Author Archives: Margaret

About Margaret

Textile artist and teacher. Working in Southwest Utah. I combine painting, drawing, digital art, print making and stitching creating a soft canvas.

Gamble

“Woman adjusting sunglasses” was a part of the Anthony Angel collection held in the Library of Congress. The photo was taken in 1957. Like everything else in the collection it was given with no restrictions on its use. This is the second portrait in my series of women photographed around the time by Angelo Rizzuto. Although I don’t know these women personally, I am creating a backstory for each woman and exploring the limitations and opportunities they faced through the lens of history.

The original photograph shows an impeccably coiffed woman looking in a shop window. In my imagination she was shopping for the perfect pair of shoes or maybe a scarf. At that moment in time she would have been dating, or possibly engaged. She was able to shop in the middle of the day because she didn’t have the responsibility of children and was able to earn a paycheck to pay for the purchase. It was a short window of independence for this young woman. A few years after the photograph was taken, that same woman would have much more control over her choices.

[Woman adjusting sunglasses] Rizzuto, Angelo, 1906-1967, photograph
1957

In 1960, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the birth control pill, freeing women from the restrictions of pregnancy and childbearing. This launched a new era for women. In that decade women had the option to put off marriage and children. Because women had the freedom to make this choice there was a steep drop in the birth rate for women under twenty five over the decade. By 1975, this trend was ingrained in the culture. Birth rates rose for women in their 30s resulting in smaller family sizes and an increasing number of women in the workforce.

READ THE ENTIRE POST ON SUBSTACK

Aunt Gin

A few months after I retired I went to an art quilt conference where I scheduled a meeting with a mentor. I presented a group of 7 pieces I had completed over the course of a few years while still working. She told me that my portfolio of work lacked a clear focus and encouraged me to create a group of 10 compositions that shared common easily recognizable elements. It could be color, size, genre, or process.

I headed home to my studio ready to abandon almost everything I was doing in my previous studio practice. One element remained; incorporating a photographic image in my work.

My love of photographers and their ability to capture a moment in time that told a particular story began in art school. My favorite courses included World History of Photography, A History of Women Photographers, and The Cultural History of Photography. In those courses, I learned to appreciate how the camera in an artist's hands creates an image that goes far beyond simple documentation.

After the conference I began my first series focused on portraits. I used a collection of family photographs taken in Los Angeles between the depression and the early 1960’s by my Dad’s brother. Starting with these often small, sometimes damaged, printed images, and Photoshop; I taught myself to format them for commercial printing by the yard. The service created a large base portrait in grayscale.

I learned quickly that custom printing on fabric had drawbacks. First, these vintage images printed in black and white were lacking focus; literally blurry. As a composition they lacked any visual impact. As luck would have it, the beauty of these “impediments” lead me to finding a unique process and discovering the importance of finding my own voice.

So I began by painting over the figure and painting in the background. I used anything I had in my studio that was water soluble and could be thinned enough to be stitched. I did this not knowing the agreed upon standards in the quilt world. I was diving into a new community and taking with me the background in fine arts. Very quickly I understood I was a unicorn in this world.

One of the first portraits I made was my mentor in the world of not being like everyone else; Aunt Gin.

SEE THE FULL POST ON SUB STACK

My Sub Stack

I have a Substack!

Here is my first post. If you want to keep up with my writing, please subscribe!

I began creating at a young age in a gradeschool art program at the Honolulu Art Museum. In high school I took an art course every semester and enter a BFA program in college. Eventually I get a degree in Art Education and a Masters in Art. Along the way I was busy with creating curriculum and raising children. When I retired I had the time to create a studio practice. Nine years latter, the results are a body of work that is closer to my authentic voice.

I have spent this time learning to toss aside what is not true. My body of work is a conversation with the past, with the future, and with ideas that are represented in human form.

As I write, I hope to share with the reader the voice in my head that drives my creative process ……..

Margaret

Message from the Universe

Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are.
MALCOLM FORBES

The universe sent me several messages that remained unread until recently. It occurred in a period of time where I thought I was pursuing opportunities to expand my art career when in fact I was serving someone else's agenda. I may be a slow learner. Looking back I can now see a pattern of, as Malcom Forbes said; Placing too much value on what I am not and not enough value on what I am.

The First Message: Stop trying to fit in.
In the last couple of years I have been moving away from larger organizations to focus on opportunities in my local community. On the advice of a member of my art guild, I began making work that looked more like what is selling here in Southern Utah; landscapes. I displayed my new work at an exhibit space run by the art guild. The gallery was poorly hung and sales were minimal. I paid a fee to hang and a commission. Next I sought out a commercial gallery.

The Second Message: Looks are not everything
The first gallery and frame shop I was in hung my work in the hall, and didn’t provide me with a contract. After constantly finding the gallery closed during normal business I picked up my two pieces. The second gallery I pursued was in a beautiful venue with lots of traffic and a regular staff. I approached the director by sharing my business card which listed Abramshe Textile Arts, she was hesistent until I showed her images of my work on Instagram. We made an appointment for the next week. The gallery took four pieces and gave me a contract. I thought it was the perfect fit. It’s been months. Nothing has sold. They do not reach out or promote my work. It looked good on the surface, but the result prove otherwise.

The Third Message: Trust your gut feeling
After leaving the art guild I tried joining non profit arts organization. This group feels right to me. They have a delightful gallery, gift shop, and co-op teaching spaces. The location is just 40 minutes away from my house. Each month they have themed exhibitions which I enter and have won prize money. Twice a year the have a juried artist bazaar where I can sell a variety of small work without having to run a booth at an art fair. I have sold several pieces for a fraction of the commissions of a commercial gallery. This gives me the option to sell at lower price points and I can test ideas for larger projects. Best of all, it's a welcoming creative community.

The Final Message: Trust the Universe to send you what you desire
After two failed attempts to create a solo exhibition (one was shut down due to a leak in the ceiling, the other had a crowd of three for the opening) the curator of the art museum reached out to offer me an exhibit in the beautiful and large downstairs gallery. Because of those two previous exhibitions I had more than half of the work needed ready to hang in a gallery setting. I had set up an inventory, a file of images, and an artists statement. I had prepared for opportunity waiting to be presented.

“Merging Lines” pairs my work with a sculpture doing large scale figures with wire in a style not unlike Alexzander Calder. In that exhibit I assembled 25 pieces of portraits I have been creating over the past nine years. It’s work I am passionate about. Each piece was hung beside a statement written to help the viewer better understand the work. The result was well received by the public including tours with local schools and the university.

The museum staff and curator were so engaged with making the exhibition successful. Everything from social media marketing to professionally printed invitations and promotional material. The first day the exhibit opened in December there was a huge crowd attending a seasonal Light the Night event with music and lots of family groups. The last first Friday in February the museum hosted a closing celebration of the exhibit. Despite the rainy cold weather I was still greeting people a half hour after the event was supposed to end.

Everything about this setting spoke to me as being what I had been seeking. When the exhibit closes at the end of the month, I will be ready to shop this group of work to another public space with a professional team to hang and promote my work.

Today I declared myself a fine artist.
I am not a quilter, although I stitch the surface. I am not a textile artist, although I work with fabric. My work is museum quality and my subject matter is always something that speaks to me.

Until Next Time
Margaret

Flow

The Word of the Year 2024

Flow in positive psychology, also known colloquially as being in the zone, is the mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is characterized by the complete absorption in what one does, and a resulting transformation in one's sense of time. **https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

I don’t remember when I began selecting a word of the year. Merriam Webster started creating a word of the year in 2003. The American Dialectic Society began a decade earlier in 1990. The trend has grown. Now you can google “word of the year” and find a plethora of guides, justifications, lists of potential choices, and even a “Word of the Year Generator”.

In an article on the AARP Website the rationale for selecting your word was as an alternative to a News Years Resolution. “A carefully chosen word is a type of mental mentor — something to help us stay motivated as we move toward our goals”

A word of the year serves as a touchstone when I feel off track. My word of the year for 2023 was wind. It referred to the Buddhist concepts of the eight worldly winds; four positive and four negative. (gain and loss, pleasure and pain, praise and blame, fame and disrepute). I choose the word to remind me that whatever the achievement or disappointment I experienced wasn’t my goal. My goal was to stay on the creative path and let the winds blow. This helped when I had a few big achievements and several rejections.

This year's word "flow" was not chosen from a list or with the help of a tool. The word just arrived one morning out of the blue. It was a perfect word for the year to come.It's the way I want to work as an artist and to live as a happy productive person.

Flow is that state of being identified by Hungarian American psycolorgist ‎Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi while researching happiness and creativity. The term describes what it is to be lost in the creative process. When I am in a flow state in my best work is produced. It doesn’t happen everyday, but it happens frequently in the right conditions.

My flow is interrupted by external forces like deadlines or calls for entry where I am making something to fit into someone else's box. I also can prevent a flow state by not letting ideas percolat at their own pace. Pressure kills flow. To encourage flow I have to let go of the clock and allow myself to dive into a project without any notion of the end result. Let the process take me for a ride.

Staying on the creative path requires that I listen to the internal voice and allow that voice to send me in new directions. An example of this is a new series I am getting ready to start. I was inspired by a conversation with a young artist I met at my local art museum. We began following each other on instagram. She asked me for coffee. Our conversation turned to her complicated relationship with her family. That led me to think about my own mother giving birth to me in 1959.

After the that conversation my mind was filling with questions. What was it like for a woman like my Mom in that era ? How did the expectations of time and culture affect our relationship? Who would have she been if she had been born twenty years latter? I ended up coming home and searching for photographs of women in the late 50’s and early 60’s. That led me to the archives in the library of commerce. Down the rabbit hole I went. Now I have several photo collage compositions sitting in my studio ready to paint and eventually to stitch.

Thats flow. Allowing an idea to lead me into new territory at it's own pace.

I am very excited about these new projects. They will be added to my ongoing series of vintage family portraits included in an exhibition called "Merging Lines". My hope is that I can have enough portraits to book a solo show at a venue here in Utah.

My year began by allowing an idea to flow from one little conversation over coffee, into a larger investigation, and creating new work.

Until Next Time....
Margaret