Printing Under the Influence

Quilt Surface Design Symposium Recap

Practicing color layering and intensity + a finger painting print

Seven. For seven marathon days in a row, I printed fabric. It was a dream come true. A seven-day focus on art. Eat. Sleep. Make Stuff. Repeat. as seen on a t-shirt at the Columbus College of Art & Design in Ohio where the workshop was held. Being there is like a homecoming or family reunion. It’s fiber art camp for adults. You see old friends and meet new, spread smiles all around at meals, in the classrooms and the dorms; gather at vendor night and the ice cream social, Meet the Teachers, the auction and more. On to the recap…

Day 1 - finding my printing rhythm
Day 2 - refining my printing rhythm
Day 3 - playing around with different tools, methods, and materials
Day 4 - finally getting some concrete ideas as to what I wanted to print
Day 5 - printing awkward prints
Day 6 - printing things I liked
Day 7 - printing while blissfully exhausted, cleaning and packing up

I went rogue. I didn’t always follow the daily instructions. Staying true to my style and finding my way back into printing with thickened dye was important to me. I took a five-day class with Pat two years ago, and eagerly headed home to print. My husband constructed a print table for me (plus some much-needed studio lighting.) I was gung-ho and good to go until a few months later when the repetitive movements of screen printing exacerbated my long-neglected shoulder injury. I had put off surgery as long as possible, got the necessary rotator-cuff repair, and am now good as new but felt like a beginner again.

From experimentation to awkward prints

Printing fabric with thickened dye and all that it entails is hard work! There were 21 of us including the instructor and her assistant. It was a friendly, focused group. We took over three classrooms, one just for drying fabric. Morning and afternoon discussions, “homework”, slide shows, and print, print, print filled our days. There was even a trip to the adjacent Columbus Museum of Art. What a gorgeous museum and collection.

A serendipitous side story:
I was excited to see an exhibit, Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In, two of the most influential women in the history of photography, at the National Portrait Gallery. I had been waiting patiently for the exhibit to open in April. The night before my trip down to DC I revisited the museum’s IG page only to discover I’d been looking at the BRITISH National Portrait Gallery profile. I was crushed. So when I walked into Gallery 5 at the Columbus Museum and stumbled upon four of Woodman’s non-traditional self-portraits, I was elated. I love serendipitous happenstance.

Printing with dye onto fabric is both a mental and physical challenge, more so for beginners of course, but even the experienced. It involves pattern design and cutting, color layering and blending, with an eye for composition, repetition, negative and positive space, scale, line, and all the other elements and principles of art. You can’t erase or paint over an unwanted mark. You can over-print, but eventually, the best way to remedy ugly results on your fabric is to find the sweet spots and cut it into smaller usable pieces. That’s okay with me - Fabric Poems, anyone? When I asked Pat how to fix an edge that wasn’t smooth she gave me options but emphasized that “the point or beauty of hand-printing is to see the maker’s mark.” Every strike of dye on the fabric is unique. Perfect is not the goal.

This workshop came at an in-between time for my artistic process. I am comfortable with what I’ve done and I’m searching for something new, intriguing, and creatively challenging. There is something more I want to say through my art but I am creatively speechless right now. I began with no agenda, no plans, a clean slate, clear-mind mentality. I was also out of my comfort zone. As a seasoned artist with 25+ years working in an identifiable and comfortable style, I wanted to see what would evolve organically and how it might help me move forward with my art. I learned long ago that you can’t find your way by thinking. It is only by doing that the path appears. I know it will be an uncomfortable path until I am more familiar with the terrain, yet I will keep going to see where it leads. It is exciting and scary, rewarding and frustrating, liberating and constricting. Only the brave need embark.

1. Did I ruin it by overdyeing? 2. finding the sweet spots 3. B&W accidental? abstract with the twist of the scraper

I ended up with somewhere between 12 and 15 yards of hand-printed possibilities. It looks nothing like my older work, but isn’t that the point when you’re looking for and trying something new? Maybe, if you know my work, you can see some similarities. Let me know.

My pile of printed fabric is worth all the work, including the endless cycles of washing it all when I got home.

The Quilt & Surface Design Symposium (QSDS) was founded in 1990 by Nancy Crow and Linda Fowler. For the last several years, QSDS has been under the guidance of and organized by director Tracy Rieger. Sadly, this, the 34th QSDS, is the last one. (But there is a rumor that maybe not.) It had a good, long run and I am glad I was able to attend four times taking workshops: Batik with the late, Els Van Baarle, co-taught with Cherilyn Martin; Joomchi with Jiyoung Chung; Multi-Media Fiber with the inimitable Betty Busby; and this year, this wonderfully intensive workshop, Printing Under the Influence, with the energetic and inspiring Pat Pauly.

Quotes of the Week

A work of art is the energy manifestation of the one who created it. It holds the spirit of the artist within its shapes, form and colors.  Audrey Flack

The courage to imagine the otherwise is our greatest resource, adding color and suspense to all our life. Daniel J. Boorstin