Oooo

Oooo, Stitched digitally printed textile, © Karen Thiessen 2010

Trained as a textile artist, I now work in collage and textiles, sometimes together, sometimes separately. Oooo began as a paper collage in my sketchbook. I scanned it, cleaned it up in Photoshop, and digitally printed it onto a special fabric, that I then hand-stitched. This piece is for the Textile Museum of Canada's Shadow Box Event 2011. This is the ninth shadow box that I've contributed and Oooo rates in my favourite top three. Check out the TMC website to view the rest of the shadow boxes.

John Cage: Rules for Students and Teachers

Rule 1: Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for a while.

Rule 2: General Duties of a Student: Pull everything out of your teacher. Pull everything out of your fellow students.

Rule 3: General Duty of a Teacher: Pull everything out of your students.

Rule 4: Consider everything an experiment.

Rule 5: Be self-disciplined. This means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.

Rule 6: Follow the leader. Nothing is a mistake. There is no win and no fail. There is only make.

Rule 7: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It is the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things. You can fool the fans-- but not the players.

Rule 8: Do not try to create and analyze at the same time. They are different processes.

Rule 9: Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It is lighter than you think.

Rule 10: We are breaking all the rules, even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for 'x' quantities.

Helpful Hints: Always be around. Come or go to everything. Always go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully and often. Save everything. It may come in handy later. 

via Alison Sant and The Spiral Staircase

Naked

"Bean tree"; Photo credit: Karen Thiessen © 2011

Winter is here. Naked trees reveal their architecture. I call this a bean tree since it has long pods hanging down. Doesn't this tree look like it belongs in a sci-fi movie?


Winter is a time of creative renewal and gathering. To prepare for this, I clean and organize. Whenever I get the urge to dust, purge papers, and tidy my studio, I know good things are on their way. What are some of your practices for creative renewal?

Yarn Bombs

Wouldn't it be great if more streets were adorned with this kind of creativity? Imagine Wall Street or Bay Street perked up with yarn and knitting. 

Harbingers

Images © Karen Thiessen 2011

Sometimes childhood interests reveal future vocations. In this case, the sister wearing the spool necklace became a textile and mixed media artist. The brother became a professional truck driver. The sister and brother sitting in the tire wells of their father's truck were about 3.5 and 2 years old respectively. The boy would sit in the pear tree pretending that it was a combine or truck. His gear-shifting abilities were exceptional. The girl would draw elaborate scenes from Speed Racer on her mother's freshly wallpapered kitchen wall. Her mother was not impressed.

The spool necklace is another one of those evocative objects. Both necklaces were simply made with wooden spools threaded onto used shoelaces. The necklace below has a few goat bones added for interest and hangs on my office wall. Seeing it floods me with good memories of my childhood.

Evocative Object I

This Matryoshka doll is a substitute for the one that I have admired and played with since I was a young child. The one that means the most to me belongs to my mom and the largest doll has an egg plant coloured dress and each doll nestled into her belly wears a red dress like the one above. In the mid-1960s my aunt travelled to Ukraine when it was still part of Russia and brought the purple doll and her brood back. Travelling in the USSR at this time was dangerous and she did not tell her parents (my Opa and Oma) about the trip until after she had safely returned. For me, the Matryoshka doll is an evocative object. It is a beautiful object embedded with childhood memories of stacking the dolls from smallest to tallest, the colours and patterns adorning each doll, and the squeak made when I opened the doll and tried to align her arms and hands at the end of play. This object represents a brave aunt and the "homeland" that my Mennonite grandparents and great-grandparents fled in the 1920s.

Goals

This is a image that I created in Photoshop a few years ago.

Have you set your 2011 goals yet? One of my goals is to learn Adobe Illustrator. It's been on my goal list for a few years, but this year is different. In previous years, I set 10 to 20 goals and I reached many but not all. Since reading Leo Babauta's The Power of Less, I have changed my approach to goal setting. Now I choose to tackle just three projects and then break them into itty bitty tasks. Babauta advocates working on them until all three are done and then moving on to the next three projects on the list. Since adopting this approach, I have had much greater success. This week I'll spend more time fleshing out my goals and then deciding which are my top three to tackle. What are your top three projects for 2011?