Emotions and Art

Saturday evening after work. Nothing terribly serious, just enough emotion and I was feeling distressed enough to keep me up all night. It didn't matter that I had to get up early to get to church, I just couldn't sleep.

I started this piece at 4 am. - I pulled out a bin of synthetic fabrics and yarns, silks and any piece of shiny junk I had. I wanted to burn them into a collage of sorts, I guess. Not alot of thought to a design. No thought of color movement.

I took my embossing stamp pad and pressed it into the layered fabrics, then sprinkled gold and bronze embossing enamel over everything. When I took my heat gun to it, I realized that I wasn't even thinking about the fumes. I grabbed a fan, turned it on high and opened every window in my studio. The stretchy shiny synthetics smelled the worst (I don't even want to know how they're made). When the enamel was melted into the fabrics, I figured it was enough to hold it all. Wrong. Some purple glass beads stitched down and 3 twigs wrapped with lutradur, stamped, embossed and stitched down also helped hold it together.

At this point, it reminded me of a dark forest, lush with color. I added gold leaf beads to represent a tree in that forest.

Most of the time when my emotions get the best of me, I have to get in the studio and create, even if I only start a new piece, or work on another. This time around I re-created my feelings in the burning, i.e., the distressing of the elements. I'm working through my thoughts and I finished the piece Sunday night, which included mounting it on a fabric covered canvas panel. It is now hanging on a wall in our home.

Will it go to Greenwich with me in two weeks, or will it stay? I'm not sure yet.