BEEE-autiful autumn afternoon

Some days are so beautiful it's a sin not to enjoy them. Autumn is often like that here. Today was a treat.
I worked during the morning then took the subway to the 6th Ave. entrance to Central Park. As usual the park was full of people, all also enjoying the day. I stopped at a deli and got coffee and a snack and was looking for a place to sit. Just before I found a perch on a rock I passed a couple on another rock, the guy, who was probably 140 was holding on his lap his girl who looked from my angle as if her hips added up to about 140, not counting the rest of her. But they were enjoying each other's company.
After my snack I walked past the big Sheep Meadow which was full of people in ones, twos and groups, all quietly soaking up sun. White garbed people were playing croquet in the enclosed court, always a strangely Victorian, elegant sight in the midst of the motley variety of others. Row boats were out in full flotilla on the lake and a topless [male] singer with guitar was conertizing to a sizable audience.
I knew there would be a street fair on Amsterday or B'way. First there was a crafts fair along Columbia beside the Natural History Museum -- beautiful stuff, and reasonably priced if one is going to spend money. I didn't.
The fair, sparsely attended and essentially dull was on Amsterdam. Since 9/11 Street fairs have gone into decline throughout the city. To many people they are a waste of time. Very little enticed me except cheap lipstick and eye liner. But I always like the sense that this is a echo of one of the earliest rites of civilization -- the coming together of those who have something to sell. Markets were going strong in Hellenistic times and probably a thousand years before that.
I watched a trim 60ish woman riding a child's scooter, and a very large and tall 50ish man on roller blades, people munching roasted corn on the cob and others getting covered with confectioner's sugar eating funnel cakes. Already overweight people munched French fried sweet potatos or stopped at the crepes booths for a sugar shock.
The market is flooded with what I once heard called "exotic real Chinese plastic beads." Everything priced at $2 -- and worth about twenty cents. A bunch of ladies are selling [possibly real] jade, lapis and fresh water pearls from Myanmar, and there are tons of "pashmina" scarves, most of which are neither wool nor silk but some are very pretty patterns and colors. And at $5 -- why argue? But I have a drawerful so I just looked enjoying the colors -- back to that subject!
Mostly I enjoyed the sun, the people, the ritual of getting out on a Sunday afternoon and doing nothing of any use ... enjoyment for it's own sake is enough. [I had my camera but didn't think to take pictures -- I'd have liked that woman crushing her boyfriend's kneecaps but didn't have nerve enough to impose.]

Color Conundrum - part 2

I got worried that "conundrum" was the wrong word so I looked it up. It's okay - second definition but often used to mean as the King of Siam sang, "it's a puzzlement."
COLORFUL! That's the picture here. Nine of fiteen stars from another Carol Doak foundation pieceing book. I loved seeing the colors come together. I was so I was so delighted I left the all over the living room to admire. Then I began working on something else and put them away before adding the sashing. Eventually I decided to go with the vari-toned turquoise sashing which I now believe to have been the major mistake. If I had looked at just a part of the quilt for a while, I might have taken it apart and used something darker, maybe navy or a really,really dark green. But doing sashing doesn't take long and I did it all one day. Then I wasn't very happy so I put the whole thing away and it sat in the UFO parking lot [out of sight, out of mind] for at least a year.
The middle of the summer I finally added a backing and batting and quilted it all in one rush -- to clear out that parking space for more recent UFOs. I have very, very mixed feelings. Love the individual stars, uncomfortable with the whole. So I put it on the bed. It was hot this summer so I didn't need to sleep under a quilt but I lived with it. It's still there and I'm sleeping under it. This is not -- so far as I can explore my subconscious -- a superstituous act of making it mine [analogous to a dog spraying a hydrant].

I think I have two color problems: I am insecure because I know my innate abilities haven't been professionally trained. I could take art classes, if I felt strongly enough about it. I don't. So I'll accept that insecurity and work within it. I'm just fine, really with color combining if it's a sofa and a rug, or a sweater and pants. It's only making quilts. Problem two is that I don't like to copy. I WILL NOT look at a picture of a quilt and try to reproduce it. I go to my stash and decide what I want to use. In this quilt a couple of the stars are very, very close to Carol's choices and I like them the least. Not because of her tastes [which are far better than mine] but because they aren't mine.
Finally, of cousre, color taste is a part of one's individuality. It changes as we change. I'm collecting orange and purple fabrics now; once I had none of either. I'm also using them!! I'm growing a little less fond of blue than I used to be ... I'm sure this means something. I've reached an age to accept much about myself with a shrug and turn my attention to other things that are newer and more exciting to me. I haven't thought much about color until the last couple years. I will now drop the subject -- but it's fall, the leaves haven't changed yet here ... when they do I may have to write about the gingko trees.

Color Conundrum - part I

This is the star I wrote of a few days ago. I've been living with it. It's grown on me so I think I'll make three more for another "quartet". It will be slow going, partly because each star has 128 pieces and takes three to four hours to piece and because I'm working on monarchs [per yesterday's entry].
I keep thinking about color, taking it personally. We say that some people have "a musical ear" or "an eye for color" or a nose for scandal -- well forget that, it's a metaphor. A few people called "Noses" are well paid by the perfume industry and the food industry has tasters. Some people are born with extraordinary musical or color skills. Most of us can never be Mozarts or Matisses. But, like so many skills, we can learn and hone our innate abilities, even if they're mediocre. I'm told even tone deaf people can learn to sing. I know an art quilter who, as an adult decided to learn to sing -- I don't think she was tone deaf, just untutored. She found a good teacher and can now sing and it gives her much joy.
I have a poor musical ear, I cannot hear a tune and reproduce it on the piano as my grandchildren can. But my mother believed her job was to raise a daughter with the social skills she wished she had which included piano lessons. I learned to read music and the dexterity came easily. But I had very poor teachers and learned almost nothing about music although I played the piano hours a day because I loved music. Not until my own children found piano too boring to practice and I decided to take lessons from their excellent teacher did I begin to learn musicality. My mother didn't mean to give me classical music but I discovered it and have been enriched ever since, mainly listening, but also playing the piano.
I think color skills are analogous. In my case there were no art classes in school. I had crayons for a while but no instruction. There were no art museums, no awareness of art. -- An aside: I vividly remember a calendar from an insurance company that had a picture of Rosa Bonhuer's Horse Fair.

It's a powerful painting. I had no idea those huge horses were painted by a woman. Not until I moved to NYC did I see the size of that painting. I was stunned that that picture I recall from seeing before I was ten, has a major space in the entry hall to the impressionists in the metropolitan Museum. When at the Met, I usually go by and say hello to the horses and salute an iconoclastic woman (a wearer of pants a la George Sand).
I learned about color combining sewing my own clothes. I am thoroughly comfortable combining garments, as most women are, but I am especially comforted living in NYC knowing I can dress all in black any time, any place and I'll look fine. That is how many insecure New Yorkers dress; it's also economical. The easiest fall back decision any day.
Back to color and quilting. I've read the color theory books, but I feel about them the way I feel about trying to read music without a piano to play. It's not helpful. I don't have the eye to carry theory in my head, or the ear to hear music on the page.
Part of the reason I've made fourteen "quartets" is because I wanted to practice color combinations in a small venue. I have lots of fat quarters or other smallish pieces of fabric and a great array of colors. I choose colors that are not those that Carol Doak uses. I have often made a square or only half a square and chucked it and changed one or several different colors for the quartet. Even with a pile of fabric on the table, my judgment of what will be strongest is not good; I have to see it sewn. I've been prepared to chuck this one. I might sew another and still chuck it ... this is definitely pushing my comfort level but I believe I can't learn if I don't push take the leap..

Monarchs [poetry Thursdays]

This is the only monarch butterfly post card I've made. Now a poem -- by moi.
In September I saw the monarchs
gorging on nectar of roses
fueling to leave for Mexico.
They do not know they will die
I wrote
they only know the will to fly.
In February I saw the monarchs
dead by the million
in sudden cold in their mountain retreat.
The species is not in danger
wrote the journalist
the monarchs will survive.
We humans are not endangered either
though we died by tens of millions
in the 20th century
and have started the 21st
with the same will to kill.

This is a follow up poem after I wrote about seeing the monarchs on the tenth day, a vision of hope, in my long, painful poem after 9/11, "Ten Days in September". The monarchs and the horror of the WTC will always be connected in my thoughts.
Yesterday the NY Times science section had a long article on this year's migration of monarchs from Canada to Mexico, what is known about this miracle of migration and what is unknown, and the dangers they will face in drought areas, in storms. Mention was made of the plan to have individuals plant milkweeds in gardens and empty lots since the monarchs feed on them and milkweeds are being eliminated by big agriculture in it's herbicidal mass killings of local flora. I am awed by how these tiny creatures make a journey few humans could make on foot even with our well learned survival techniques and available shelter. Actually the article said that, at least on the spring journey from Mexico to Canada, the migration sometimes spans there generations, with stops at various points to lay eggs and then grow to migration ability. It didn't say if that happens on the north to south trip.
I have begun making the monarchs that will go on the envisioned show quilt which will be called "Monarch Migration" ... The survival of this idea and it's successful implementation remains, at this point, as chancy and dubious as an individual monarch's probable success of reaching that winter resting place.

Van Gogh, Picasso, not eye candy

I am addicted to eye candy. I love the photography in fashion and shelter magazines, I even occasionally read the wedding announcement pages of the New York Times -- that's BAD. I'm addicted to a brain candy too, the NY Times Sunday puzzle, The Wall St. Journal Friday puzzle and the simple after dinner mints of New York Magazine's puzzle. Ear candy? Well, I do like Strauss's polkas and almost all of Gottschalk's music.
But the main course is always better than the quick bite of candy even though the sugar rushn is nice. The main course in eye food is a good art show. It can be a quilt show were I'm challenged to pick the exciting out of the competent; it can be a gallery show with just a few pieces by an artist I never heard of before. It can be a major show at major museum.
Yesterday was a feast. A pure feast of a fall day, blue sky, warm but not hot, a walk across Cental Park to the Met, stopping on a bench to eat a sandwich and watch the dog and baby walkers. I was bound for the show about the art dealer Vollard who knew and handled everybody from Van Gogh to Picasso. A big, important show, a crowd pleaser -- and there WAS a crowd but not as dense as dense as I feared.
Such shows usually have a few things that I've never seen, either in museums or books, or that I have seen in books but now see "for real." Here were some very familiar Van Goghs, but also three hanging together, as apparently they had once and only once before: two views of a bridge over a narrow river amid spring verdure of and between them a young woman in a field of luxurious grasses. Van Gogh's work when I first meet a painting [not once it's too familiar from reproducions) is pure emotion, pure presence of that moment. These three were A Spring Day to me. Fresh, lucious, abundant.
I won't mentional the astonishing list of painters represented. At the other end of the time period was a cubist painting Picasso did of the dealer, all in grays. A picture I'd never seen in any book, owned for years by a Russian collector. It was understandable, a complex picture of a complex man, an example of cubism I could really love looking at.
Many others are already puddling together in my mind; but those four -- and, oh yes, a Starry Night of Van Gogh's that I had never seen before. Not the manic one with the tortured cypresses we all know and are astonished by, but a slightly earlier one, below is
a bridge over a dark river, and above, the stars, points of pure color dabbed directly from the tube. This is the glory of a clear night sky in a place where pollution in the air and pollution by city lights have not intruded. A picture about being in love with the miracle of glimpsing a sparking universe.
Those I will remember; those have enriched today and made me happy I am in this great city and can decide, when I find I have a free afternoon, to go see something wonderful.
Last week I read in one of the Artful Quilters blogs that in order to become a quilt artist, one must look at great art. The idea is not to imitate suject or style but to know that art is as much about emoton as idea. Technique, of course, one must be competent and capable but art is not manipulation of material and color; art is to communicate through maniupulation of matureal and colors.

Cow is a female bovine -- really!

In my job I transcribe a really weird, wide, wild variety of stuff. Today it was a Kurdish writer talking about the "poetry or resilience" and the horror of attempted genocide. The subjects are so all over the place I can't begin to list them. Last week it was trailers for the animated movie BARNYARD which is currently in the theatres.
Briefly for anyone who hasn't seen trailers or the movie: when the farmer goes away Otis, a cow, becomes leads the animals in having a bust out teens-on-the-loose party. Eventually Otis falls in love with Bessie, a lonely pregnant cow and with the calf she eventually delivers. What's wrong here? Otis is a COW, "he" has an udder. "He" is obviously not a bull. "COW" means female. Duh! I was ranting about this at work and was told "it's a lesbian story." I don't think so.
This is a nationally distributed movie by Paramount. This cost a pretty penny. How old are the animators and scriptwriters? Do they speak English?
As I've mentioned I grew up on a farm. I knew at a young age that all mammals, birds, and beasts like frogs and snakes have two sexes, as do humans. Do the people who made this movie also think that milk is concocted in a factory as Coca Cola is? Do they know where eggs come from? Do they think hamburgers grow on tropical trees? A college educated adult recently asked me what kind of animal a "veal" is. True!
I've read that Americans are becoming stupider. I know educators are saying Johnny and Janie can't read. I know even members of my generation are what one writer called "enumerate." They don't understand numbers or statistics [unless they're men talking about baseball players' records]. But have we lost touch with the real world? I think we may have -- by "we" I mainly mean Americans with our "great society" where the majority of people are urban and have never seen a working farm. I mean the under-30s who think up movie ideas.
I'm reading books that make me think [I perversely enjoy thinking] including Temple Grandin whose ANIMALS IN TRANSLATION I mentioned a couples days ago. Ms. Grandin points out that humans ARE animals. Animal studies show, she writes, that for their brains to mature puppies, kittens, etc. need to run and jump, chase their tails, pounce on shadows, mock fight, etc. The movements of the body affect the maturation of the brain. This must be true for human children too; but today children spend far more time in front of a TV, far less time climbing trees, riding bikes or playing with friends and helping mom and dad with household chores. Maybe part of their brains aren't maturing properly ... maybe it's not so much the violence on the TV but the body itself -- which, we are now told, is also getting unprecedentedly obese and that leads to a whole batch of other problems.
I'm also reading, as I've mentioned, ENDGAME, by environmentalist, Derrick Jensen, who emphasizes that our water and air are both polluted, our food is full of chemicals, and kids are being pumped full of various drugs, and now are getting vitamins and heaven knows what else in the supposedly pure water they buy because some ad agency has made it chic to carry around a bottle all day ... what is all this doing to the developing body and brain? We have no idea. Are kids getting stupider or are they mutating in ways we won't be able to see for decades? How much is going on that we don't know about?
Why aren't we at least teaching our kids that animals come in two sexes and that COWS are female and BULLS are male, HENS are female, ROOSTERS are male. Have whole parts of society become either ignorant of, or so afraid of sex, they can't even admit living beings are not neuter blobs? Meanwhile some -- at least one -- American is so afraid of sex that a parent in Texas raised such a stink because his or her child was taken to an art museum and saw a nude in a painting that a teacher lost her job and a school system will now deprive all children of the cultural advantage of knowing that art museums are places full of treasures.
What is going on here?" What century is this? If we lose touch with the natural world, what will we be?
Below is the "quartet" quilt I meant to have at the beginning of yesterday's posting. Read on to find out about it.

It's Fun to be Surprised

In quilting, I like surprises. I'm not the kind who plans everything out on graph paper. I don't go shopping for just the right fabric. I find something I want to sew, dig through my stash [LOVE my stash!] and start.
Paper foundation pieced blocks usually surprise me. When I chose the fabric I have an idea what I'm going to accomplish but my sense of color is wobbly -- I'll write about that another time, maybe tomorrow -- so that I'm never quite sure just how a block is going to work until I see it done. Probably people with really good color sense will say something like "you poor handicapped schmuck". I am, both handicapped and a bit of a schmuck about how colors are going to work together -- I like to use commercial fabrics rather than hand dyes -- I really can't dye in my little NYC apartment. I love accumulating a stash and love pulliing out the fabrics I think are goiing to work. I'm often wrong.
For the past couple of years I've been making stars from Carol Doaks' book of 50 state stars. She shows them in groups of four on each page so I decided to make a number of "quartets" that would, with borders become wall size quilts. At the beginning of this entry is one of them, I'm not sure what number but it was in my digital album and demonstrates a "quartet". I just finished the first star of #14, I think. I don't have a picture of it yet because I'm contemplating whether I like it enough to continue with the background fabric I'm using -- a Hoffman geometric print with a black background that I like and have had a long time. Like many Hoffman fabrics it has its own strong pesonality which may be too assertive. The geometric print colors are greyed and the fabrics in the fairly complicated star are brighter.
I couldn't know what it would look like before I had one star done. Right now it's across the room, pinned to the black sofa. I've been myopic since I was 12. Long ago I discovered that with my glassses off the distracting patterns become fuzzy and the balance of colors pops at at me -- I'm surprised I've never heard this as a "tip" in any magazine. In my small-ish apartment I have no design wall so things lie on my black sofa.
I contemplate them from across the room. I do not complain about lack of space. Many years ago I heard Paula Nadelson speak -- about her complex quilts mainly -- but she mentioned her Bronx apartment shared with family and very crowded with her fabric stash. If she can accomplish those astonishing quilts in such a cramped space, I cannot bring myself to complain about lack of space-- tho' I dream A LOT about a studio.
This is the most recently completed quartet. It's so bright I'm almost embarrassed by the triteness of the colors -- I call it "Christmas in August Star". I probably over reacted by chosing black print background for the new one. I found I had a stripe in my stach that had the same colors as the print only brighter. Then I chose the other fabrics of the star from the bright spectrum. On the surface this is all very clever and ought to work. Maybe it does ... I need a cople days to decide. Part of the problem is that I generally find cleverness a very bad route to take. I don't trust my own cleverness.
In fact, I don't like cleverness in anything except cocktail party chatter. It's wonderful how delightful people become after a martini. I dislike clever novelists like Tom Robbins and clever playwrights or screen writers and I've never liked stand up comics. I don't like clever quilts either or other kinds of art. [In the spirit of full disclosure, I will admit that I'm not really clever and when I try to be it feels hollow so, sour grapes?]
I think in general cleverness is mental laziness. My theory is that a smart children find that by being clever their friends laugh at their jokes and their grandparents tell them they are the smartest kids in the whole world and they become addicted to their cleverness which was also appreciated by teachers who are so starved for anything at all sparkly in the classroom that they gave the clever kids a lot of positive feedback too. So they skated cheerfully along and some of the cleverest are making lots of money in ad agencies and glossy magazines and Hollywood. They were never challenged to really think about much.
Now that's not always true, I'm thinking about Dorothy Parker who was very, very clever -- but her cleverness was always in service of her very acidic view of life. That is where cleverness works best -- to display an ironic and sarcastic understanding of how things really are and work. Oscar Wilde was probably the cleverest writer ever, I beleieve he truly saw society's foibled and stupidities and pointed them out mercilessly, even compulsively.
Major digression, huh? With that I should pack it in for today.