In Process

I talked about my resistance, last night, with dear friend and artist Joan Gold, and became enlightened to the idea that I am working up to being ready to use my handwoven fabrics. I am in the process of getting to where I want to be...working things out along the way...getting ideas out of my system, as it were...making the marks on cloth that I have envisioned, as I find out what I really grabs my attention and holds it.

I have already discovered that I am far more intrigued with organic, seemingly uncontrolled designs than I had previously imagined. I am drawn to and want to focus on letting the dye and paint go where they want to go instead of imposing structure and boundaries.

Actually, I had an experience of this back in the early 1990s, when I "tried" to paint silk -- I was hoping to be able to do painterly work with gutta (resist goo) that was popular then and now. For me, it was fraught with technical difficulties, until I finally let go of what I thought I wanted to do, and just painted dyes on silk without expectation.

This image is of a silk scarf that I dyed in 1992. I have it and two others hanging in my studio now, thinking I'll probably go further with them, finally. They feel unfinished. But they do capture what still excites me about dye on fabric, and so the feeling elicited here is what I am still aiming to achieve, now on handwoven fabric, and now with dye, paint and discharge.