Winter in Maine is a time to slow down, to take a break from teaching and focus more deeply on my own work. Sometimes I use this time to study and explore a different medium. I'm reading Color: A Workshop for Artists & Designers right now and loving it. I highly recommend it as a tool for deepening your working understanding of color. I'm also taking time away from the studio to make my holiday gifts this year.
I'm taking an interpretive lens to sewing and thinking of my stitch marks as an exercise in mark making.
Sewing offers me the opportunity to experiment with color, form, and line. As an avid and longtime collector of fabric, I'm making my way through my stockpile and turning it into a bunch of beautiful tote bags. I will confess - I can barely sew a straight line. I'm taking an interpretive lens to sewing and thinking of my stitch marks as an exercise in mark making.
Making the same bag over and over again affords me the opportunity to practice improvisation within a set of prescribed guidelines. Each bag is unique. They all have a lining, but some are pieced together from 3 - 4 different fabrics. I used webbing for two and made straps for the rest. I put two pockets in most and no pocket in one. While the majority are linen cotton, quite a few have some pure linen or linen gauze in places. I discovered right away how hard it is to sewing thinner, flimsier fabric; how quickly my material goes from straight to sloping. And along the way, I’ve threaded and unthreaded my machine numerous times, tried out different stitches, adjusted the stitch length, and wound my bobbin more often than I care to admit. There has been some cursing. But I have also fallen in love with each bag at some point.
As I’ve cut, measured, and stitched, I found myself thinking about improvisation and comparing the type of work I am doing with needle and thread to the work I do in my studio. Students often ask me if I plan out my paintings in advance. I tell them I used to start with a very specific vision and the whole process of painting was about executing that vision (sometimes, of course, this went well and other times it derailed). Still, the intentionality was helpful in that it taught me to focus on the minute aspects of my work - controlling the heat from my torch, the angle of my brush, how much paint I applied and when. About six years ago, I experienced an internal shift brought on by a month-long yoga teacher training. I returned from that program with a desire for greater spontaneity in the studio. And a real hunger for color. I began to make very different kinds of paintings, looser and more gestural. I found I liked not knowing where I was going or what the end result would be, caught up instead in the act of painting and responding to the marks I made as if I were engaged in a conversation with my work.
The paintings I have made over the past few years represent a kind of improvisation and yet I know that if I had started from this place, rather than the time I spent developing my skills, I would have experienced a great deal of frustration. I also recognize that I started to make these paintings when I had already developed a clear sense of what my work was about, what ideas I wanted to explore, and what types of marks represented those ideas. I had a process in place for making my work and the tools I needed to create it.
I stumbled upon this quote 10 years ago and it has stayed with me: “Improvisation does not imply postponing decisions or basing them on impulses that arrive with a moment’s notice. Rather, it represents an entire way of life in which predictability has been systematically, purposefully altered.” (“On The Map,” essay by William Arnett and Paul Arnett, The Quilts of Gee’s Bend.) I appreciate this definition, though I also think it’s okay and perhaps even critical to, from time to time, experiment with impulses that arrive with a moment’s notice. It reminds me of playing as a kid, which is easy to forget to do as an adult. I think the deeper message has to do with creating parameters in which improvisation can flourish. In researching this topic I came across an article on improvisation in the arts that noted that despite a focus on spontaneity, “most improvisation theorists agree that improvisation is not ad hoc activity; rather, it involves skill, training, planning, limitations and forethought.” (PhilArchive) It’s as if improvisation were a muscle one developed and flexed at certain times.
If ever a year called for doing things differently, for figuring it out on the fly, 2020 was it. However the past year was altered for you, here's hoping you were able to find some helpful forms of improvisation both purposefully and in the moment.