wesley willis intermission

Just taking a little vacation from blogging. Will return shortly. Until I come back, enjoy this little documentary about the amazing artist Wesley Willis.

Rock over London. Rock on Chicago.

Anna Zemánková

Some of the most beautiful art I’ve ever seen has been the work of Anna Zemánková. A woman who gave up her career to stay at home with her children, in her later years she discovered her artistic talent while searching for a way to deal with menopausal depression. Oppressed by her government, and the expectations of women of that time, she seems to me to be expressing her femininity through her art. It is so strong and vibrant, at times even erotic, and yet so lovely.

“Working in the pre-dawn hours between four and seven o’clock, Anna Zemánková found solace in art, creating floral and botanical drawings that served as a brief respite from the duties of her regular life. It was during these hours of solitude that she created, as she said, “I am growing flowers that are not grown anywhere else.”

She was born Anna Velelá on August 23, 1908 in Olomouc, Moravia (present-day Czech Republic). As a young girl, she enjoyed drawing but her father, a hairdresser, encouraged her to instead pursue other interests and a more lucrative career path. She studied dentistry from 1923 until 1926, becoming a dental technician. She worked in this profession until 1933 when she married Bohumir Zmanek, a military officer. According to common practice of the day, she no longer worked after her marriage, and gave birth to four children – three sons and one daughter. However, one son died at the age of four years old.

Zemánková and her family moved to Prague in 1948. She took care of her family, and in her spare time loved to read and listen to classical music. As she approached menopause, there was a change in her demeanor. Her son, Bohumil, who was a sculptor, gave his mother some art materials and encouraged her to pursue creative work as an outlet for her depression. He made her a drawing table that she would work at every morning during the early hours. A friend of the family recounts that she “spent all day caring and ‘doing’ for them; night was the only time she could concentrate and ‘be at peace’.” While Zemánková has been likened to visionary artists because of the trance-like state she worked in, she would occasionally go back to finished pieces and add or enhance her drawings.

After 1969, she began to develop new techniques of working with the surface of the paper by piercing holes into it, and in 1971, began to create raised textures in her work by crimping and producing a raised surface on areas of her drawings. Instead of the larger pieces she made during her early artistic endeavors, these were small pictures, some measuring only inches in size.

Between 1979 until her death in 1986, Zemánková was very ill with diabetes. Even through this, she continued to create, making black drawings on paper instead of her more well known colorful images. These later works were destroyed by one of her children. As a result of diabetes, she developed a paralysis and underwent the subsequent amputation of her legs in the early 1980s.”

Full bio can be found at the Anthony Petullo Art Collection website.

Maud Lewis

Maud Lewis was born in Ohio, Yarmouth County, Nova Scotia in 1903 and she died in Marshaltown Nova Scotia in 1970. She remains one of Canada’s best known and most loved folk artists.

Maud suffered from polio as a child, and it left her with crippled arms and deformed hands. Both her parents died while she was still dependent on them, and at that time she moved to Digby to live with an aunt. Notwithstanding her early misfortunes Maud retained a strong character, and a desire to “live and love life”.

At the age of eighteen Maud married Everett Lewis. They were quite poor and lived in a small ten by twelve foot shack. Soon after they were married Maud accompanied Everett on his daily rounds of peddling fish, bringing along Christmas cards that she had drawn. She would sell these cards for twenty five cents each. After some success with the cards, Maud started painting on various other surfaces such as plank boards, cookie sheets, and eventually on more or less every available surface in their tiny home. It was Everett who really encouraged Maud to paint and he bought her her first set of oils.

Most of Maud Lewis’ paintings are quite small - eight by ten inches. Her technique consisted of first drawing an outline, and then applying paint directly out of the tube. She never mixed colours.

Between 1945-1950 people began to stop at Maud’s home and buy her paintings for two or three dollars. As time passed her paintings began to sell from seven to ten dollars. Maud Lewis began to be quite well known around Digby and far beyond. In 1965 she was featured on CBC-TV’s “Telescope” program. Unfortunately arthritis deprived her from completing many of the orders that had flown in for her paintings.

In the last year of her life Maud Lewis stayed in one corner of her house, painting as often as she could while traveling back and forth to the hospital.

(Biography courtesy of Folk Art Canada)

name that muse

Yesterday morning, having just had 24 hours without sleep/shower/second without babe Niblo demanding attention, I heard a knock at the door. (Actually, I heard my special-needs dog lose his mind and run around the backyard hysterically, inspiring half the neighborhood to call the humane society, the way it happens every time there’s a knock at the door. I never actually hear the knock itself…)

Did I order something? I couldn’t remember. Lately, there have been a couple late night Amazon trysts when I had to have it that very instant and couldn’t wait and who will know but me and the UPS guy and my Prime account is still active and I deserve a treat and… Shameful, really. I always feel slightly unwashed when I open an Amazon package. Especially since my own local bookstore is so good about ordering whatever I want within a week. I mean, when did a week suddenly feel like such an outrageously long time to wait?

But it wasn’t Amazon. It was something so much better.

The Big Bale Sale from Sheep Shed means you’re looking at 10 lbs of beautiful grab bag roving.

Which leads me to the next question. I’m not quite sure what makes me want to sell the yarn I plan to make. Isn’t it enough that I make it and use it and give the projects away to people I love? I think it should be. If I was anything like Madge Gill — if I was the rockstar artist it seems I should be in the middle of the night — than I wouldn’t be etsy-bound at all. I’d be honoring my aptly-named muse and trying desperately not to anger her.

Seriously, though, I’ve got a muse. I don’t know her name, but I’ve definitely got one, and I know for a fact that I’ve pissed her off more times than I can count.

I decided not that long ago to write/create/perform whatever the hell the muse whispered into my ear in the middle of the night, no reservations — no questioning, criticizing, or second-guessing — but it hasn’t happened. And because of this, she holds back the good stuff. She just hands me crap, forcing me to do it and like it, and if I can be consistent (see: prolific) than the good stuff will come.

So I’m holding off on the etsy thing. I’m holding off on selling anything for a while. I might not go so far as to stuff everything under my bed to be discovered posthumously by my only child (though my journals are there, and Niblo better damn well get them edited and published if I die before writing that book) but I will give my crafts to the people I love.

And I’ll post them on this blog. Sadly, this may be the place where I parade the bountiful creative brain crap once and for all.

Lucky you, internets. Lucky you.

Madge Gill

Another Artist Wednesday has me thinking about Madge Gill. She was a multi-media artist and even went so far as to name her muse. And she never sold any of her work, for fear of angering the spirit that inspired her creativity.

(Image courtesy of Henry Boxer Gallery)

“Born an illegitimate child, Madge Gill is first hidden by her mother and her aunt. At the age of nine, she is sent to an orphanage.

In 1903, she becomes a nurse and lives with her aunt, who initiates her to spiritualism and astrology. At the age of twenty-five, she marries her cousin, Thomas Edwin Gill, who is a stockbroker. Together they have three sons but their second one, Reginald, dies of the Spanish flu. The following year, Madge gives birth to a stillborn baby girl. She is taken ill, spends several months in bed and loses the sight of her left eye. From then on, her drawings and her connection with the spirits keep her alive. In contrast to Aloïse, whose work is all about abundance, offering and warm colors, Madge Gill is a woman of darkness, a woman of the night. She works by candlelight, creating ink drawings with rapid and strong motions. Forty years of thousands of drawings, in all sizes, from postcards to large sheets of fabric, some of them over thirty feet. Her son figures out a system for her to draw on a fabric by unrolling it gradually.

“Myrninerest” (My inner rest?) is her guiding spirit, who inspires her writings, her embroideries and her piano improvisations. Madge Gill is the only subject of her representations. Everything is centered around her, her own image or the one of her lost daughter. She appears at times melancholic and fearful, at others haughty, almost triumphant. She never shows her entire body, only her face, forever repeated. However, her dresses and hats are represented in abundance. The clothes are interwoven with the architectural maze of the drawings. Madge Gill expresses herself freely, led by the abstraction of the lines.

Madge Gill never wanted to sell her drawings. When her son Bob dies in 1958, she starts drinking, stops drawing, letting go of her life. After her death in 1961, hundreds of drawings are discovered in her home, piled up in cupboards and under her bed.”

(Bio courtesy of Raw Vision)

If You Live in Santa Fe…

Do me a huge favor and check out the Museum of International Folk Art. For the rest of 2008 their exhibition Needles & Pins: Textiles & Tools gives some serious love to the fiber traditions.

From their website:

“Explore the processes, techniques, tools and equipment — spinning wheels, bobbins, looms — used in creating and producing weavings, lace work, and other forms of needlework. A variety of tools are juxtaposed with examples of the beautiful textiles that result featuring pieces from the Museum’s unsurpassed collection of textiles and costumes from many cultures and regions. Visitors are invited to: try your hand at embroidery, add to the group weaving, use a loom to make a pot holder.”

Besides being able to experiment hands-on, and take part in community art, the highlights of the exhibition are the artist demonstrations. Talented folk artists teaching their skills to the public for free. The entire idea of it seems so congruent with folk art itself, I’m wishing I had the time to head south. But since I can’t, would you go instead?

Artist Wednesday: Anne Grgich

Welcome to Artist Wednesday, the first of its kind, wherein I will highlight one folk artist every Wednesday. Consider it a crash course in intuitive art history. Super crash. As in, since folk art has been around since time immemorial, I’ll just jump in wherever and pick whomever appeals to me that particular week. (Like your average absent-minded liberal arts professor would do, but without all that arbitrary grading afterwards.)

Today’s artist: Anne Grgrich
“Crown Yourself”

Born in Harbor City, California in 1961, Anne Grgich began making spontaneous art at the age of fifteen, mostly by clandestinely painting in her family’s books, or making junk constructions. She first introduced collage into her work around 1988, but took it to a higher level in 1997 during a period of illness. During her convalescence she worked in bed, making paintings on file cards and CD’s and organising collages from material she had collected. When she had recovered, later that year she began to produce collage paintings — images of people encountered over time in the street and in mind journeys that manifest themselves and recombine, according to her mood, in the process of creation. Recently, she has described her faces and people as ‘manifestations of conglomerated persona, in a way acting out these characters’. In a way they are a displacement for action in the world out there; fragments of experience, thought and interaction brought together to produce new possibilities out of contemplation. As she puts it, ‘bundling images, separating them’, then looking for ‘interrelating pieces to build meaning and feeling’. Seen separately these faces are individually commanding, but seen together, they form not so much a series of portraits as a group of living presences. (Bio found here, written by Colin Rhodes)

she grew up on a farm there

I’m crying today because I’ll just miss the Midwest Fiber & Folk Art Fair in Illinois this summer. If you don’t know, I’m a daughter of Illinois, and most of my family still lives there. I’ll be visiting in July, a week or two before the fair. Oh, the humanity!

One consolation, though, is the Fine Fiber and Folk Art Show will be displayed in the McHenry County College galleries during my visit, so I have hopes of dragging my family along on an inspiration-gathering mission.

I’ve never been to McHenry County, but it turns up in my favorite Tom Waits song “Johnnsburg, Illinois” and really, what more of a reference does one need?

in the realms of the unreal

Yesterday I joined the Democratic Socialists of America.

Today someone witnessed a strange man taking photographs of my car.

It is Friday the 13th.

I just finished watching the documentary about Outsider artist Henry Darger.

I will not sleep well tonight.