Monday, September 10, 2012

New school year, new house

It's early September and the new school year has started here in Prince Edward Island.  It's a new beginning for us, too, since we are about to buy a house.  For the past three years, we rented a house that we loved, but ultimately didn't buy.  For Americans with great credit ratings in the United States, getting credit in Canada is surprisingly difficult.  

However, that is now behind us.  We have a mortgage and a new house.  We've been living in our cottage for the past two months and it's time to move into our new, permanent home.  We will be moving into it next weekend.  Hooray! It's been a long, hard road. 

Monday, April 9, 2012

Easter, The Biggest Snowstorm of the Winter

Yesterday was Easter.  Easter this year occurred on April 8.  March 21 is the beginning of spring.  Before that time, it was winter: December, January, yes, and even February.  All with very little snow. Kids here in PEI had only two snow days during the winter of 2011-2012.  The ski area closed a day early due to warm weather and lack of snowpack.  There was enough man-made snow to make a nice run, but, in general, we had a very mild winter.  Not so Easter!  The white out was so bad in the morning that Kathryn had to turn around less than half a mile up the road and couldn't get to work because she could not see the road anymore.  Later that morning, we ventured out to church and Abby's Confirmation ceremony.  We barely made it through deep drifts, over icy bridges and windy, horizontal snowfall.  By afternoon, the sun came out.  The snow that was nearly completely gone two days ago has been replaced by a fresh coat.  The good news: we're expecting three solid days of +8 degrees celsius (about 50 degrees farenheit). 



Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Our Lady of Mount Carmel


 Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, copyright Sharon Sawyer, 2008

I made this art quilt for my brother and his wife.  It is our Lady of Mount Carmel standing on a cloud.  She is holding her baby, Jesus in one hand a a scapular in the other.  (You can read the story of our Lady of Mount Carmel and the brown scapular if you click on the link.)  She is made with hand-dyed, hand-painted, and commercial fabric, polymer clay, trims and other embellishments.  Her hair is made of alpaca wool.   

Thursday, March 29, 2012

The Business of Craft

I just finished taking a course last night offered through the PEI Crafts Council and Holland College.  The instructor/facilitator was Michelle MacCallum, a potter from Breadalbane PEI (pronounced Bread- AL -bin, for those who don't know).  The course was ten weeks long and covered the business aspects of running a crafts or fine arts business, because even though we are all artists, we still need to eat!  There was an enormous amount of talent in the room: painters, sculptors, chefs, fine woodworkers, potters, photographers, writers, jewelry artists, etc.  Everyone shared their thoughts and helpful advice with each other.  We learned about copyright, web design, marketing, writing a business plan, taxes, billing, keeping inventory, grants, legal issues, hiring workers, craft and trade shows, etc.  It is so strange that most art school don't offer these kinds of courses.  If artists were taught early on that they would likely be working for themselves and be given the means to make a living doing what they love to do, fewer artists would feel compelled to give up their dreams to make money at something they would rather not do!

Artists shouldn't have to starve.  So much of our daily culture is tied up in images.  Someone has to make these images.  Artists need to learn to make a living making art.  Art is not valued when it is looked upon as just a hobby or past time to fit in when every other bit of "real work" is done.  How many times are artists told to "get a real job."  HURRAY for the PEI Crafts Council for giving this course.  I look forward to taking the next course offered.

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Our Lady of Guadalupe

 Detail of Our Lady of Guadalupe, 2007, mixed media art quilt



Our Lady of Guadalupe, copyright 2007 Sharon Sawyer

Our Lady of Guadalupe came about when I asked my Spanish class at St. Michael School in Lowell to work on a project on this theme.  Our Lady of Guadalupe is the favorite image in Mexico.  She brought hope to the native people who were oppressed by their Spanish conquerors.  She is dressed like an Aztec princess and Aztec people of the time recognized her this way.  Her feast day is December 12.  On her feast day in 2007, I was in Mazatlan, Mexico during the celebration.  People dressed their children up in traditional clothing and took them to the cathedral where they left flowers in the church and took photographs of their children in front of backdrops of Our Lady of Guadalupe as she appeared in the desert.  I followed the traditional description of how she appeared in my art quilt.  She is dressed in red and deep green with gold stars and trim, standing on a half moon with the sun shining behind her.  I added polymer clay roses to a gilded frame and LED lights all around her figure.  The background is hand-dyed silk damask and gold lame.  Her face, hands and feet are sculpted from Model Magic clay. 

Monday, March 26, 2012

Ode to Gees Bend

"Ode to Gees Bend" copyright 2009 Sharon Sawyer   30" x 20" mixed media quilt

Chickens!

This quilt which I called "Ode to Gees Bend" is my chicken quilt.  Before I left Massachusetts, there was an exhibit of quilts from a small southern rural community called Gees Bend.  The women who lived there were very poor, but yet they created some really beautiful quilts from materials they had on hand.  I reached into my own stash, grabbed some leftovers, and made the quilt.  I embellished the chicken, and it always makes me smile.  Here is a link explaining the story of the Gees Bend quilts: http://www.quiltsofgeesbend.com/

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Memories of Western Avenue Studios: The Lowell Visiting Nurse Association Quilt


Before I moved away from Lowell, our last collaboration at the Lowell Fiber studio www.lowellfiberstudio.org was this lovely quilt:


This was a commission commemorating the 100th anniversary of the VNA of Greater Lowell.  It is a collaboration between 10 quilt artists working together and in pairs (each pair responsible for the design and execution of their panel) and the nurses, patients, families and other health professionals associated with the VNA.  The quilt now hangs in the VNA corporate headquarters in downtown Lowell.  The scene includes photographs of houses in Lowell as well as a photograph of the downtown seen from the top of Christian Hill.  The quilt reaches from night into day, and includes quotes by the patients and families of the VNA expressing their appreciation for the care they received.  The quotes are written in six different languages spoken in Lowell.  The artists were Linda Dunn (who coordinated the quilt project), Cathy Granese, Gwen Stith, Ann and Sonja Lee-Austin, Margot Stage, Merrill Comeau and me, with some additional help from Laura Gawlinski and Susan Webber.  This piece took over six months to complete, and is quite large, taking up most of the conference room wall at the Lowell VNA. 

Monday, March 12, 2012

To Buy, To Rent, To Move, To Stay!

Back in September, we became permanent residents of Canada.  Kathryn had become a permanent resident a few years ago, but the rest of us were here on visitor records and temporary work permits.  To those of you who don't know much about immigration to Canada (most, I would suppose), it meant that our time in Canada was officially limited because we would have to leave and go back to America when our temporary work permits expired.  This was a hard situation because we couldn't settle down or make plans for our lives at all.  We couldn't buy a house because we couldn't get a regular mortgage, and we had no assurance we could remain in any house we bought even if we could buy one.  So, we have been renting in a lovely spot for the past three years.  We now have the chance to buy the house we are in, or buy another house close by, or even rent for a while longer.  Now the time has come to make a decision.

Kathryn will be moving back to the USA, to Notre Dame University to study for her doctorate.  Kathryn has been selected as a Mellon Fellow, which is a very prestigious award for outstanding scholarship.  She also got accepted to Oxford University, but she has decided to study at Notre Dame instead.  Aaron will be graduating from Massachusetts Maritime Academy in June, and we have no idea where in the world he will be working next year.  Abigail is going to the University of Prince Edward Island, and Daniel is in high school.  So, we will be down to only two kids living with us in PEI, for the time being.  Abby's miniature horse, chickens and our five cats are here with us, but all our relatives and most of our friends are in another country.

Are we going to stay here forever?  It seems like we might.  In fact, I just found out the other house up the road that we like so much is not for sale, so we are going to stay put and buy this place and the glorious nine acres of woods, pasture and bubbling brook around us.

Saturday, March 10, 2012

St. Michael the Archangel I


This is my favorite art quilt in my series of saints.  Unfortunately, I donated it to the school where I used to teach Spanish.  When I left Lowell to come to Prince Edward Island, I also left many students I had taught there in grades five to eight.  I asked the principal to hang this piece in the school where all the kids could see it.  Instead, it was stuffed behind a file cabinet somewhere, and was lost.  When I went back to school for a visit, this piece was nowhere to be found.  This made me very sad, since it was a wonderful piece and went totally unappreciated.  Worst of all, the students never got to see it.   I learned a lesson the hard way not to donate my artwork.

I have since completed another St. Michael Fighting Satan, and you will see it in future posts.  The original was 36" x 20" and was made of multiple layers of the brightest, blingy-est fabric and embellishments I could find.  St. Michael was dressed in shiny layers of stiffened holographic ribbon and sequins with lame wings and halo and a helmet made of silver holographic shreds.  The nebula background was hand-dyed silk damask and all the layers of red and orange fabric were tulle and other transparent fabrics.  Satan's tail was made from acrylic angora yarn.  Heads, hands and feet were made of polymer clay and Model Magic clay.  Satan's body was made of silver sequins.  The quilt was embellished with gold stars, beads, and red polymer hands reaching upward from the flames. 

Satan's other name is Lucifer, which means "bearer of light" in Latin.  Satan is Michael's sibling and equal, one of the archangels along with Michael, Raphael and Gabriel.  Angels have no gender; they are pure spirit, but they are like humans in that they were created with free will and could choose to obey God or not.  Lucifer and his buddies chose not to, and became bent on destruction and evil.  This scene shows Michael defeating Lucifer and throwing Lucifer into Hell.  Michael and Lucifer are both made of silver sequins to show they were created the same, but Satan made only bad choices while Michael made good ones.

Thursday, March 8, 2012

St. Anthony in the Land of the Lost


St. Anthony in the Land of the Lost

The next art quilt in the series is St. Anthony.  I especially love St. Anthony because there are so many great legends around him.  This quilt is full of symbolism.  If you are Catholic, you know that St. Anthony is the saint who helps you find lost things.  This is why he's holding a set of my car keys in his right hand. Yes, St. Anthony finds them for me every time! Of course, St. Anthony was a monk, which is why he is dressed in a simple, brown robe.  St. Anthony was such an amazing orator that when he would stand on the beach and preach into the waves, the fish would jump out of the water to hear him.  St. Anthony's words were so sweet that his sermons attracted bees that would circle his head.  Mostly, though, St. Anthony finds whatever is lost.  The treasure chest at his feet is filled with all the little things that people misplace every day.  I loved working on this quilt.  I hope you enjoy it, too.

Thursday, February 2, 2012

Son Worshipper

The next in the series is a piece called "Son Worshipper."  This is a sunny reminder of weather to come as I sit here watching it snow in February.  The inspiration for this piece was the little pair of sunglasses the little sister is wearing as she soaks up the sun.  Cathy Granese gave me a bag of cast-off jewelry which included a tiny pair of sunglasses.  They were perfect!  First I sculpted the face, hands and single foot (to put just one toe in the water).  I perched the sunglasses on her face and started working on the rest of the quilt.  The piece is made of various kinds of fabric and trim, attached to a painted, stretched canvas, 24" x 18."  This one always makes me smile!  I hope you enjoy it, too.

Friday, January 13, 2012

The Next Two Art Quilts in the Series

After making "The Angels and Saints Are Watching Us," I decided to make another art quilt with nuns as the subject.  I remembered that the nuns who taught at my school all lived together in the parish convent and that they had only one car, a very big station wagon.  There was one sister who could drive and she was in charge of going out to get the groceries.  She was a notoriously bad driver, but that would not stop her from driving around with a carload of sisters out for a shopping adventure.  If you look at the nuns in the car, the driver is determined, the far passenger is terrified and the sister in the middle must be praying! 

There were quite a few technical problems in planning this quilt.  Since the work I do is three dimensional on a flat surface (bas relief), it was a real challenge in perspective to make the front end of the car emerge beyond the sculpted nuns inside the car without adding bulk to the quilt itself.  The quilt is stitched by machine and by hand, and I sculpted each of the nuns' faces by hand.   This quilt has been exhibited in several shows in New England and in Prince Edward Island.  It is definitely my favorite in this series.  The name of the piece is "Accidental Sisters."






The next piece in the series was inspired by the farm-themed fabric that dominates the quilt.  Of course, not all nuns teach school.  Some even raise chickens on a farm.  This next piece shows a nun feeding the chickens in the barnyard.  It is hand and machine sewn and embellished with a hand-sculpted face and lots of glass beads.  Its title is "Feeding Time."





Wednesday, January 11, 2012

The Art Scene in Lowell and How it Grew

The really great thing about working in a place like Western Avenue Studios in Lowell, MA, is that it is a huge community of artists, spread over five floors of an old mill in a run-down industrial area.  The rent was really cheap, and the space was just bare bones.  Since artists generally don't make a lot of money, it was an ideal spot to build the foundation for what the politicians like to call the creative economy, a concept made popular among urban planners by a professor at the University of Toronto, Richard Florida.  Lowell has long been known as a depressed, mill town dependent on one failing industry or another, not a reputation that will attract the best and the brightest to live there.

However, in the 1990's, the city looked at its resources and at other cities, most notably Boston, and saw that the price of real estate was climbing fast everywhere else, and that many of Boston's artists were being displaced by their own successes in building a vibrant creative community.  Basically, artists move into a place that seems pretty hopeless, usually industrial spaces, and transform these places into somewhere the young, hip and moneyed want to be.  This is great for a city.  When people with money, free time and no kids move into a city, they want to go places, do things and spend their money.  The places they go begin to attract small businesses that cater to these people.  The small businesses grow and the city thrives.  The revitalized city develops a reputation for being cool, hip and the place to be, which attracts real estate development, and more money.  In fact, everyone benefits except the artists who created the success.  Their rents go up and they lose their creative spaces.  They are forced out and begin to look for somewhere new.

People in Lowell saw this happening in Boston and wisely offered their city up as a place artists could go, where rents were cheap and mills were empty.  The city approached developers interested in re-purposing old mill space for artists, and offered them lots of money, tax breaks and encouragement to make new spaces for artists in Lowell.  The earliest result was the Ayer Lofts in the downtown, which was made into condos and an art gallery.  The Ayer Lofts had previously been a downtown eyesore which had been an EPA brownfields site (environmentally blighted).  It was transformed into a beautiful, functional place that attracted new residents to Lowell who were interested in improving life in the city and had the wherewithal to do it.  By all measures, the Ayer Lofts project was a success for Lowell.  New museums, like the Revolving Museum, opened in Lowell.  New businesses like Friends Fabric Arts, the Mambo Grill, and Brew'd Awakenings followed.  Downtown began its rejuvenation.
All this was added to Lowell's reputation as the site of the largest, free folk festival in America: The Lowell Folk Festival.

Lowell's reputation as a hip and happening place for the arts was on the rise.  Once the Arts League of Lowell was established, resident artists had a collective voice. The city government expanded its outreach through the Lowell Office of Cultural Affairs.  This later became known as the Office of Cultural Affairs & Special Events (CASE).  Lowell was now able to show that it cared about art and artists, and that it was willing to facilitate development based on cultural affairs.  Thus, the seed was planted for the development of a dilapidated mill complex in the worst neighborhood in the city. This would become Western Avenue Studios, a showplace for all the best contemporary art that the city of Lowell has to offer.  


Our little fiber arts studio, the Lowell Fiber Studio, was among the very first in the complex, located on the fifth floor, number 512.  There were originally eight of us working there, Maxine Farkas, who had been our teacher at Friends Fabric Arts, Gay Tracy, Gwen Stith, Linda Branch Dunn, Margot Stage, Karen Bettencourt, Laura Gawlinski and me.  Little did we know at the time that we would soon be joined by over three hundred other artists in the mill complex and be a featured studio in Quilting Arts Magazine (Issue 39, August/September 2009).


Western Avenue Studios was a great place to work.  Walking down the halls and visiting friends' studios was always inspirational and fun.  There is a real creative energy in the place, especially on the first Saturday of each month during Open Studios.  Watch the video for a taste of Open Studios at Western Avenue!





Monday, January 9, 2012

How the Series Began

Here is the first of the series of art quilts devoted to nuns and saints.  This art quilt was juried into a show at the 119 Gallery in Lowell, MA.  The theme of the exhibit was dreams; and nuns have been a recurring theme in my dreams since I was a child in Catholic school.  Mostly, the dreams revolved around me, being late to class, showing up on the very last day of school just before the MATH EXAM!!! And, of course, I was totally unprepared.  Have you ever had this dream? 

So, I tried to re-create the scene.  First, by choosing the absolutely right color of yellow paint that is ubiquitous in Catholic schools.  Yes, I also taught in Catholic school as an adult in Lowell, and my color memory serves me well!  I remembered the sisters of my childhood: the stern, the sweet and the bemused.  I also remembered that no matter what, the angels and saints were watching our every move, and knew our thoughts.  This could be a blessing or a curse, depending on what kind of day one was having!  Nevertheless, it was a constant theme. 

Notice the little angels, reflecting their sisters' personalities, sitting only on their right shoulders.  This is because all little children were taught that their guardian angels sit at their right side, and the devil was tempting us on from the left side.  That is, of course, unless one was left-handed like me.  I once pointed this out to my teacher who promptly sent me to the office.  I knew that God made me left-handed, and that I could draw much better and write better with my left hand.  So, of course, God reversed the process in me, and all other righteous, left-handed children.  End of story!

This art quilt is called, "The Angels and Saints Are Watching Us."  It has been shown in several juried exhibits in the United States and here in Canada.

Saturday, January 7, 2012

My 2012 creative resolutions!

We have been back on Prince Edward Island for less than a week, having spent Christmas and New Years in Massachusetts.  In fact, I had been there since early December, helping my mother with going through my dad's clothes and books; a task everyone had been avoiding.  The house is cleaner now, and we are looking forward to a better time in 2012.  I quit teaching ESL in November, and I want to spend that creative energy working on my art.

So, I have lots of work to do!  I will begin by taking a class on art and craft business development next week.  And, of course, I will be posting to this blog as often as I can.  In my next post, look for my collection of nuns and saints, which had been part of my solo show entitled, "Here and Hereafter."