Gail Grinnell's amazing art

Today I had a great time in a wonderful class at Pratt taught by Kiki Macinnis, we used ink on glassine, dripped ink and squeezed ink between pages (there's a name for this but I've forgotten. I showed Kiki a little of my work and she suggested I look at Gail Grinnell's art. I'd seen it before at the Bellevue Art Museum but not remembered her name. OH boy! Ink and sewing and translucency and breaking off the rectangle of the canvas/page/whatever.  But what in the world is spun polyester? Anyway, check this out.

It was very hard to choose. See more at:
http://www.gailgrinnell.com/index.html

More on Larry's class

I realized I should post a couple of the images I made in the class I wrote about below. I had a lot of fun. Different kind of work for me but it got me thinking.. Who thought I'd be using the copier to copy thread, wrapping paper in yarn and waxing it? I realized I really enjoyed the lines themselves and the different thicknesses. Controlling thread and yarn was near impossible. Here are just a couple from my big pile.

Larry Calkin's Silhouettes

I've decided to start this blog by thinking about how people use materials in interesting ways. I took a class with Larry Calkin at Pratt in Seattle recently. The most inspiring thing about the class was the inch thick pile of cheap printer paper on each of our desks. Larry said, "I want you to do something with every sheet of paper by the end of today." This both freaked us all out and also liberated us to just get to work. I never used all my sheets of paper but over the next few days I waxed, burned, crumpled, sewed and punched holes in my paper among other things.

The lesson here is: Use cheap materials and just make stuff, something might come out of it.

Another lesson from Larry: Make repeats, don't try to make something new all the time but make more than one of something, you'll learn something new each time you make another version.

Larry has tons of examples of his art online. I really like this silhouette piece. More can be found here: http://www.calkinsart.net/projects/