Tactile Scene
November 12, 2012
Inspirational Art
Cate van Alphen hasn’t been working with polymer for very long but her background in numerous other mediums has assisted and influenced her polymer creations. Her experience in painting is obvious in this donut pendant.
Cate says this was inspired by a painting by Maurice Utrillo, a French painter that worked primarily in the first half of the 20th century. The heavy tactile nature she gets from manually manipulating the clay rather than using stamps or other machined imagery reminds me of heavy impatso painting where the texture itself is part of the design and draw, as it is here.
So, enjoy a little scenery and the idea of manually working your clay in the purest sense.
Switching Structure Between Forms
November 5, 2012
Inspirational Art
If you make a particularly beautiful bead, the inclination is to make it the focus of a new piece. Focal beads are commonly worked into necklaces, sometimes bracelets. Either way the usual construction is a focal bead plus a series of complimentary beads to string with it. One could try stringing it solo but that usually doesn’t do much to frame and showcase the prized bead.
I like that Maryanne Loveless has created a bracelet structure that can showcase a bead in such a lovely manner. These bracelets are kept relatively simple but given just enough pizzazz on the ends of the encircling polymer to frame the bead and make it look that much more elegant.
Often times I think, with beaded pieces a very pretty but subtle bead will get lost in the business of the piece. This solution is good food for thought. If a focal bead can stand on its own regardless of what it’s matched with then it’s not an issue. But if the bead needs to be supported by the rest of the piece in order to shine, a simple, understated structure might be just the ticket.
Delightfully Crowded
October 30, 2012
Inspirational Art
If you have seen crowds photographed from above, you may have noticed there tends to be a pattern in the way people group. Sometimes there is a definite direction as it will be during a concert with everyone facing the stage. Sometimes there is a pronounced flow, a line of people moving back and forth on a path through the throng. Crowded spaces, be they at an event, within an abundantly planted garden or the result of a busy day at your studio table, have some pattern and impression to impart.
This piece by Klavdija Kurent of Slovenia is the kind of crowd I can get into. Like little faces or tiny, blooming flowers, the silver ball accented folds of polymer open up to the space outside their crowded circumstance in an almost expectant and lively manner. The fact that it is black and white rather than multi-colored keeps the crowded space from becoming overwhelming. There is always a danger of over-doing it when you crowd elements in your work but if it’s well balanced with simplicity in other aspects, it can result in a delightfully subdued complexity.
Speaking of crowds … how are our Eastern US friends doing? I’m hoping you and your families are all doing well, are safe and comfortable, and if you are crowded into shelters that your stay is very short and you get to go home soon. Good energy and wishes going out to you all.
Outside Inspiration: Trying Not to Be a Polymer Snob
October 26, 2012
Inspirational Art
Below is an intriguing, elegant necklace by Danielle Gori-Montanelli. Fairly simple with a calm yet random pattern and subdued colors. Nice, right? It’s felt.
Have you ever worked with felt? Dense, rich, durable and a really earthy medium. Great fun for the very tactile artist. It’s also pretty forgiving if you mess up and have to take your piece apart, rebuild, extract or expand. And still … my first thought when I saw this piece was “How cool. But it would have been so much easier to make in polymer.”
Now why did I say that to myself? It wouldn’t necessarily be easier or quicker — considering the conditioning and handling of the clay that would be needed before constructing it. But it did make me realize that I’m a tad bit biased. Okay, more than a tad. And that’s with fiber being one of my first loves.
I think it really comes down to an overriding admiration for the versatility of the medium as well as the very sharing and generous nature of the polymer community. It’s really hard to beat. It’s rather insane how many other art materials have been sitting in boxes — untouched — since I became a full-blown polymer addict some 7 years ago. I think I need some intervention.
All materials are valid. There are a very few that cannot work with polymer. So to temper my snobbery, I have been mixing fiber with polymer. It has been seriously all too fun. Has it been helping my prejudice though? Well …
Do you have a medium that you worked in before polymer? Have you tried combining the two? You should really try it if you haven’t. You will probably come up with some incredible works of art!
Of course that would further support a prejudice for polymer … what can’t polymer do? Oh, well. I guess those of us so inclined need more therapy … yep, we will have to spend more time in the studio exploring. Oh, how terrible.
Echoes of Another’s Vision
October 17, 2012
Inspirational Art
This lovely image showed up in a Facebook group this past weekend and just stuck with me. Ariane Freisleben, Munich-born but a resident of Tuscany, has taken classes from all the greats. Her commitment to the medium — and how much she has learned from spending so much time with quality instructors — is quite evident in this translation of Jeffery Lloyd Dever’s backfill and construction techniques.
The design here is just fantastic. The stylized flowers make not only an interesting floral abstraction but they echo the form and surface treatment of the ‘vase.’ She has dots on the small sphere buds visually relating to the dots within dots backfill technique and the teardrop-shaped blooms are the completed form that the vase starts building toward but halts in order to open and hold the bouquet. I might have hoped for more saturated color in some of the lighter translucent teardrop blooms but it’s a minor consideration as the joyful nature of the piece still comes across so nicely.
So lots of echoing here. A bit of Dever, a bit of dots and bit of drops. And, a great piece from it all.
The Beauty of Color Drained
October 1, 2012
Inspirational Art
The colors are turning over quickly here in the Rocky Mountains. Drought conditions have stressed the trees so their gorgeous display of fiery reds and oranges, bright yellows and deep burgandys are here but for a few days. Left behind are fantastic forms … thin delicate branches, finely textured tree trunks, and a forest floor with every shade of brown laid in waves from pale tan to deep near-blacks. And among this are the most interesting pods, drying flowers, and dried buds. These end stages of the flora are drained of color as we near winter, but they are not drained of the beauty of their form.
Here is such an example of form reigning over color. Ionela Zanoaga takes simple pale polymer forms, a little texture and combines them with some fairly unassuming copper findings. And it’s stunning.
Stripped of all that could be distracting, we see the lines, form and the beauty inherent in even the final stages of nature’s cycle and an artist’s unobtrusive vision.
Frilly Flower Canework
September 25, 2012
Inspirational Art, Technique tutorials
Creating a repeatable section to develop complex looking canes is a standard approach in polymer caning. However, with most such canes, the section repeated has a centered image or pattern which, of course, makes it easy to halve and repeat or at least allows the artist to butt the pieces up next to each other without worrying about how the edges will match. So I do always admire the canes that depart from this and build from sections where the imagery is not always fully centered such as these Frilly Flower canes by Cathy Harm.
It’s a subtle difference but if you look at the bottom left and bottom center cane, there is a dynamic sway to the imagery that you dont’ see in a cane built from balanced and centered components such as the top left piece. Nothing wrong with centered work, as I’ve said before, but if you want to have more movement in the patterning of a cane, learning to to build such components will give you that option.
So what kind of considerations must be taken into account to create canes like these? Well, I personally don’t know … yet. Luckily, Cathy is sharing her approach in a CraftArtEdu class which happens to be discounted right now so it’s a great opportunity to learn from this caning master. According to the class description this is not just a limited number of canes you’ll learn but rather an “open-ended technique that will enable you to design so many unique canes depending on the amounts of blends and the colors that you choose.” How cool does that sound?
Outside Inspiration: Subtraction in Metals
September 21, 2012
Inspirational Art
So, I guess I’m not pulling away from the leaves and Autumn theme much this week. I just love the season.
In this piece, it is more about the forest than the leaves. The layering of the landscape, the way the trees are cut from one layer into the next and the variation of texture make it a delightful pendant.
Although layering is regularly used with polymer, cutting away the clay in this way is not. The absence of material — a space left in the form — adds another dimension beyond the form of the work itself. We also tend to have a curiosity about what is missing, so we are apt to focus on it. This negative space technique gives you yet another way to direct the viewer’s attention within your work.
This piece was created by Beth Millner who has an Etsy shop full of forest-inspired metal work .
The Flowery Depths
August 28, 2012
Inspirational Art
Zuda Gay Pease is a grandmother who lives in Illinois and creates these incredible flowers that seem to have so much depth and complexity to them. But if you look closely, they aren’t so much complex as unexpected.
The caned petals aren’t simply sliced but also cut and sculpted. This gives them a depth and tactile surface I don’t think you’d find anywhere in nature but they seem to be perfectly natural regardless.
Would you call yourself a selfish person? I doubt very many of us would think that way about ourselves. Yet, as artists, we often find ourselves “stealing” time away from others or other things to do what we love, reveling in it when we have it. Is that selfish? I mean, it is more about us than anyone else, isn’t it?
Yes, it is about us, and that is as it should be. In the requested comments for last week’s giveaway (scroll down to see the winner and this week’s giveaway), participants mentioned some version of the “me time” aspect of getting to sit down and create more than anything else. I mean, I know we create because it is something we enjoy, regardless of what anyone else thinks, but I just love that so many people acknowledged and celebrated it. We should!
I strongly believe that everyone should have something of their own, something they can turn to in order to express themselves or at least put something out into the world that would not have existed without their desire to create it. The art we create gives us purpose, exercises a uniquely human part of our brains, and helps us to love ourselves. Not to mention that we deserve the joy we get from it!
But, by definition, that is selfish—doing something because it’s what we want. I wish our society would get over the idea that doing something for ourselves is bad. I think not doing things for yourself is self-negligence. Why is that not a commonly understood thing?
This also highlights the bigger, contradictory world that we inhabit. We live in such strange societies where selflessness and humility are expected or requested, and yet we are also pushed to strive for excellence in what we do. How do we reach excellence without focusing on ourselves? And then there is this silliness where we are not supposed to acknowledge when the work we do is good or that we’re proud of it. If we do, others may think we’re being arrogant or grandiose.
So, do we strive to be great and then pretend that we’re mediocre? We talk about contrast being good in art, but this is so not the right kind of contrast!
I’ve long found the dichotomy of these contradictory but societally prescribed behaviors beyond aggravating as well as having the potential to be debilitating. I think that is why it made me so happy to see so many people acknowledging their creative hours as me-time, self-care, and a time of wonderfully selfish joy. Keep it up, I say!
Now, let’s talk about the good kind of contrast in art.
Design Refresh
Let’s look at the beautiful brooch by Lyne Tilt that opened this post. What do you notice first about this? There’s a lot going on in this little space, isn’t there? What are the three things that jump out at you as far as design elements?
I’m going to say color, shape, and texture. Did you come up with the same three? There is also a lot going on with marks and size. So, any combination of those would be spot on.
How about design principles? What do you think is the number one principal used in this design? Sure, we could refer to scale and proportion considering all the different sizes of the layers, or we could talk about focal point or even just key in on the centered composition. But the one thing this has in spades is contrast.
Obviously, there is color contrast in all the major color characteristics—she has a vibrant trio of warm colors contrasting the cool of the blue and cyan; color values range from the dark blue and deep red to the moderate orange to the light yellow and pale polished silver; and, if you check your CMY color wheels, you’ll see that the color of the bottom layer is a blue-cyan whose complementary AND split complementaries are the yellow, orange, and red that you see in the upper layers.
But doesn’t a color palette have to have at least one common characteristic between all the colors? Well, ideally, yes, and this does. Here it’s saturation. These are not muted colors. The orange may be slightly tinted (has some white in it) but not enough to feel it’s gone off base from the saturated characteristic that ties them all together.
Now, look at the contrast in the textures. The top and bottom layers might have the same texture, but the rest are vastly different. There are even different materials—metal and clay. But they work together pretty well, don’t they? Why?
The textures work together in part because they are all drastically different—the wide variety is part of the charm of this piece. But, like color, they need something to tie them together.
Did you notice that the textures are applied to the entire layer from one edge to another? Thier differences are connected because the application on each layer is the same. That does seem to be enough to allow them to exist in the same piece and not have it feel completely chaotic.
The shapes, on the other hand, are not completely different but they are not the same either, right? They are all some version of a hand cut circle, but some of them are definitely more oval. I think pulling back on the amount of contrast between the shapes also helps to rein in the potential chaos all this dramatic contrast and color and texture could fall into. The centered composition also adds a bit of calm to the piece.
Let’s take this week to consider the design principle of contrast. Would your pieces benefit from more contrast, or do you need to rein some of that in? Remember, it all depends on your intention. There are no wrong levels of contrast, at least not in art.
Last Week’s Giveaway
Drum roll please…
This last week’s randomly chosen winner is Eloise B! I’ve spoken to her and her clay is already on the way. Congrats Eloise!
This Week’s Giveaway
Thank you to everyone who participated in last week’s giveaway through comments on the post. As mentioned above, it really made me happy to see all the fantastic, positive and self-caring observations. I also hope it gave you a moment to focus on and appreciate what you love so much about creating.
So, let’s do this again.
The Goodies:
- This week I have a selection of Sculpey clays in 2 new Soufflé colors, 3 new Premo colors, and 2 big 8 oz. blocks of clay stash basics—Sculpey III in Pearl and Silver. That’s 26 ounces of fresh clay along with a three-piece set of Sculpey silkscreens.
- Or if outside the US, I have a $25 Tenth Muse certificate, since it would be such a gamble to ship clay outside the US.
How to Win:
- Put a comment in the blog comments* (below), telling me what type of contrast you enjoy creating most in your own work, or the type of contrast you wish you used more of. And, yes, if you want to share pictures, you can do so by including a link. Just don’t put more than one link in or it may spam filter the comment.
- Note: It can take some time for the comment to appear if you’ve not commented before since, due to annoying spamming, I have to approve it .
- Giveaway winners will be chosen by random—it will NOT be based on your answers. I do hope you’ll give it some thought anyway. The answers could be helpful to you as well as interesting for the rest of us.
- And let’s say you can only win once this month so we can spread the love around.
- Get your comments posted by Wednesday March 17th at midnight Pacific time to get in for the raffle.
- I’ll announce the winner here on the blog next weekend!
I’ll put together yet another pack of goodies for a giveaway in next weekend’s post, so stay tuned here!
You can support this blog by buying yourself a little something at Tenth Muse Arts or, if you like…
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We are going to be dropping in on some big names this week and next to see what they are up to and what they have to inspire us with.
First up: Bonnie Bishoff. Her focus on jewelry these last couple years has been a journey through a variety of styles as she moves from working primarily in veneers on furniture with her partner J.M. Syron to smaller and more intimate work. But regardless of the style, her quietly strong and confident sense of color and pattern mark each piece like a signature. These lovely earrings are paired almost solely by color scheme although they do work within a limited set of variations in composition, visual texture and shapes. Each variation relays a slightly different mood, adjusted through the level of contrast in value and hue. The subtlety of this communication is what really brings home how masterful her color work is.
You can see what I mean by looking at the body of her work. You can do so by jumping onto her Instagram page and the website she shares with J.M. Syron.
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Happy Monday, fellow polymer enthusiasts. I’m not sure how this week is going to turn out as I have not had time to put together a full-fledged theme so we’re gonna go with “things that caught my eye” for now.
I’m sure you can understand why this piece by Marion Le Coq aka Fancy Puppet, might have caught my eye. They are fun and refreshing pieces, wonderfully finished and composed. She connects all her elements with repetition of motifs, colors, or other things. For example, the leaf off the apple is reflected in the leaf addition on the back and hanging leaves. The carrot’s colors are reflected in its layered pieces behind it, and its crisscross of lines reflect the crisscross of the plaid.
I’m guessing the plaids and dots are silkscreen but the secret is probably available on her YouTube page where she has dozens of tutorials and review items. She’s also quite busy elsewhere online. You can find her on Instagram, Facebook, Canal blog, and Etsy.
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I recently realized that I don’t think I’ve ever talked about the lowly squiggle. But who doesn’t like a well-done squiggle? I guess it’s hard to take it seriously with such a silly-sounding name but the sound of the word itself describes it so well.
I myself am very fond of squiggles and apply them throughout my work, primarily as accents, but some people take the squiggle to wonderfully elevated levels as the central theme of their piece.
This pin by Petra Nemravová is an excellent example of the squiggle stealing the show. The organization of these wonderfully unruly squiggles brings a regular rhythm to their organic movement. It reins in the rambling energy that this kind of squiggle contains. The bright array of colors, which could also get out of hand, is held in check by a regular graduation from one color to the next, helping to create an energetic but contained feeling.
Petra is such an advocate of bright colors and cheerful compositions. Enjoy a stroll through her colorful world on her Flickr photostream. She is also the genius mind behind the wonderful selections found in the online polymer shop Nemravka, serving the European polymer and craft communities and beyond.
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I decided this week I would like to talk about work that speaks to me. Well, I don’t mean that I want to talk about me so much as use pieces that do speak to me as examples of what it means when a piece of artwork elicits a response from the viewer.
For various reasons, I ended up thinking and talking a lot about how we define art this past week. I have long felt that art should be defined as work that is made with expression and intention, with a goal of eliciting an intellectual or emotional response. Yes, I know a lot of people will say that it is the individual who should determine what art is to them but I would like to suggest that such a statement is not quite the right phrase. Each of us can determine what is good art or what is bad art—to that I absolutely agree. But shouldn’t a label such as “art” have a more specific definition than just whatever someone thinks is art, or just something that is made by hand, as the definition would seem to be nowadays?
I am guilty of this broad use as well so I’m not pointing fingers, I’m just a big proponent of using language to effectively communicate and I think it would be great if the English language had a well-defined use of the word “art” that allowed us to talk about work born of self-expression versus craftwork or artisan work created from skilled hands.
My definition also brings up the question of what does it mean to elicit a response? It is not as confined a concept as it might sound like so I thought I’d try to define that a little this week.
For a piece of work to elicit a response all it has to do is make the viewer stop and feel something, or stop and think. It could be something as simple as making them smile or as complex as questioning societal norms. It can be positive such as emitting a sense of peacefulness or negative such as work with a high shock value geared to make you appalled or angry. If the piece is made with intention, part of that intention will, consciously or unconsciously, be to communicate with the viewer, and if the artist is communicating then they are attempting to elicit a response. Good art accomplishes this. Bad art is too distracting in its failings to communicate or illicit anything of value.
This piece here feels like a very personal piece for Shannon Tabor who commented on her Instagram post of this that “I’m back to my roots in design with ‘Compass’. My Back To Basics study is over and I’m anxious to get all these design ideas out of my head and onto my clay!”
I can feel her excitement for this new work in the composition and surface treatment of this necklace. There is a buzzing kind of energy from the scratches and the asymmetrical placement of elements but there’s also a reservedness in the basic geometric shapes and the subdued and shaded palette. I found that I was drawn to the contrast between that reserved feeling and that feeling of excitement. It reminds me of that point in time right before things really take off in some exciting new venture, which I love, and so that must be what made me stop and spend time with this piece.
So, you see, Shannon may have been working on something specific to what she wanted to explore but the intention in her skilled design choices allowed me to connect with her emotion, or at least my sense of what her emotion must’ve been. That’s eliciting a response. And to me, that’s what makes it art.
See what else Shannon is up to by following her on Instagram or hopping over to her website.
Read MoreHappy Monday to you all. Business first… preorders for the fall issue of The Polymer Arts is available online now. We don’t have a precise publication date but looks like mid-September. I’ll let you know here on the blog, in our newsletter, and on the website when we know. Again, thank you for your patience with me while I work on healing my overworked joints.
Okay, one more piece of wall art, this time by the inventive Angela Barenholtz. I know it seems like we’ve been talking about wall art for a couple weeks but this will probably be the last for a bit. I picked this one for a couple reasons having little to do with wall art.
For one, it’s a really fun piece with its variety in color, visual texture, and even the long shapes that make up this “polymer quilt.” Creating with a large variety of primary elements makes for energy-infused and eye-catching work. But, the trick is that everything still needs to work together and have some kind of relationship. In this case, the relationship is in the consistency of the type of pieces inserted into this quilt—long and evenly cut strips of visual texture arranged in a square composition. With this much consistency, you can go nuts with the variety of color, texture, and pattern.
Each one of these could actually sit on its own—like it could be a pendant or brooch if small enough, or even a pair of earrings. Giving yourself a canvas of a certain size and shape releases you from having to be overly concerned about the bounds of individual elements and construction of the work, particularly if you’re creating jewelry, and you get to play with what you place on that canvas. I imagine a lot of you might find that attractive, being we are so in love with our surface treatments, canes, and textures. How many times have you fallen in love with just the sheet of clay you were working on before it became anything? Creating a simple surface to work with can allow you to present those fantastic results in a fun and easy manner.
Angela is all about surface design and variety. You can see that by looking at her Flickr photostream. She also generously shares her techniques in her published tutorials which you can find on Etsy.
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Guest Blog Post by Teresa Pandora Salgado
Van Gogh admitted to the world, “I am always doing what I cannot do yet, in order to learn how to do it.” Me too, Vincent.
One of the most infuriatingly fabulous things I cannot do is make cane like Jon Stuart Anderson. Jon creates canes in a cunning palette that leans in close and whispers, “Go ahead…take your time…look at me.” And I surely do. And the world does too.
I love the way Jon cruises nimbly past the pedestrian cane crossing. He jaywalks that trodden path without ever touching the ground. Obvious contrast? He doesn’t need it, no matter how much the cane is reduced. Nor does he require new colors. Jon keeps it fresh with precision, composition, and balance. Neat trick.
Jon Anderson is known for his millefiori animals: elephants, turtles, bulls, and birds. You’ll notice the creatures have a flesh and blood sense about them, a beating heart beneath their rich robes. So you look and you look and then, just when you think you know him, Jon takes you to another fork in the road. To the left, skulls, vessels, lights. And to the right, guitars. Ohhh, the guitars.
So, go ahead. Look. Be inspired. Aspire.
See Jon’s work at his website here.
Teresa Pandora Salgado is a polymer clay artist, designer & instructor from Los Angeles, California. She has made 87 YouTube tutorials which have garnered over 2 million hits from viewers in 151 countries. In addition to teaching live workshops on millefiori complex caning across the U.S., Teresa helms the online store, Tiny Pandora Crafting Boutique, which featuresMilll her specialized tools and kits.
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In perusing #the100dayproject on Instagram these past couple weeks, I’ve noticed that veneers are quite the thing to be experimenting with right now. Whether you call polymer sheets you work with surface design, surface treatments, or polymer veneers, it does feel like the clay surface is having a renaissance of exploration.
One of the first of these explorations that I’ve noticed in recent weeks was this piece by Lindly Haunani, which she posted on Facebook. Of course, the queen of color is going to have a showstopper based on her color choices alone, but the subtle texture and the composition of the layout of the veneers, for all the energy of the color and lines, has such a satisfying sense of calm and rightness. There is that obvious sense of intention and deftness of skill that brings refinement to such unquestionably masterful work, even in a piece the artist claims is exploration.
Explore more of Lindly’s work on her website and Facebook page.
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Another great contribution to the Spring issue was in our artists’ gallery. All of our artists are unique in their approach but it is Isabelle, known online as Bellou, whose designs are really standing out.
Isabelle creates bold, contemporary adornments that are polished to a glass-like shine. Her work often has a centered focal point but the balance of the components are set in asymmetric arrangements or are all shaped differently with different treatments. However, in all the disparity there is a common element that brings it together.
This is one of the pieces she sent us that we couldn’t work into the gallery pages. On the one side, there are wide, solid pieces, dense with texture, but on the other side, the space is opened with a series of cut-out shapes that have the same mica shift texture as the other side. The rest of the center piece brings in a grounding energy to the movement of lines and shapes that play across the necklace.
To see more of Bellou’s work, take a look at her shop pages here.
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