Miriam Badyrka is The Doodler

Embroidery #13

Here is the latest free embroidery doodle in my Books & Needles project. I know the name of this one, but oddly enough, I am not certain which way it ought to be oriented.

Even though I have always twisted and turned my work (this includes paintings, drawings, doodles and even the books) in every direction while working, I have almost always known which way was supposed to be up. My work has always told me which way it wanted to go, but this one ain't talking.

Here it is again, but flipped over. I think it works either way.

In my student days, I was told that it was a sign of a good abstract composition if the work looks good from any direction, but I have never really subscribed to that point of view. I think it is a good exercise to turn work. It gives you a new perspective and fresh eyes, but I still know if the piece is laying on it's side or upside down.

This piece is called The Star Factory. Do stars come from below and float up, or do they come from above and drift away? 

Embroidery #12

Here is the latest embroidery in my Books and Needles Project.

These embroideries are done completely free handed. They are slow motion doodles. By embroidering these doodles, as opposed to drawing them, time stretches out like it would in a dream.

It looks like something you would find if you were looking at a drop of pond water under a microscope. Did you ever do that in science class when you were a kid? It was such a thrill to see that a drop of water was actually teeming with unseen creatures and plant life.

I like this one, it seems joyful, exuberant and full to bursting with life.

Embroidery #10

Here is another one of my Slow Doodles. The doodles are slow because I stitch these, rather than draw them. It slows things to a crawl. Rather like my brain this afternoon.

I call this one Horse Heaven.

But that errant hair in the image? That is canine not than equine. There is probably some feline hair in there too.

I need to get me one of those tapey things, aka  a lint roller, before I take a picture.

Actually, I have one. The thing I have to do is Remember To Use It!

You can see it (and buy it, please) and several other embroideries and even a couple of folded books at Art Over Macleay Park this weekend.

Embroidery #7

I really like this embroidery. Don't know why the little people have crept into this embroidery but they give a bit of personality to the medallion images.

The Book and Needles Project is still as mysterious to me as ever, but my handling of the craft aspect is becoming ever surer.

Part of the difficulty I have been experiencing comes from my ground material. Embroidery and canvas are not really well suited for each other. But I like the visual coarseness of canvas.

The drawback of working on canvas is that it allows me much less ability to make fine stitches or limits the evenness of the stitches. The coarseness of the material dictates where and how I can use the needle, and also the length of stitch in a particular area.

I like the textural effect of the coarse medium and  the heavy texture. It adds weight to the simple images.

Questions

Here is the latest embroidery based on a block doodle, with some random embroidery doodling added because I wasn't done sewing or something. 

The stitched doodling has started me off on another experiment. The embroidery I am currently working on is a.) white on white and b.) entirely free hand, not based on anything. I am embroidering like I doodle, just letting myself sew whatever the needle comes up with. 

Can this work? The preliminary verdict is yes, but I have just begun to work on this one. 

Why am I not painting? I am spending all my time embroidering and folding books, rather than painting. It is disorienting. I have defined myself as a painter for so many years that it is strange to not be doing it. I am certain that I will be back at it at some point, but, for now, I have to follow the embroidery and book folding through to where ever it is leading.

I have come up with even more questions for myself then I posted yesterday. Now I have 26 questions to ponder while I work. 

Folding Stillness

The folding continues. I started down this path because of a dream.  It baffled me at first. Now, I think I am coming to understand what it means, although I still have no clue why I am compelled to do it. 

They are a type of clock. Each fold represents a passage of time, a breathe taken, a heartbeat. 

A week or so ago, I realized that I breathe deliberately when I am folding a book. Just as one would when meditating or praying. My entire focus is on what I am doing. The folds are markers, a physical remanent  of breaths I took while I was working.

Anyone who knows me well knows that it isn't unusual for me to be totally absorbed in what I am doing to the exclusion of all else. It is the reason that I love to paint. But it is a deliberate act. I feel that painting is the exact opposite of what I do when I doodle. 

Doodling is unconscious, it is like dreaming. Folding, like painting, is an entirely conscious act.

I still have so many questions that I must answer. 

Why does it have to be books? Why not the newspaper or origami paper? Lord knows, I would leap at the chance to buy a bunch of beautiful papers.

Is a stopwatch, or a timer, a better analogy than a clock for the resulting object, because they represent time passed rather than time passing? 

Is it time well spent, or hours wasted?

What are they? Are they still books after they have been folded? Are they sculpture?

Am I destroying or creating when I do it?

Why do I feel like they are related to embroidery? Is the relationship merely the time passed and the patience and persistence required to do them? Do I need to move beyond what I am doing now and somehow combine the two? 

Or are they totally separate ways to manifest the same idea?

Embroidery

Here is my latest embroidered doodle. This one is a bit smaller, 6x6 inches, if you don't count in the border. It is from one of the square paper  doodles. 

I could use a finer linen and fewer threads to get cleaner lines and curves, but I like the jagged effect of the coarse fabric and thick thread. It looks invitingly tactile and rustic.

Summer Blog Project

(This is the third of a series of posts following Tyla Tharp’s book The Creative Habit. All the previous posts are collected in the Summer Blog Project category.)

#3 Face Your Fears. She lists hers in the book and goes on to debunk each one in turn.
I will list mine, but I am not as confident about the debunking part as Ms. Tharp. After all, I am no Tyla Tharp, internationally known choreographer. I am a little known local artist.

Here are my fears:

1. That I have no talent and I have no business calling myself an artist. Even I know that this is ridiculous. I may not be a world busting talent, but I am good and professional. I have just as much of a right to be an artist as anybody else, and more than some.
2. That I will not be able to communicate what I am trying to express through my work, that I will fail to connect. I will be the only person who knows it then, and I can always take another stab at it.
3. That what I make will be a failure, despite my best effort. So? It is no reason not to go ahead and do it anyway. Nothing is perfect and the most interesting things often come about by accident.
4. That no one will care. Well, that’s actually true. No one but me will care if I do this or not. And since I care, I may as well do it.
5. That no one will like my work. A whole bunch of people won’t like it, but some will. It is worth doing it for them. If I was only doing this to please myself, I would not feel the need to get it out there. I feel the need to share my work with others, because it is my deepest, truest, best self. So I keep putting it out there regardless of rejection.
6. Fear of talking to strangers. A silly fear, with nothing to do with creativity, but it remains my biggest handicap.I am not a very verbal person, and I am shy. I am always afraid to talk to people I don’t know well. I doubt I will ever get over this, and it doesn’t get easier with practice.

#4 Give Me One Week Without.

This has to do with dealing with distractions, like the phone, clocks or the internet. She makes a list of things she will ignore for a week in order to sharpen her focus on creativity.

I am starting an internet surfing hiatus. I can’t go randomly looking at things , which is the biggest time waster ever invented as far as I am concerned. I love to type in any random thing that comes to mind and follow where it leads me. I will keep up with my own blog for the purpose of this project, but I will not go off reading any of my favorite blogs. And no internet forums either.

She suggests avoiding Numbers, on clocks, scales, bills, dials, meters. Any form of counting to give the left side of your brain which is the counting side a rest, which will let the right side, the more intuitive side, come to fore. I think I will be good at this one. I am kind of like that anyway.

Another suggestion is avoiding background music. I don’t like background music when I am working. I listen to music, and often stop what I am doing while it is on. I can’t work with music because it grabs my focus. Music is based on repeating patterns and is full of colors. I can only listen to music when I am doing something fairly mindless that I don’t need to pay close attention to.

What I do instead is listen to NPR. I can ignore speaking in a way that I can never ignore music. I turn on NPR and let it drone on in the background while I work. Sometimes, things catch my attention, but mostly I use it to make a kind of white noise.
So I will give up NPR for a week as well.

Books. I love to read. Although it gives me many ideas, it is also my biggest distraction. No books, other than this one I am following, for a whole week. This will be the absolute hardest thing for me. I may die.

Tharp compares this pact with yourself to abstain from your distractions a ritual sacrifice to the gods. Instead of goats or sheep, the sacrifice is distractions.

Folding

I have been folding books for a couple of weeks. I am using old airport novels that I am never going to read again and that I can't sell back to Powell's. This is the only sculpture I have done since a required 3-D class in college, which I hated. I love the 2 dimensional surface.

This is the oddest thing. I had a strange dream that I was sitting in a room, surrounded by books, and I was methodically folding the pages. Over and over. Book after book. I was alone the whole time and there was no sound. When I woke up, I knew that had to fold books.

I have no idea why I am doing it yet. It is one of those threads that I have to follow to the end.

I think that this folding is related to the embroidered doodles. I can't say exactly how, but I think they are connected in some fashion.

Some very deep part of the reason I make art at all is because of my fascination with Patience, Persistence and Repetition.

Persistence and Repetition is the reason that my doodles have become such a focus of mine. I draw the same patterns and shapes over and over for no reason I understand, I do it when I am not thinking about it, and they are same shapes and patterns people have been making since the beginning of time. I find it fascinating and mysterious.

Patience is a new addition. I sew quilts entirely by hand, even though I have a perfectly good sewing machine. I wonder why I do that too. Embroidery is the same. Careful stitches adding up one after the other.

Who knows where this will lead? A new direction? A new facet to my art making? Or a dead end?

In any case, the folded books remind me of shells. I like the aged color of the cheap paper and the patterns made by the type.

Embroidery II

Here is another embroidered piece adapted from a doodle. This one is about 7.5 inches (more or less) square, sewn in black thread, on a 10 inch square canvas.

The doodle is 2.5 x 3 inches, and done in black ink on paper. As you can see, the embroidery is faithful to the doodle without being an exact copy.

Doodles just happen. I don't make any conscious decisions regarding content or design. I just let the pen wander where it will.

Once I begin to make a finished piece, using a doodle for inspiration, I also start making conscious decisions regarding content and composition.

The first choice in the translation process was to make a square embroidery out of a rectangular original. I had to make design choices regarding what elements were to stay, and which were going to be left out.

I also shuffled some of the light and dark elements to give the piece visual balance, and varied the size of the repeating elements for variety and movement.