Author: amandapearsonart

So last October I was in Washington for an art show and extended family gathering to honor the life and work of my great-great grandmother at Sunnyshore Studio, and was invited to show something at the big island-wide Mother’s Day Camano Island Studio Tour that they participating in. This is super exciting, and coming up soon!

I wanted to take advantage of being in the area and track down some inspiration for an idea that I had been mulling over for a while. It hinged on finding the perfect tree – sure, there are trees everywhere, but it was important to me to use a specific tree from the island as the basis of the piece and go from there. So, I made my husband, father, and grandmother drive me around and search for the perfect tree. One that had character in the branches and bark, and would reflect the rain, wind, ice and sun that makes the area as beautiful as it is. While there are a lot of evergreens in the Pacific Northwest, I’m so glad it was the fall and able to find a tree without leaves – I do a lot of trees, and the movement and texture of the tree itself is so much more interesting to me without the pesky leaves getting in the way. Maybe someday I’ll come to appreciate tree leaves, but not yet!

One thing that I was excited about on this was experimenting with textures and shapes that I could create with the embroidery floss. I’ve done a few of these kind of pieces at this point, so I’m trying to refine the technique and figure out what the medium is able to do. I’m happy with the qualities of the bark, clouds, water, sky and grass. This is something that I am going to look to push further on the next embroidery floss piece I do.

I have added a canvas print of this piece to the Richfield Community Center where it will be displayed with some of my other prints through the end of May. I’ll be out in Washington at Sunnyshore Studio for the first weekend of the Camano Island Studio Tour from Friday, May 11th to Sunday, May 13th. The original will be displayed (and for sale) along with paper and canvas prints and handmade cards. There is a second weekend to the tour (Saturday the 19th and Sunday the 20th), but I’ll be back in Minnesota for Art-a-Whirl (more details on that to come).

Yes, that is my cat on the piece in it’s early stages – it is amazing I get anything done. You can tell she thought I was spending too much time gluing.

I have multiple art events lined up for April and May, so I’ve been working hard on my latest piece and getting the details worked out.

The first display for this “Spring Sprint” has been installed in the Richfield Community Center and will be up through the end of May. The Richfield Arts Commission provides the opportunity for local artists to display their art in the city buildings, so I contacted the director and was able to hang up my canvas prints in the community center. I’m excited to be able to show my work to my community!

So yesterday, I did something crazy. I, with a lot of help from George, pulled off having a booth at a local craft show. I was too afraid of it being an epic disaster to tell anyone here in Minnesota about it (except for my sister, but she doesn’t count). It is a lot of work – getting and packaging prints, determining the best way to display what I have, figuring out the business side of things…it was a little overwhelming. And that was just the organizing side. Once you get everything ready, you have to sit at the event for seven hours with you heart and years of work on display. What if people say something mean? What if they just ignore it?? It is terrifying. Thanks to college art class critiques, constructive feedback doesn’t scare me. And I know that not everyone loves my pieces because that’s how art works, and that’s fine. But putting myself out there and asking strangers to interact with my art, and having no idea what those interactions will be like, is the worst. THE WORST.

But I spoke with so many complete strangers yesterday who took the time to talk to me about my pieces and what goes in to creating them. I received some really amazing feedback – and that is invaluable, especially when the main source of discussion on my art currently happens with my husband or my cats. So this is a heartfelt thank you to anyone who was in Maple Grove yesterday and sees this!

I thought I would try an experiment and do a time lapse video of a little embroidery floss project. This is 12 hours of work over a few days (see if you can spot my Cheez-It snack), condensed into 45 seconds. The piece is just 4″ x 6″, and is part of the beach view from my dad’s cousin’s home in Camano Island, WA.

“Reflect/Retreat” – Embroidery floss, 16″ x 20″, 2017

Here is the final picture of “Reflect/Retreat” that I finished earlier this year. This is my biggest embroidery floss piece yet, and I don’t think I will ever do one bigger than this. This also won People’s Choice for the Hopkins Center for the Arts Member’s Show in the fall of 2017, which was incredibly exciting – it is a juried show and there were some great pieces, so I was surprised!

This is from a weekend that George and I spent up at a camp in northern Minnesota. George made friends with a dog, as he tends to do. This dog was inexhaustible and just wanted to play. Forever. He spent probably close to an hour throwing sticks of increasing sizes, and no matter how large the stick, the dog kept bringing it back. Even when it was thrown into the lake, the dog jumped in without hesitation.

Something that is also special about this is that I was able to incorporate embroidery floss that my grandma sent me from her craft collection.  She had a lot of pinks, blues, and browns, so I thought this would be the perfect image to use these with. I remember as a kid digging through her craft supplies when my family visited her in Florida, and working on craft projects with her, so I am glad she thought of me and pulling these out for me when she was cleaning out some of her old boxes. Thank you Grandma Fuller, I hope you like how I used them!

 

 

 

May not look like much yet – it’s been a lot of time/work for what essentially is a background, but I wanted to show what I’ve been up to!

This piece is three 16” x 20” panels made with paper hole punches. It’s a lot of dots.

“Vessel” – Embroidery floss, 11” x 17”, 2016

I wanted to post a little bit about some of my past projects, so I wanted to start with this one. When I have these projects, I carry them around with me for months to work on them whenever I have time. This shell has taken many trips to coffee shops (notice some of the coffee stains), around with me on errands, and even traveled with me to Oklahoma for my cousin’s wedding. I purposefully choose projects that can go wherever I go since they take so long to finish, and I get cabin fever if I am stuck at my kitchen table. I did decide it was time to invest in a craft lamp to give me better light though, so that helped to make the process easier and I think will help my future projects be more successful as well. I should have done that years ago!

This was also one of the few times that I have gone back and used a medium for a second time (other than something traditional like paint). I think I have finally started to get my groove – I figured out that my life purpose is to glue things to boards. There is a freedom and confidence that comes with knowing this, and I’m really excited about some of the ideas that I have stewing. I loved my first embroidery floss picture of the waterfall, but I really expanded on the technique with this shell. I can even see how I was learning more and more about what worked and what didn’t on this picture – hopefully it’s not too obvious!

One of my favorite aspects of these pieces that I have made over the last few years is that they are like a journal; I can see my moods, experiences, and situations expressed over time as I moved through the creation of the image. This took me 4 months to complete – when I started this I was not in a good place. My work life was really draining and emotionally exhausting, and it took a lot out of me to get up every day and do what I needed to do. Because of this, there were periods of time where I wouldn’t make any progress because I was stumped on where the next string should go and didn’t want to figure it out. But then I started to get out of my slump, any my brain was working differently. The decisions I would make and flow I would create was changed as I changed. I love making these little decisions piece by piece that add up to the whole – but just don’t ask me to decide what to have for dinner, that is too hard.

Earlier this month,, my extended family traveled up to Camano Island in northern Washington to celebrate the legacy of my great-great grandmother, Fanny Y. Cory. She was an artist and illustrator, and was one of the first women illustrators in the industry when she started out in her late teens. She also wrote and illustrated a couple of comic strips that ran in newspapers across the country.

 

It was amazing to celebrate this life of a woman who I never met but is part of my artistic heritage. My father’s cousin, Jason Dorsey, has an amazing art gallery and living space called Sunnyshore Studio, and he organized an art exhibit (with a movie!) to celebrate this woman. He provided me with the opportunity to show a few of my pieces, along with my other artistic family members (and there are a lot of them) – it was an honor to be a part of this event and help to show how her legacy continues down through the generations. Check out his website (sunnyshorestudio.com) and recent blog posts – I’m featured in one of the videos!

When my grandma was younger, her mother and grandmother (FYC) would have creative sessions where they would paint and make art, and they called this the “Grunt and Groan Art Club”. The story is that they would be so immersed in their creations that they wouldn’t have time to have full conversations, and would only manage to grunt in acknowledgement and support of what they all were making. I love this – not only is it adorable to imagine this scene, but also because the idea of making art being voiced by “grunts and groans” resonates with me. My art involves hours of being hunched over a table, which is hard on my back and eyes. Sitting at tables in Starbucks and on my living room floor is not conducive to a pain-free experience. I now have an art studio with an adjustable table, which is going to help quite a bit, but the sounds I have emitted when hoisting myself off of the floor after an hour of gluing dots are not the most pleasant. Creating art consistently requires discipline to push through the times that are not enjoyable. For me, since each piece takes so much time, I need to be intentional about taking every opportunity to move forward and using my time well.

It was an inspiring weekend, and I am working on some ideas of how to take my art to the next step – stay tuned! Continue reading ““Celebrating the Art, Life and Cultural Legacy of Fanny Y. Cory” – exhibit and family gathering at Sunnyshore Studio in Camano Island, WA” →

Finishing one of these projects tends to put me in a weird head space – on one hand, I am ecstatic at the finished product and feel like it is a real accomplishment. The moment of putting a piece in the frame with the mat after months of dragging it around with me in a pillowcase is really a special moment for me. However, there is also a sense of being off-balanced – what the heck do I do with my time now? For five months, I would spend my Saturday mornings in Starbucks or my lunch hours being that weirdo in the corner gluing string to a board. I have spent so many of my spare moments and thoughts concentrating on a few square inches of space, and nothing else. And I loved it! It is meditative and calming, especially in the time when the end of the project is in sight and I use every free second I can to push through to the finish line. But now, I am thrown back into reality. Don’t get me wrong, it is good that I finally got around to finishing painting the giant bookcase that has been sitting in the middle of my one bedroom apartment for a couple of weeks, and it was about time that I actually ran a load of dishes in the dishwasher.But it is unsettling to be without a project that has been constantly on my mind for five months.

There is also the anxiety of starting the next thing. I am so happy with this shell, but that puts a lot of pressure on my next piece! I will be working on the next two projects simultaneously – one to work on at home because it doesn’t travel well and a second to take around to the coffee shops and work on on my lunch break. I’m excited to get started, but it is hard to make the leap into really digging into them. I have a pattern of starting the layout of a project, getting overwhelmed, and then ignoring it for weeks. But no more! I am determined to be more disciplined and start going on the next projects soon. These take too long to drag my heals in between!. So if you see me on a Saturday and I’m sitting at Caribou NOT being the weirdo in the corner with some crazy assortment of art supplies in front of me, please poke me and tell me to get moving.

PS – Thank you for all the kind words and compliments on this. It is really fun for me to show it off, and I appreciate the support!

 

Here is a sneak peek of the latest project – I’m going back to the embroidery floss (like what I used to make the waterfall). There will be a lot of little pieces and so it is a challenge to keep the ends from fraying, but I’m excited about the spectrum of colors and using the lines to show shape and shadows.

My (ambitious) goal is to have this finished by the due date for the Hopkins Center for the Arts Spring Members show – which is April 4th. Eek! I’m not sure I’ll make it, but I have to keep moving forward and at least try!