Monthly Studio Review #2

(An experiment in which I look back at a month of my creative life at the start of a new one. See last months’ here.)

1. Paintings on Canvas

I completed three 11x14 inch acrylic paintings on canvas, the first work I started and finished in the new studio. I posted a couple of these last month and mentioned my process here. I seem to be continuing with the “animals in unlikely places” theme, more to come on that.

Process note: It took me longer than I expected to settle in and feel comfortable working here, in the third bedroom in our new home. Unpacking and organizing took forever, and then I had to spend some time just hanging out in the studio, doing other things besides artwork. (I was easily working on sketchbooks and art journals in the living room and dining room, that’s always felt more fluent to me.) Since I was physically unable to spend as much time here as I’d have preferred, due to caregiving responsibilities, it kept feeling like re-entering a brand new space. Honestly, I had no idea I was so space sensitive — previously I was working in a screened-off corner of the dining room! But now my studio space is starting to feel like a creative ally.

2. Location Drawing

Lots of location drawing, which gives life to my years. I’ve previously posted a number of them here.

I’m especially excited about some sketchbook drawings I made at my local community pool, which saved my sanity daily this summer. This one has stuck in my mind for some reason, and I’ve started to develop it further.

3. Other Sketchbook Drawings and Drawing Sessions

☀️ Drawing from National Geographic magazine is still a pleasure — a quarantine habit that’s stuck! (Sometimes I draw straight from an image, other times I combine freely.) I’ve noticed that my usual “horror vacuii” style is sometimes being joined by a few compositions with more white space. (Also the case the bathing suit sketch above.) This was a style I worked in more a few years ago and I wonder if it’s returning in some way — although obviously I’m still pretty good at packing a page.

🌈 I also did a bunch of sketches of 1970s hotel interiors. These are from the heyday of the Poconos.

Although I know this makes me sooooo oooooooooold, the 70s were when I made my debut on this planet, and its design ethos is present in my blood. My memories are of course vague — In Kindergarten, I remember having a disco lunch box, and thinking that Jimmy Carter and Jiminiy Cricket were probably the same person!

🙄 I read another biography of Marc Chagall, this one by Jackie Wullschlager. (Earlier this year, I’d read one by Jonathan Wilson.) My grandparents had a lithograph of his that I lived with for many years. I love his art and wanted very much to admire him as a person, but… “I felt disappointed i what a spoiled and petty shithead he was,” I wrote in my notes. I did admire Bella Chagall, though, so I made some drawings of her and her daughter Ida.

✅ Online drawing sessions: Holly Surplice’s Wonderful Wolves session replay entirely lived up to its name! Emma Carlisle and Sarah Dyer teamed up to draw cars, which I weirdly liked a lot. (I have a little internal cringe about car enthusiasm, due to it being an obsession of the ex-husband, but I actually do quite like the look of vintage cars…I’ve actually been drawing more of them since.) I also joined Beth Spencer’s Introvert Drawing Club, which could not be more perfect for me, the confirmed introvert. I’ll have more drawings from that next month.

Hi Embroidery!

My fingers got itchy for the needle as I prepped my embroidery books for their star turn at The Art of The Book Show in Rochester, opening on September 18th. I’d been on a little break from embroidery, but I’m back, baby.

Here’s the ignoble first of my “Collaborations with Anonymous Project,” in which I use the incomplete embroidery project of a stranger as a prompt. I shared the second one here, the first one was kind of a mess because I went too far and then I kept going! I failed to take a photo of the first one before I started stitching, but the first one was taken before I’d done too much.

Hi Refillable Pens, and Bye Markers!

Note: I’m not adding links to common art supplies I’m mentioning, you know how to Google and I’m not doing affiliate links at the moment. As a matter of policy I’ll just add links to things that are in some way specific, or a little more tricky to find.

I made a real switch in my art materials. I’ve been feeling uncomfortable with non-refillable markers for a long time — for one thing, they are very expensive, and for another thing — just a lot of plastic in the trash.

This is the second time in my creative life that I’ve made this switch. Back in my full-time writing days, I was very particular about a certain Uni-Ball pen and bought boxes of them. At some point, I realized that I would be saving money and resources by using a refillable pen, which is when I got my Lamy fountain pen, a refillable cartridge, a syringe, and Noodler’s Ink, the very best ink.

Over the past few months, I’ve been slowly experimenting with filling water brush pens with liquid watercolor or ink, with the goal of replacing my Tombow brush markers.

It’s taken some trial and error and some very annoying and messy leaking, but I was able to finally put away my markers and go 100% refillable.

I found that Pentel Brush Pens are the only ones that don’t leak on me. In the brush pens, I use Ph. Martin Concentrated Radiant Water Color and some of their Bombay inks, Ecoline liquid water color, Noodler’s ink and some Winsor and Newton — I really like their Polar White. Michael’s Artist Loft liquid watercolors are also pretty good and very affordable! It’s really great to be able to mix the exact colors that I want.

To replace fine liners, a Sailor Fude pen with Noodler’s X_Feather Black Ink is the way to go. I also have a calligraphy nib on a long Lamy pen, which I use with Lamy’s gray ink, gorgeous.

I’m still experimenting with empty brushes and containers for acrylic paint, to replace my Poscas. Still not thrilled with this yet, but so far, some cheap refillable dauber bottles from Amazon filled with a mix of acrylic paint and water are doing the job.

In Conclusion!

I didn’t think that I’d gotten a lot done, but it was actually not a bad month now that I see it all in one place. So I guess I’ll keep these reviews going for now, since it makes me feel all productive.

P.S. Please forgive the imperfect photo editing and any typos…if I got uptight about it, this would never have been posted!

Carnegie Arts Walk 2023

Carnegie is often described as a ‘vibrant arts community,” and this, plus the library, plus the dog park, is why we chose it! When I went to drop off my work for this show, I was blown away by the tiny glimpse I got of some other work that was selected for the show. I can’t wait to see it next weekend!

Here are the five pieces that I’ll have in this show:

Our Town Newspaper Story on Embroidered Journals!

Fun!

For those who love books as art–or books and art–a visual and tactile treat awaits as Greenwich Village-based artist Alison J. Stein works feverishly to stitch, snip and appliqué a growing stack of delightfully-designed booklets that will eventually be exhibited as books without paper.

Local Artist Alison J. Stein Prepares to Unveil New Works: Embroidery Books Our Town, January 30th, 2023.

And a few extra images of the books for your viewing pleasure:

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!

Spotted: Dazzling Margins Notecards at McNally Jackson

As if having my art displayed at NYPL wasn’t enough….greeting cards with my art on it are at my absolute favorite NYC indie bookstore, McNally Jackson on Prince Street! I went to check these out just after we installed the show, and although I was hot and sweaty and tired, the sight of these instantly revived me. Go see if they have the same effect on you?

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.

Sea/Sun/Set to be Auctioned at Nest+M's Annual Gala

I donated one of my favorite canvases to be auctioned for the benefit of a very cool school here in New York City. The kid of a friend of mine attends. And actually, we know each other because our dogs hang out in the same clique at the dog park. So this just goes to show —what happens in the dog park doesn’t always stay in the dog park. :)

I know it’s a nightmare for parents to navigate the city’s school system, which has grown exponentially more complicated since I was a student, but wow — I wish these things were available when I was in the system. (I also wish these cool options were available to more students across the socioeconomic spectrum, but that’s a different story.)

In any event, I hope this canvas goes for tons of money and the school does good things with it!

And I will definitely consider art donation requests for good causes, so if you’re doing a fundraiser, feel free to hit me up.

The Dazzling Margins - Exhibit Postcard!

Preparations continue apace for my solo show upcoming at the NYPL Mulberry this summer! Here’s a sneak peek at the exhibit postcard:

Save the Date for my Solo Show! "The Dazzling Margins" at the NYPL.

I’m so excited to say I’m having a solo art show at the New York Public Library’s Mulberry Street branch this summer! The show will open on June 4th, 2022 and go through August 28th

It’s called “The Dazzling Margins: Vibrant Glimpses of NYC Liife” and is based on my observations of this neighborhood during the pandemic. Especially in the early going, pretty much my only excursion was to the Mulberry Library to pick up and drop off books — and try to get the damned forehead thermometer to register that I was standing in front of it. (Move closer, move further back…usually the security guard would take pity on me and beam-test my wrist.) The “neighborhood” is the sort of ill-defined area — technically Greenwich Village, but just north of Soho, some people call it Noho… in any event, my stomping grounds.

More info to come!

See My Art in These Upcoming Exhibits

I have four paintings that will be on exhibit starting in May. (August 2021 update: Two of the paintings are still available, see below for details. If you’re interested in purchasing, please contact me!)

“Sea/Sun/Set.” Mixed media on canvas, 18 x 24 inches. Included in Art of Water V at James May Gallery. May 1st - July 31st, 2021.

“The Dancers Dance the Dance.” Mixed media on paper. 7x10 inches. Included in Mujeres Mujeres Mujeres at Raices Taller 222 Art Gallery in Tucson, Arizona. May 1st - June 12th, 2021. SOLD

“Completing the Thought.” Mixed media on canvas, 12 inches diameter. Included in Neuroanatomy at Stone Valley Arts, Poultney, Vermont. May 15th-June 27th, 2021. SOLD

“Brain in my Heart.” Mixed media on canvas, 9x12 inches. Included in Neuroanatomy at Stone Valley Arts, Poultney, Vermont. May 15th-June 27th, 2021.