inspiration

I have been taking Lorna Crane’s Perfectly Imperfect online course through Fiber Arts Take Two. Lorna is a powerful Australian artist and a generous and gifted teacher. We started the class by making our own brushes and exploring our landscape. She is an abstract artist who references the land. I am, too. 

I walked along a Puget Sound beach and loved the soft grays and browns of the shore and water. I couldn’t wait to use my new brushes to capture that feeling.

Instead, I made these collage papers and fabrics!

Where did this come from? What does this have to do with Puget Sound? As I started putting the pieces together, though, they reminded me of my Minnesota summers and apple trees bursting with fruit. I called the series Apple Orchard. Perhaps I was capturing a place from long ago. 

But then, walking around my garden, I saw this. 

I have been spending hours and hours on my garden this spring catching up on it after two years of relative neglect. I have spent a lot more time in the garden than on the beach.  My beloved garden with all the textural greens studded with red Japanese maples showed up in the pieces without my conscious thought. 

I still want to do pieces that honor the chromatic greys, blues, and greens of the Pacific Northwest. Often with art, though, what our conscious mind wants is not what comes out in the studio. Maybe that’s true in life, too.

Those fabrics turned into this.

As i realized it was the garden inspiring me, I made these scrolls.

And turned them into this.

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