Sweet Emotion [Art Journal Pages]

Not long ago, I did this series in my art journal, exploring different emotional states, “Mad” was my first and favorite, “happy” was my second favorite and the last one I did, make of that what you will.

[ I feel duty-bound to disclaim that these are not edited photos. The colors are a little off. These are handbound journals with pages of various sizes so other pages are visible around the edges. But if I spend loads of time editing these, I’ll never share them! So now you know. ]

Enter the Embroidered Art Journals

I can often sense my creative focus moving before it actually does. The last time it happened was this past July 14th.

I’m a “multidisciplinary” artist, but I’m actually more serially monogamous I have periods — eras really— where I’m very focused on one kind of art practice. I’m deep into printmaking, collage, crochet, figurative painting, book arts — and then it falls away for a bit. It feels to me like a spotlight trains on an art form and it becomes luminous, irresistibly compelling — which casts other practices in comparative shadow.

I can’t always identify the shift with such precision as this last one, I know the exact date because it’s when I went to an exhibit at The Drawing Center called “The Clamor of Ornament.” It was, as it turns out, the waning days of my last Printmaking Era, C.E.

At the Drawing Center, I spent a long time in front of an embroidery sampler from Mexico in the 1800s:

Image of an embroidery sampler on display at The Drawing Center in 2022, unknown artist.

Worked by an unknown artist, this piece is silk thread on cotton, made to look like patchwork, with each rectangular portion a different kind of pattern made with a variety of different stitches. (If you know your stitches, there was cross, stem, long-armed cross, threaded running, Roumanian, fern and buttonhole.)

i knew at that moment that embroidery was coming back— I could feel it in my fingers.

I first embroidered this piece based, appropriately, on an image I saw on my last trip to Mexico in 2019. But after I finished that, I didn’t want to work on anything specific.

I wanted to keep embroidering, but in the way that I work in my paper art journals. These I bind with various kinds of papers — blank and printed, new and vintage, uneven sizes — and I skip around as I work on them. I can lay down a bunch of marks on different pages, collage a bunch of things down, or I can work right into a piece and finish it.

And so it hit me: why not do this with fabric? Bind a book with lots of different fabrics, stitch scraps on in certain places, and just flip around.

And so, dear reader, I did.

Image of a “spread” in my embroidered art journal.

Another page in my embroidered art journal.

It’s actually weird to me that I haven’t thought of this before. I am always wanting to treat paper like fabric — I want to stitch into it, weave it, attach fabric and buttons and trim to it. (In fact, last year I taught a workshop at FabScrap about using fabric in art journals.)

And I knew you could use bookmaking techniques to bind fabric rather than paper. Although when I flipped through my reference materials on bookmaking, I only saw examples of soft books made for babies, in which each page had been embroidered separately and then bound together after. And that’s not what I wanted. I wanted to bind “blank pages” and embroider into them.

The challenge for me was the back side of the embroidery. Although the reverse side of an embroidered piece can look cool in its own way — and some people take a lot of pride in how neat they keep the wrong side of their embroidered pieces — I’m only concerned about the reverse side when I’m embroidering on a garment. I didn’t want half the book to be the reverse side of embroideries.

Then I remembered that waaay back in 2017, MOMA had Louise Bourgeois exhibit including her embroidered books. She “bound” them with buttons, so she could easily remove each “page.” I liked this idea.

Louise Bourgeois’ embroidered book pages on display at MOMA.

Since I couldn’t see the backside of Bourgeois pages at MOMA, I didn’t know how she resolved this wrong side issue — if it actually bothered her at all.

Eventually I decided I would simply bind my books and just work on every other page. I could safety pin the “wrong” sides together while I was working, and sew them together like a sandwich when I was done.

The only trick here is to keep track of which side was the right and wrong side — you don’t want a wrong side facing a right side, because then there’s no way to hide it.

I did fuck this up a few times on the first journal, although. I just sewed in an extra page when I did, which is a little fiddly but not the end of the world. If you try this at home, I’ve since realized that for stability, I generally need to double up my fabric. I used a different fabric for the “wrong sides” which has helped me to keep track and not sew on it.

I’ve now made three of these art journals — I’ve basically filled all of those up, so I’m soon to bind a fourth. I’ll post more pages from these journals soon!

From Art Journal to Greeting Card

I’m always curious about how designs go from an artist’s head into reality, so I figured I’d share a meander through the process on my 2022 holiday card.

Like all my projects, this card started out in one of my many art journals. I found an image I liked, brought it into Photoshop, and turned it into something card-ish!

You can read a detailed description, including images considered and not used, here.

American Can (Not) Do

A page from my art journal — I made this last week, after Buffalo, or was it just last night, after Texas, or in between when a man was randomly shot in the chest on the subway here in NYC, or, or, or.

Obviously it doesn’t matter, the subject is, as the news people call it, “evergreen,” or in this case, everbloody.

I was in my twenties when Columbine happened, and it was a 9/11 magnitude event, before 9/11. As was Sandy Hook. Last night, Vox Sentences, in its excellent nightly news round up, filed the Texas elementary school shooting under “Miscellaneous.”

Which is what prioritizing what ought to be a quaint relic in our founding document over human life gets ya. Fetishizing an idea about America, which worships our theoretical “can do” independent spirit, and which apparently must involve being armed and unregulated, or else we aren’t free at all, results in the . murder of twenty school-age children in their classroom becoming commonplace. It’s just the price of freedom.

But let’s remember that abortion is the real murder. How do we even survive in such a contradictory state? (Answer: a lot of us don’t.)

Anne Helen Petersen analyzes the moment best, as usual.

Multidisciplinary or Serially Monogamous?

I have described myself as a multidisciplinary artist, ever since I looked up the meaning of “interdisciplinary” and learned that it meant to collaborate with people in other disciplines, which ain’t me.

Sketchbook, Sept 2021 (This also ain’t me!)

What it means in practice is that I’ve always got the vague feeling I’m neglecting something. When I have a great day with my watercolors, the other media are tapping on shoulder. Hi gouache and acrylics! I see you there, collage materials, printmaking supplies. And oh my God the fiber — embroidery and weaving, and crocheting — and when was the last time I bound a book? I love all these things. Beyond media, I often like to work expressively and I sometimes crave working technically and representatively. (And I’m not even going into how I feel about writing.)

I’m not good at working in different ways at the same time, though. I go through phases where all I do is collage, and then all I do is crochet, and then all I do is weave, and so on. There’s a re-acclimatization period, where I remember what I did before, and am mad at myself for almost forgetting what I’d learned before, and vow to never let it happen again. Then I produce a bunch and learn a bunch…and then I feel my interest start to wane, my fingers start craving a different kind of production. After a few days of feeling depressed and lost, I’m on the to the next thing. 

Sketchbook, Sept 2021. Them/They.

What’s nice about getting older is that I have come to realize that this is a cycle. When I get into my latest thing, I think, well, now all I do is weave or whatever, and I shall never make collages or xyz again. (It’s bad to write artists statements and so on, in this mindset.)  It’s very dramatic to feel this way, and nice to realize, at least somewhere in the back of my mind, that my experience is that it will fade and come around again in its time.

Right now, I’m into making portraits, aiming for a kind of likeness. Working more technically than I generally do. I think this is possibly seasonal — I know I did this last Fall too. It feels like back-to-school, traditions of the academy and so on. (Not that my work achieves this, obviously and of course, I’m proudly self-taught and I think it shows.) Of course, I think this is now what I do! And if you come back in a few days, weeks or months…you will see I’ll be on to my next love. 

"New York Began to Cry"

Sometimes when I’m working in my art journals, certain words seem to arrange themselves into startlingly appropriate phrases.

“New York began to cry” is one of those. It feels like it could be a title for a collection of pages I’ve made during the pandemic, or the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, or, or, or….

The other two are less discovered and more assembled, although there’s a certain amount of chance involved with what scraps of words my hands will find. “The intrinsic nature of something” is in my handwriting, and looks to be part of a definition of something that I jotted down on a magazine page. “By their arbitrary light” is part discovered on the page itself — this is an altered book, I guess I should have said — combined with some other words.

New Work, Summer 2021

It becomes more and more of an effort to post on Instagram, to even open the app. I’ve set time limit on my phone to interrupt any glazed-eye scrolling, just 15 minutes per day. At first I was constantly hitting it, but there are now some days when I don’t even reach that.

At the same time, I want people to see what I’ve done — especially you, if you’re reading these words.

Some new work, then, which I’m posting here first instead of on Instagram, at least initially. (There is more on the home page.)

Of course, edited into the square format because you and I both know it’s going to end up there eventually. If not immediately.

Art Journal Flip Through

This is the art journal I started in April 2020. Obviously a BIT of a hectic time here on this planet, and especially in New York City. There was lot of processing going on in these pages.

I tend to note the date that I start my art journals, and not the date I finish them. (Often, I will write “established on xyz date” inside the front cover — this one was on established on April 20th, 2020.) But I never really consider them “all done” because I always feel free to go back in and do more. (in this type of a journal, I don’t go from page to page sequentially, I build layers on multiple pages over time.) In filming, I did see a few pretty unfinished pages, and one entirely blank spread! This hardly ever happens. I’m tempted to leave it just as an indicator of what an unusually disorganizing time it was.

I worked on this book most actively through the Fall of last year, when other art journals began to capture more of my attention. But because I tend to work on each art journal most intensely during a specific period of time, they really do end up being something of a time capsule. It’s funny how many pages I’ve already totally forgotten about, just a year later. And some of these pages have already gone on to have additional lives as inspirations for other art works, or as art works on their own.