Tracy McCabe Stewart - Contemporary Fiber

I got a last minute chance to participate in a lovely art fair this weekend:  The Festival of Fine Arts in Wilmette, Illinois.  My incredible guild, the North Suburban Needle Arts Guild will have a booth of artists displaying their work over the weekend.  I will be there Sunday from about 10am until 1PM, displaying some of my work.  If you are in the area, stop by and say hello.  I would love to meet you.

Crane Series I (c) by Tracy McCabe Stewart

  You can find me in the North Suburban NeedleArts Guild tent, where I will be exhibiting fiber art with several other artists including Shelley Brucar  (there on Saturday), Cathy Mendola (there both days), and Women’s Journey in Fiber.

The Festival of Fine Arts is held Saturday 9/11 from 10am until 5pm and Sunday 9/12 from 10am until 4pm in the Metra parking lot, Lake Ave and Greenbay Road, Wilmette, IL.  Hope to see you there.

 

I have been crazy busy traveling this summer and working on some personal projects.  I am also working on a piece for a large juried show next month, but can’t post any pictures of it.  It will negate it’s eligibility to the show.

In the meantime, I thought I would introduce you to a fabulous textile artist named Lorraine Roy.  She works out of Canada and I have been following her work for years.  I love Lorraine’s textiles.  Her focus is mainly on trees as subjects these days, but I first got hooked on her work when she was doing cloth representations of patinaed sheet metal.  Unfortunately, she no longer has these pieces on her site, but you can see her gorgeous tree compositions.    They are all a gorgeous mixtures of abstraction and realism; full of  beautiful colors and texture.  They are well work a look.  Enjoy!

I was walking around Asheville galleries today and ran into some of Chris Roberts-Antieau’s fantastic artwork today.  I am not normally a person who likes humorous art, but her work makes me laugh out loud.  Some of it makes me think and some just reminds me of my childhood.  I especially love “The Unlimited Potential of the Human Mind” and “Feeling Sorry for Pluto”.   and “Pot Roast on Fire” These pieces can be seen in her 2010 collection on her website.  Make sure you enlarge them; there’s a lot of great detail. 

 Her website includes all sorts of fun stuff to look at other than just her art.

 

I am currently in beautiful western North Carolina, but was in Door County for a few days last week.  Door County is small, but they have a really high caliber of artwork in the galleries there.  There are enough tourists with an eye to buy to support the area’s galleries.  I visited some of my favorite galleries while I was up there.  Unlike my previous visit, this time, I had my camera! 

My favorite galleries not only have stellar artwork, but the owners have created these beautiful spaces to showcase art; often utilizing old barns or outbuildings and creating beautiful gardens to surround or display the artwork.  The use of space is as impressive as the roster of artists.  For me, they are a haven; a place of peace.  I step out of the car and I feel myself immediately quiet and pay attention.

I hope to create an artist space of my own as imaginative as these galleries in the future.

My gal pal Nina’s husband, Richard Edelman had a beautiful sculpture exhibit going at the Woodwalk Gallery.  It’s a great space and they had a gorgeous setting for his work:

Richard Edelman

 Here are some shots of the gallery space.  Here’s a converted corn crib:

Converted Corn Crib (c) Tracy McCabe Stewart

Here is a shot of the ceiling:

Corn Crib Ceiling (c) Tracy McCabe Stewart

 My favorite gallery of all is the Edgewood Orchard Gallery.  First of all, they are the sweetest people on the planet.  All of them.  The owner, Nell, is an absolute peach.  They have a beautiful space with a series of gallery bulidings connected with patios and a beautiful sculpture garden:

Edgewood Orchard Gallery"s Sculpture Garden

The converted barn serves as the main gallery:

Edgewood Orchard Galleries

here’s another shot:

Patio leading to additional gallery space

and here is some of the incredible artwork:

Sculpture by David Valentine

and a beautiful piece by William Jauquet:

William Jauquet Sculpture

and a lovely piece by James G. Moore:

James G. Moore

Here are some other great galleries I would recommend:

The Blue Dolphin House for great garden art,  K Allen Gallery for glass, and the Fine Line Designs Gallery for both sculpture and indoor art.

I will post NC pictures when I return to Chicago.  I can’t seem to get them off my camera!

I know I haven’t posted in ages.  I’ve been absorbed in revamping my garden.  I downsized my big pond to a smaller one that requires less upkeep.  It involved moving tons of flagstone in the summer heat.  I wasn’t really feeling too creative afterwards. 

I fished this dragonfly out of the pond and he seemed quite content to dry off on my fingertip:

My Pet Dragonfly

Here’s a shot of the new pond.  I dismantled the waterfall, but have water bubbling through this millstone:

New Pond (c) Tracy McCabe Stewart

Three of these cute green frogs moved in the new pond.  So far, my big frogs haven’t returned.  This guy likes to hide in my lotus plant:

Green Frog with a Personal Umbrella

Here’s a couple of shots of parts of my garden.  I have gone heavy on the grasses and shrubs because my Great Dane and other big mutt mow down anything much daintier:

Tiger Eye Sumac, Hibiscus and Grasses (C) Tracy McCabe Stewart

and here’s more grasses in front of my garden shed:

Garden Shed (C) Tracy McCabe Stewart

and a shot of my old pond:

Fish! (c) Tracy McCabe Stewart

and I did manage to put multiple layers of screening on my latest piece.  It combines both regular and metallic paints:

Screened Layers (c) Tracy McCabe Stewart

Here it is with hand dyed silk organza over it.  I like the look; a bit more subtle:

Okay, the rescue wasn’t really all that dramatic.  I did a bit of vat dyeing today.  When I came down to the basement, I had some little toads staring at me through the window wells.  we’ve had rain of biblical proportions the past few weeks and these little guys got washed through the grates.  It seems to happen every time we have really heavy rains here.

Toads!

I finally used a great silk screen that I made at a workshop with the fabulous  Barbara Schneider (I love her workshops!).  The effect was made by dribbling the design goop and letting it drip.  I love the effect.  Here it is on some hand dyed fabric.  I’ll be using this for my latest cave piece:

dribble screened vat dye

and here’s a scarf I screened vat dye on while I was at it:

vat dyed scarf

It’s all one screen, but different colors.

Another layer tomorrow!

 

Cave screen:As you may have noticed, I haven’t gotten a heck of a lot done in the art department over the last few months.  I did revisit a whooping crane piece I’d started before leaving for my trip to Japan, but wasn’t really engaged enough to stick with it when design problems arose.  It is currently in pieces waiting for me to get interested again.

I noticed, over the past few days, that when I thought about starting or working on one of my bird pieces, I’d start drifting away.  Suddenly, any thing else was more interesting:  laundry, walking the dogs, solitaire, you name it.  Interestingly, when I thought about doing some work on my cave series, I began designing and working the logistics of the piece out in my head.  I guess I need a break from the birds for a while.

I began working out fabrics and creating new thermofax screens to use in the piece last night.  I haven’t decided whether this will be a pure fiber piece or a piece that combines fiber and etched copper like my Lascaux pieces:  Horses and Bulls I and II. 

Anyway, here are some of the new screens I made based on the cave paintings in Altimira, Spain and Lascaux and Chauvet, France.

I am going to try to get some screening done over the weekend.  We are getting house stuff done next week (carpeting).  I need to empty out all of our furniture for the job and move it all back again when they are through.  It will be completely chaotic here for most of the week. 

Have a great weekend!

I have been working on my preening Whooping Crane piece the past few days.  I’m happy to be back in the studio and motivated, however, progress has been one step forward and two steps back.  

I did quite a lot of work on the wings, but it started looking like some weird bird angel.  Obviously, the shape of the wings is off.  I cut things apart last night and hopefully when I piece the bird back together it will look like something from the avian family, rather than the Great Holy Whooping Crane.  

I will post pictures when I have something done that I don’t find embarrassing:-) 

In the meantime, Christine Kane has posted a video of Simon Sinek from the fabulous TED series.  It’s about marketing directly from your passion.  It’s really about presenting what you do in life in an authentic way, rather than “selling’.  I can definitely see applications in my own life, especially in art marketing.  It’s pretty long, but if you have 18 minutes to spare, it’s worth the watch.  

In the meantime, a daily moment of Zen.  This is a shot I took from a flight I took to Knoxville, TN.  I don’t know what the body of water was, but it snaked around all over the place.  I loved the organic shape of the river system obscured by clouds: 

Over Knoxville (c) Tracy McCabe Stewart

 

I think I’ll be thinking about how to apply the content for a while.  I would love to hear your thoughts on art and marketing-or anything else!

Linville Falls (c) Tracy McCabe Stewart

I am usually someone who goes on a trip and doesn’t want to travel again for months.  This time, I found myself starting to have an itch to travel again about 10 days after leaving Japan.  I am unusually restless.  The good news is that I have some travel coming up in the near future.  In the next month or so, I will be traveling to one of my favorite places on earth:  Asheville, North Carolina.  It’s been a while since I’ve made it down that way.  I couldn’t be more excited.  Here’s some pictures from previous visits:

Blue Ridge Mountains (c) Tracy McCabe Stewart

 

Rhododendron Tunnel in Craggy Gardens (c) Tracy McCabe Stewart

More rhododendron formations (c) Tracy McCabe Stewart

Spring fern (c) Tracy McCabe Stewart

Mt Fuji (c) Tracy McCabe Stewart

I am back from my fabulous trip to Japan.  I had a lovely day getting myself mentally and physically back on this continent:  loads of laundry, grocery shopping, walking my dogs, seeing what’s coming up in my garden and spending some time reconnecting with my husband. 

I checked the blogs I read tonight and came across two really lovely posts from Leslie Avon Miller’s  blog  “Create Your Best Life Coaching”  Her post is about getting back in touch with our power and our dreams.  after just having spent the last ten days taking some risks and fulfilling some dreams of my own, I especially appreciated this.  Check it out here and a really good short video here