Lee Thomson

Shell River – whole and detail:

Sunday afternoon Red Kate brought her lovely camera and useful but wimpy tripod (with a crank! so steam-punk!) and she took photographs of the river series on white backgrounds. I needed different a background to enter a different competition. The multiplicity of requirements for submitting work is exhausting. On the plus side, I have lovely pictures of my most recent work.

I just finished Black Stone River, but haven’t gotten photos of the whole of it yet:

That is linen background and coffee sack (from Esselon, one of my favorite places on earth) with smooth black stone beads stitched down on it. I got the beads because they made me think of the beach full of smooth black stones on Hurricane Island off the coast of Maine. We stopped during a sailing trip when I was a teenager, and I still have a handful of Hurricane Island stones that I picked up off that beach.

Alice is on a school trip to Rome and Athens, including a fair number of ruins, some Latin to translate and at least four ferries. She included this her most recent email “Far and away, most of the things I have acquired this vacation have been pebbles.” Which means it is apparently hereditary. My mother does this, and grandmother did as well.

A friend gave me a giant collection of buttons from her grandmother. I think the grandmother had lived next to a button factory, or worked in it, because there were a lot of not-quite-fine shell buttons, in sizes small, large, and larger. They were not useful for garments, so I have been saving them for some large decorative project.

When I made a background of all the white and off white fabrics I could find, I liked the buttons on them, the variation of sizes, and adding some of the weird singleton shell buttons that seemed to fit in.

I finished sewing the buttons down on Sunday. I need to figure out how to photograph it at home, but it is done. I am proud of it. Also I think it is voluptuous.

I have started the next piece already.

I spoke to the Northampton Modern Quilt Guild yesterday, and it was lovely. I was originally contacted to talk about Surface Design, but since it seemed like the definition of surface design is so broad as to be functionally useless, I wound up talking about my path to … whatever it is I do. The members were delightful; appreciative, attentive and with good questions.

Towards the end of my allotted time, I talked about various creativity manifestos that had inspired me to keep working. I went looking for them today, and found so many I couldn’t tell which ones had been important to me at the time and which ones had been only so much noise. Of course, after reading more than two or three of them, they all turn into more or less noise. It looks like many of them are more about exhorting the writer themselves to  better working and thinking habits, and then they were published because publishing on the internet is nearly frictionless.

So I made my own manifesto:

1. quantity first, sift for quality later
2. lean into the stuff that pleases you
3. “if you love something, do it again. if you hate something, do it again” (I can’t remember whose manifesto this came from, but it has been extremely useful.)
4. leave the stuff that leaves you unmoved
5. figure out what drives you, and follow it*
6. do not worry about what to do with the results from your process, something will become clear

*This is where I say something about following your bliss or finding your passion except I am a reserved New Englander and I am deeply dubious about both of those as motivating forces. I find I do some of my most interesting and useful work when I am pissed off about something. I work well from aggravation. I know this, and can follow it. Know what emotions drive your strongest work, and see where they take you.

So? What does your manifesto say? Should you edit it?

The first several days on Monhegan the weather was foggy and warm, an unusual combination. Sitting still was not so bad, although the fog tended to bead up on my glasses making seeing a problem, but walking anywhere became a sauna-like proposition. We were renting a house near the top of the hill, and saw nothing much farther than the trees at the edge of the lawn for a couple days. Sometimes Manana would appear, only to vanish again when the fog came back.

I started the painting project in this foggy weather, and some things about it really spoke to me. I like the idea of veils showing and hiding things that are normally in view, and the shifting fog was very explicitly veiling the distances. I love how the fog intensifies the colors that are close, and mutes those in the distance.

My favorite painting of those first couple days started off as more of a tantrum. I was trying to get a glimpse of Manana, and fog kept shifting. Finally I added a wash of white paint thinned with medium every time I got exasperated, and in between fits of frustration I painted what I could see. The result makes laugh every time I look at it – because I remember the aggravation, but I see the shifting veils of mist and the spikes of pine trees and the skeleton of a dead tree at the edge of the property. I’ll see if I can take a decent photo of it, but you might just have to visit me to see it.

Originally the title was “more ruination” but really it is more experimentation or stitching or something a little more positive.

This was one big painting. Well, not that big – 9×12″ – but I lost interest in the lower left corner, and after staring at it for a while I realized it would be better as two smaller works, so in a fit of courage I cut it up, and finished the edges of two smaller pieces. One is 6×8″ the other 5×7″ and I still have some small pieces left over to practice techniques on.

Next up – take on the foggy pieces, which I like better and am having larger issues with stitching. But they deserve it as much as these did. So.

I might have mentioned that I took a handful of acrylic paint on vacation to my brother’s island (not that he owns it, but that he lives there year round, unlike the cascades of artists, birders and other tourists that arrive in summer) this past summer. It was a surprisingly intense learning experience. I made a point of painting every day, as much as I could before I felt I was missing something important. Learning new ways of seeing and representing things is exhausting. I’d work in the morning, come home for lunch and a nap, do some more work in the afternoon, and then sleep hard all night, frequently with dreams about paint or brushes or trying to paint with a sewing machine.

I brought these home and left them alone for a while.

When I experimentally added stitching to one of the pieces I was unsure about, something interesting happened. So I added thread to a few more of the small pieces, but I was “saving” these larger ones for something, until I decided I wasn’t. So now I am experimenting with adding thread to all the painting I did last summer. It is related to the work I’ve done before, but it also feels really different.

I can tell I have dozens of things I can experiment with. I could paint on softer fabric, more like the cotton I usually use for stitching. I could use fabric paint instead of acrylics for canvas. I can alternate paint and stitch and see what happens. My head is whirling with possibilities.

My hope is to learn something from stitching into all the paintings from the summer. They aren’t important enough to keep the way they are, and I am learning a lot while working on them. so they have become fodder for the next step, the next thing to learn.

If I leave them alone, they’re still not finished. If I can ruin a couple, I’ll have a better idea of what to do the next time

the pictures are misleading – the brown one is much larger than the other.

Eddyline is 20×48″  Silver River is 25×20″

Photos by Stephen Petegorsky

I started another piece that will be connected after the stitching is done. Working big is interesting because pieces last longer than a day or two, and I have to keep the idea I was chasing in mind as I move through the work.

In which I again make something larger than I can photograph with any grace and have to get it photographed by someone with more space and larger equipment. Fortunately, I know who to go to (Stephen Petegorsky does excellent work).

I had this idea that the circles would get more intensely colored as they got smaller, which worked relatively well. The small peach circles are from a couple scraps that fell on the stack of blues when I was buying them. I collected some of these softer orangey-pinks for contrast, and the idea of finding another line down the river took shape.

I’ve already started the next too large piece. Just following my nose… Or my muse?

After encouragement to work big again, and fix what I perceived as problems on the last big laced piece, I started this one. The thread texturing on the background is darker, and lets more of the browns show through. The river has more different colors and sizes of circles. I have one last layer to put on, a line of small circles in varied pinky-oranges, and then I will hammer holes in it to lace it together. More better photos coming soon.

I have shift back to landscapes after I finish this piece. I have a request for some snowy New England views, in stark contrast to what we have going on here at the moment.