Fiber Art Matrix

 

 
 

 

My room sized loom went away last year, along with my art studio. 

 

At the time this seemed fine. I was in love with my ipad art and did not expect to want to do any other kind of art ever again. (Just like that time I got toe shoes and had to buy toe socks to go in them. I thought I would always wear toe socks so I got rid of all of my regular socks.)

So the fiber art stuff simply decants into the entire house. Somehow, instead of going away, my art studio superimposes itself out into the whole house. It surrounds me in baskets of yarn and fleece all over the place, and I seriously expect to not be interested? Actually, I wanted to use it all up, remember, because it is so....physical? 

I want to Simplify.

But of course as we know now, Real Stuff also has a place and does sometimes call me. Maybe I'm just downsizing. I am intrigued with the way that looms work. In previous projects I explored peg looms. Now I wonder about tightly warped,  but still super simple looms. 

 

I order an inexpensive tapestry loom and put it together. It fits beautifully onto my wooden painting easel. But after assembling and warping up this new loom, what do I do, weave something? 

 

No, no, no! I build more looms! A couple of even simpler looms, from yardsticks, paint stir sticks, and picture frames, which I pick up by the roadside trash/free pile on my morning walk. I want to pare it down to basics.

 

Now, I have a nifty quick and easy loom that takes up no more space than a book to replace the room sized loom. One that can do the same, albeit much smaller, kind of tight warp weaving I was doing on the room sized loom. 

 

Instead of making a commitment to a big project, this loom is more like sketchbook loom, portable and quick. Instantly, two weavings pop right out of the new little loom I have made. 

 

The loom is a matrix, a new tool, like the studio itself is also a matrix, a tool. Or even the idea of studio, all the way to the artist As matrix. I wonder what magical fiber art will emerge next from this constantly shape-changing art studio.

 

 

 

 

“Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.”

― Richard P. Feynman

The Dog Gets a Companion Human

Each bite of food contains the life of the sun and the earth. The whole universe is in a piece of bread. —Thich Nhat Hanh

 

Now that we have a granny living with us, the dog has adopted her as his best companion person. Both of them like to sit around a lot, and both enjoy someone warm to cuddle up next to. It's a good thing all around, so it is worth encouraging. The key is to have the granny feed the dog, thus establishing said granny as a human with benefits.

 

This particular granny is so old that when she was a child, kids were heavily outranked by everyone. They were treated like little devils who needed to be trained and punished so they would grow up into good adult citizens.

 

One day Granny does not like what was for breakfast, and does not care to finish eating her food. But she remembered being a little child who was punished for not "cleaning her plate".

Granny begins to cry! When we find out why, we tell her everyone eats as much or as little as they like here. Besides, the food left over from what she did not want is by definition the doggy's food. She can't eat that. That would be stealing!

 

What a relief! That fixed it. Doggy and granny have been the best of friends ever since.

Speaking of Chartreuse

Charlene, Charlene, I don't mean to be mean, 

But you're the gaudiest thing that I've ever seen! 

Chartreuse, chartreuse, since I've turned ya loose,

 You stick out more than a red caboose!

Now that my pond pearl piece is sporting a new pearl of electric chartreuse, I contemplate this extreme and (to me) distasteful color. When I weave rainbows, this color is a real stumbling block to a nice smooth color transition from yellow to green. Chartreuse really stands out. No wonder we use it for safety signs and reflective gear.

  

One problem is that this color reflects so much light that it outshines the light green on one side and even yellow on the other side. Chartreuse is the color of your glow-in-the-dark cardboard Halloween skeleton, and of ghosts. It looks slightly radioactive.

Chartreuse lichen is the only color the bare trees around here wear all winter, but it is also the first color of spring. Soon it matures into a deeper summer green, of course, unlike reflective safety gear.

 

 Chartreuse stands in the center of the rainbow, the brightness midpoint of the spectrum of visible light we can see. We are calibrated by evolutionary design to navigate in the light of our yellow green sun. Chartreuse stands as the absolute zero point between warm colors and cool colors. Everything to the right of chartreuse is cool, everything to its left, warm.

 

Chartreuse is pure mentation, devoid of feeling, an almost overpowering binary or alternating current of dry information. If pure mind is like the clear light, chartreuse is like pure data.

You can learn a lot about a thing by considering its opposite, or complementary color in this case. Deep blue-indigo-violet holds this pole, ranging off toward the deepest most mysterious vanishing point. This indigo-ness pursues an infinitely receding but ultimately nonexistent concept of black. 

 

The lightest color balances the darkest one. Indigo goes until no light can be seen, while chartreuse goes on until there is no dark left, competing even with white.

I wonder if anyone ever feels warm and fuzzy cuddling up to chartreuse.

 

"Spring quickly growing

alive in the water

the weeks of rain infusing

all the land with color

the softness of the new leaves

the buds unfurling

chartreuse greening

into deeper hues

the spectrum expanding

the forest still alive, open

sharing hidden treasure"

- Chartreuse Greening by Raymond A. Foss

 

Charlene, Peace, and Pond Tales

"Sitting quietly, doing nothing, Spring comes and grass grows by itself." -Zenrin Kushû

Tales from the pond:

The multitude of goldfish survived the winter and then had a big spawn party a month or so ago, during a heat spell. Now bright orange fish flash and glide around in the shallows.

 

You have to sneak up on the pond or sit quietly for a while to see them. Or hide behind the ferns like I do. These fish are very cagey. Instead of darting away, they have a way of just sinking down imperceptibly until they disappear.

 

The wood ducks still swing by, flying low through the woods from pond to pond. Fat polliwogs wiggle in the sandy edges but most have hopped out of the pond to join the fully populated tree frog chorus performing every evening now.

 

Wetland plants are steadily creeping into the water and the pond lilies made it through the winter even though they aren't supposed to in this climate zone. They even have big round flower buds. Wildflowers are having a great year at the pond too, with more kinds blooming all around me than I can mention today.

 

The pond has a new pearl. Her name is Charlene because she is chartreuse. Here is a picture of Lon performing the formal rite of tossing in the new pond pearl:

I wrote a little poem about her:

 

Charlene, Charlene, you outshine the spring!

You're brighter than yellow, and brighter than green.

You get my attention, I cannot refuse,

that's why I've named you after chartreuse!

Chartreuse is the first color of spring. Everything seems to be a month or so early this year. Already we have had many record breaking high temperature days this year, same as you, probably, wherever you are. Global warming seems to be now passing the point of deny ability, even here in the land of denial.

Still and yet, spring is glorious. Meditating by the pond on a lazy warm day might seem to be the very idea of a peaceful spot. But peace and quiet are not the same! Even out here in the country where human made sounds are a bit fewer and far between, nature is roaring with the cacophony of the season.

I relax into the sounds and try to pick out the various birds voices from one another. Gradually the voices emerge of fauna and machine... I think of the fellow who roams the world searching for the sound of silence. But there is no silence, and peace is dynamic. I realize peace is a relationship web, and there is no more any silence in the universe than there is such a thing as the color black. All is light, all is vibration, all of creation sings. Peace is the sound of the song it sings.

Really? Isn't this pond a seething cesspool of contentious evolution, with fish eating fish, and I'm just romanticising the whole scene? I look out at the surface of the water. It is not a placid mirror, but a hundred moving circles. As I watch the water bugs skate around, I feel the joy of their adventure. I just know they are having fun. I wonder if most of the time, most of us, bugs included, are just bopping around being beings around here.

I give up trying to mediate with closed eyes or ears. Peace, I conclude, is some sort of intricate state of harmony we can tune into, or uniquely to us humans apparently, tune out from.