherri Woodard Coffey

Category Archives: Art

La Grange

After returning from Arizona, I got a phone call inviting me to HarvestFest which was being held in Fayetteville, Texas. This is a fund raiser for ART, Arts for Rural Texas. I’ve mentioned this group before. They are dedicated to bringing the arts to rural Texas, not only visual arts, but also opera, ballet, etc. I was in ArtWalk last May and plan to go again.

This time I stayed in La Grange (you may have heard of the “chicken ranch“), and since I arrived before check-in time at the hotel, I decided to find the town square and explore. As I drove by, I spotted a wall of painted quilts. They were amazing! I went around the block and found a parking spot. One whole wall of the building was painted with quilts so that they looked like they were hanging on a line. There were even dark areas so that it appeared to be a shadow behind the quilt. In front of the quilt wall was an enclosed garden, the cottage garden type that may have been in grandmother’s house. Turns out that the quilt wall is on the building that houses the Quilt Museum. Walking down the sidewalk I spotted the sign for Quilted Skein (clever name, right?). Inside was a treasure of yarns, fabrics, quilting and knitting paraphernalia.

The courthouse was a beautiful building and much like other small town courthouses. I was told later that that the inside is beautiful, right out of To Kill a Mockingbird. They took one of the chairs original to the courtroom and copied it until they had enough chairs to fill the room. Guess that will have to wait for my next trip.

Guild meeting-Kay Sekimachi

Nagare VII1970 Kay Sekimachi, born San Francisco, CA 1926 woven nylon monofilament 80 x 9 x 9 in. (203.2 x 22.8 x 22.8 cm.) Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase 1972.183.* I read that she did quadruple tubular forms. I’m not sure if this is one of those, but it looks like it could be. You can see pictures of more work that is in the Smithsonian Collection here. None of them are on view currently. I wonder if you could see them if you made an appointment.

Our guild is doing something a little different this year by having a couple of programs about weavers who do notable work, but may not be well known locally. The program was given by Sarah, and she did a great job. It happens that I was actually familiar with this Kay Sekimachi, having read about her in American Craft magazine. What I remember most from the article is how organized her “stuff” is, becoming art in itself by being placed on a shelf with nothing else. Take a look at her worktable here. Is that the way your worktable looks? Not mine! Of course, maybe that helps explain her success and her work.

Kay was born in San Francisco in 1926. During WWII she was interned with her family. Later, after seeing one weaving class, she bought a loom. Her oral history interview can be found here; I found it very interesting.

You can always do an Google search to find images. Here are links to a couple of galleries that either have or have had her work: Jane Sauer and Brown Gotta. I love her leaf bowls!

*Personal, Educational and Non-Commercial Use

Personal, educational and non-commercial use of digital images from our Web site is permitted, with attribution to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, for all images unless otherwise noted.

Mystery

While in the library to get abstraction books, I had to browse the mysteries. Who could resist picking up this one? Here’s the blurb from Amazon below. I added the color to draw attention to the career of the main character.

Will Rees feels at home. It’s been a long time since he last felt this way—not since before his wife died years ago and he took to the road as a traveling weaver. Now, in 1796, Rees is back on his Maine farm, living with his teenaged son, David, and his housekeeper, Lydia—whose presence contributes more towards his happiness than he’s ready to admit. But his domestic bliss is shattered the morning a visitor brings news of an old friend’s murder.

I don’t usually read period stories, much less period mysteries, but there you go, the title got me. Setting is Maine, 1796.

Yellow to violet

In that very large abstraction book that I checked out from the library, there was a piece titled From Yellow to Violet by François Morellet. It was a kind of squared spiral, with yellow in the center going to violet on the outside line. That got me thinking about all the colors in between. The handy Color Schemer came out again. In “Mixer” I chose a yellow and a violet. The default gives you 52 colors, in this case from yellow to violet. I changed that to 21 and this is what I got. Notice that there are lots of browns and some not very interesting colors in the middle of this. Then I happened to notice the drop down menu beside Path. Evidently I’ve never done that before, but there are three choices in all: linear, radial clockwise, radial counterclockwise. The example above with the not-so-interesting colors is the linear path. Left is the radial counterclockwise. When they say radial, they are meaning on the color wheel. Here is the radial clockwise. Both of these schemes are interesting to me, maybe even a little exciting. These color palettes look like they could be for the abstraction book. I love them! After all, they have purple.

This and that

I took way too many photos, but I think most of us do that in this digital age. They’re so easy to get rid of. The day that I drove to Tombstone and Bisbee, I stopped for gas and saw this sign. I definitely knew I wasn’t in Kansas anymore. I find it interesting that there’s no smoking in this establishment.

Pretty parasol, not sure if it would do much good. In a Tombstone window.

Just like this green swirl.

Accidental self-portrait with pottery in the Museum of Northern Arizona, Flagstaff.

Beer caps on door in Bisbee

Random sighting at the Burger King near Bisbee. I love the juxtaposition of this man, his backpack, and his laptop.

Botanical drawing of the saguaro cactus and the many ways it has been used.

We have lots of cactus in Texas, but I had never seen this purple variety. They were all over the Scottsdale area. Some even had cochineal growing on them.

Sonora Desert Museum

Copper ore

This is the bark of some sort of palm in the Sonora Desert Museum. I love the soft colors and the shapes of the bark.

Arizona

What do you find yourself noticing most when you travel? Guess it depends where you travel to, right? I have just recently returned from Arizona, where I did a big loop around the state. Besides the obvious, mountains, I found myself fascinated with the desert plants.

I found this grouping of magazines interesting in Bookman’s

After taking care of the car rental, I drove to Flagstaff to visit my son and daughter-in-law. On my first morning, I woke up to snow! Yes, snow covered the ground, and it was beautiful, but I’m not a big fan of snow, especially if I might have to get out in it. However the streets were wet, so it was not a problem. It snowed big, wet flakes off and on all of this windy day. Besides the government shut down, we now had weather to affect what we might do. Plus, my concern was getting back over the mountains to other parts of the state.

After Flag, I drove to Tucson. While driving, many more plants got my attention. I knew that I wanted to go to Bisbee and Tombstone, so that came next. Then I worked on the plants. Of course, the Saguaro National Park was closed, but Tucson does have the Sonora Desert Museum nearby where many of the plants are identified. They also have an art institute there with lovely art by local artists, plus many pages of government drawings and informational pages that were done by government scientist in the early 1900s.

I did absolutely nothing yarn or weaving related in the usual sense. However, I did take pictures of native pottery in the Museum of Northern Arizona, where I made my suitcase much heavier with the purchase of a large book on horse masks. I also took lots of pictures of plants that I found interesting. I think those will end up in some weaving at some point, not as a pictorial piece, but in some abstract way.

Bisbee with its buildings on the sides of hills

Those will come later–I’m still mulling those over. In the meantime, here are some typical tourist photos.

Wall in Bisbee

Love this–Sweet Sin

Spooky eyes in the second floor windows

Tombstone–where else?

1000 steps–no I didn’t climb up

Busy, busy

Color aid papers

Illusion

The latest piece was cut off the loom yesterday and I plan to start the finishing of warp ends today or tonight. Force myself. I have started a series of yoga classes and hurt my back last week. I have no idea what I did to cause that because nothing hurt or felt bad during class. Plus, I seldom have back issues. Today, on the way home, I had a long list of errands to do. That idea was scrapped quickly. I was trying to do these things during the lunch hour– on a FRIDAY! Fridays are always crazy. What was I thinking!

This afternoon I plan to play around with color, since that was successful for me before. Gettin’ out those Color-aid papers. Who knows? I may even cut them! Above is the finished result. When I look at this photo, though, I realize all over again that I need to get to the photographer. Or get some lights. Or something…

White pens

How do you do design work? I use several ways, but mostly a sketch and if I like that, I go to graph paper, and in the last year or so I have then been scanning the graph paper drawing and playing around with color in Photoshop. Sometimes though, through all of that drawing on graph paper, I might ink it in and realize that the scale is off or a motif is in the wrong place. That’s when I want a white pen. It’s easier to get those stray marks out of the way before going into Photoshop, at least for me. Maybe my fine motor mouse skills are just not very good. So, Monday I went to our locally owned art store and checked out the white pens. And, boy, are there a lot of them since I last looked. A few years ago, the only thing I could fine was a really big one, maybe to use for your graffiti or something. I bought a couple of fine point Sharpies and two different brands with medium point. I really like the fine point pens, all of them. The only pen that I didn’t like is the very last one on this list. It has two different “brushes.”

So, back to designing—those who do designing—how do you do it? I’d really like to know.

Playing around in Photoshop

Puppet warp. Never heard of it. Until I saw something about puppet warp on Lynda.com’s Facebook page. Hmmm, sounded interesting, and I really wondered if it was available to me because I had never seen it. Well, it’s there, but missed it. There’s a little video explaining how to improve a photo, in this case, remove those love handles. I’ve been experimenting with variations on a line (see the result of the drawing on the right here), and had something I kind of liked with circles made of dotted lines. I decided to use this drawing and play with this. The first step is to “lasso” it. Then you make another layer and go to puppet warp. It makes all those little triangles all over the design. You then put in some dots that are going to be the places where you drag to change the design. From there you push and shove and play around with those dots until you finally think you’re done. When you go to “save as,” you are asked if you want to apply the changes. Below is my final result, not great, but there are possibilities. From what I can tell, not being much of a really good user of Photoshop, the puppet warp gives you more places to make changes than does “free transform.” Fun stuff to think about, though.

Towels

The Fort Worth Weavers Guild show is hanging, as mentioned before. Several items caught my immediate attention, but alas, they already had red dots and were sold. These towels were already sold, but there were more at home. Yippee! These and the next two pictures

show towels woven by Margaret Humphries.

Both sets of towels are part of her drink series, as in Tequila Sunrise series and Margarita series.

I love handwoven towels and use them daily, but I also buy them for gifts. Those of us who use them, like to think and acknowledge the weaver each time we use them. It’s nice to have Margaret in the kitchen with me–and many other weaver friends.

Below are three towels that I picked up at the guild sale.

This picture really does not do them justice, because the weave structure is not very visible. Click on the picture to really see how beautiful they are. These towels were woven by friends Lynn Smetko and Nancy Berger. As for Margaret’s towels–I bought the ones on the right in each picture. And they’re gorgeous! Just like the others.