Starting a New Chapter–and Keeping the Flow Going

I’ve been spending more time in the studio and at the writing desk in the past few months. Lots of progress–slow but steady.

It has been interesting watching this coiling chronicle evolve.  I started it on September 23rd using yellow/orange as the base color for the month, blending two additional colors with it each day.  I enjoyed the bright color blends that emerged. October’s oranges were good too and the blends were similarly bright. November’s red/orange was a bit more subdued, and I saw some darker blends emerge.  But December. Red. Not my favorite color.  I’ve preached to my students for years that no color is bad.  We may like some more than others, but they can all work together.  December was a challenge to those words.  I had trouble finding blends. I began dreading the daily work, even though it was only a few minutes a day.  I could say it was the winter.  Not my favorite season.  But it was a warm month—we even had to turn on the AC a couple of afternoons—so it wasn’t the cold or the dark.  Just the red…. Then came January and its purple/red.  A deep saturated color I can work with, though I found the darkness of it a bit oppressive. 

Working day after day with a single base color has been teaching me to tune into each month’s color more.  February’s purple has been singing to me.  And working with a base color each month has given the work more cohesion and depth. Not just the progression through the days and months but the depth of thought I bring to the work. I’m not just bouncing from one blend to another but working slowly with one color day after day watching the harmonies and flow through the work. 

This is different from working with the palette of a design which has a more constrained set of colors chosen to harmonize over an entire piece.  With this chronicle, I’m using the entire spectrum but modulated for a length of time by a single hue.  And it’s been interesting to watch how the base hue for a month affects the colors I blend with it. As Josef Albers demonstrated in The Interactions of Color, the same hue will look different when juxtaposed with another hue. The temperature and saturation of the other colors affect the base color just as it affects the juxtaposing hue(s).  And across the months, I now see how two colors used with one base color are modulated and affected by using them with different base colors.

I’ve been writing the past few months as well, working on a book titled, Color Journaling: Engaging & Expanding Your Creativity Through Color Play.  It’s based on an exercise I developed for my own design process that expanded into a way of meditating on and experimenting with color.  The coiling chronicles as well as my Meditations series of small tapestries and coiled pieces grew out of the color journaling exercises.  I’ve taught it in my classes and shared it with others for several years and now I’m putting it down on paper.  Slow going, but I’m making progress with it. Here’s an example of a piece I created using my Color Journaling techniques.

Writing about the exercises isn’t too hard but writing about the philosophy behind it and the ways the practice can be deepened to connect more deeply with creativity has been hard.  For a long time, I have toyed with the idea of starting a second blog/journal about my research into and thoughts about creativity and spirituality.  It’s a scary thing putting those sorts of thoughts out into the world. I have talked about them on occasion with my students but haven’t committed them to anything for the larger world.  Last month I decided to take the plunge and started a Substack called The Spiral & the Grid.  I’ve only posted one essay, The Habit of Fear and I need to flesh out my page there with a bio, what the page is about, etc. I’m working on part two of The Habit of Fear and will have it up shortly. I will continue to write here about my studio work and techniques.  When I’ve finished the Color Journaling book, I will return to work on Vibrant Vessels: Coiled Basketry as a Contemporary Artform.  This is my BIG book which covers the techniques and design principles I’ve developed and used in my studio work. Once that’s finished, I’ll get back to work the video courses about coiling I started a few years ago. I don’t think I’ll be going back to teaching in person or online in real time….but never say never…..