Archive for No Artwork – It’s All About Me!

Who am I to Think I’m an Artist?

January 22, 2013 / / No comments

Casual head shot of Nancy Smeltzer

Nancy Smeltzer, MFA

I just recently had another birthday, and decided to reflect on the fact that one of the ways that I define myself is an artist. This idea was brought home to me that I haven’t always felt this way by a posting on an arts group to which I belong. A young woman, new to her craft, was brave enough to ask if anybody else in the group was scared to post their art work to the rest of the member son this private site. Everybody commended her bravery and encouraged her to “go for it”.

I so remember when I used to feel that way, too. There was the fear of being seen, “O-O-O-h! Everybody’s looking at me!”, but then that’s what being a visual artist is about….the dance between having people look at your work and as an extensions, look at you. For me, there was the fear of being perceived as being pretentitious, like who does she think she is, calling herself an artist? There was the fear of not being accepted into a show or a gallery, in that I’ve spent all of this time making this piece and nobody likes it.

Fortunately, after doing this for 30 years, you realize that the rejections are often not about you. Maybe, it’s late in the afternoon, and the jury already has 5 other yellow pieces chosen. Oftentimes, my work is considered “too pretty” for some “serious” shows, so I’ve learned to read between the lines, much like choosing a vacation get-away and learning what an “ocean view” can mean, so that I don’t submit to those shows. Style change, so what was popular last year may not be this year, so what’s your market? If you’re after the home décor crowd, then you had better be up on this year’s colors and styles. If you’re creating to please yourself, then it’s a matter of finding your market, and with the Net, that’s so-o-o much easier than it was when I first started.

So for myself, I stuck my flag in the shifting sands of public scrutiny long ago, and wear the mantle of artist proudly. This is who I am and this is what my work looks like. Besides, I can get away with a lot of fun stuff that regular people would never allow themselves to take on by being an artist, so “Happy Birthday” to me and the quirkiness I revel in.

To find out how I also define myself, a spiritual intuitive and healer, please check out my other blog at… http://www.transitionportals.com

 Are you comfortable describing yourself as an artist, or do you hide the fact from your friends and colleagues? At what point will you feel like it’s safe to come out and declare yourself an artist?

Why not leave a comment as to your thoughts on this posting. Please take a minute, fill out the form below or by clicking on the “comments/no comments link” at the top of the posting, and then share your ideas with the rest of us. We all grow when we share our thoughts and impressions, so why not join our growing community of those who appreciate art quilts and textile arts. We’d love to hear from you!… and PLEASE tell like minded souls about this blog! The more readers and contributors, the more I write.

You can see more of my art work on my web site at www.fiberfantasies.com (be patient as it loads; it’s worth it), my healing work at www.hearthealing.net and can find me on Google + , Facebook (for Transition Portals) Facebook (for Fiber Fantasies),  and Twitter.

To find out how to buy my art work, please check out “How to Buy my Art Work” in the “Pages” section to the right of this blog.

Category: No Artwork - It's All About Me! / Tags: , , , ,

Getting Past Overwhelmed – How to Keep Going When I Feel Like I’m Drowning!

December 11, 2012 / / 2 comments

Nancy Smeltzer, art quilterThere are so many times when I’m working on my art quilts when the creation process is so effortless. The ideas flow, the fabrics fall into place, and magic unfolds before my eyes. Life is good and all is right with the world. Those times are not what this posting is about.

Instead, I’m speaking today about those times when I have to force myself to sit and sew because there’s a deadline looming. That time constraint may be because there’s a blog to write, a new piece to photograph for consideration for an exhibition, or a commission piece whose owner is waiting to show it off at a party. Whatever is the reason, there are times when I feel as if I’m drowning in the “I  should be doings”. I thought that when I retired from my teaching job of 27 years of instilling the rudiments of science into 7th graders, that I would have countless leisurely hours to sip a favorite beverage and stitch masterpieces. The reality, is that I now work much harder than I did when I was employed by the local school system.

A few additional things in my life began to command my attention. I began a spiritual path, which involved a healing practice that teaches powerful tools to empower others to heal their own issues. I extended my gardens to heights of horticultural grandeur, but which require lots of attention. I began to enter more substantial shows, and started publishing this blog. (and have since started a second one.) I’ve added onto my rudimentary knowledge of photography and Photoshop skills. There is also the maintenance of a 3 story house and trying to maintain some semblance of cleanliness, coupled with three months total last year of pneumonia that are still taking heir toll on my energy.

So, yes, there are times when I feel overwhelmed with what I want to do to get myself out there. I have big dreams and plans to get my art and healing practice better known, and it’s hard sometimes, to do a lot of that work and promotion by myself. I try to make lists and keep a calendar of mini- deadlines so that I can stay on track of due dates for goals that are important to me. Still, sometimes, it feels as if I’m just treading water, and if I stop working so hard, I’ll be pulled downwards into an endless vortex of oblivion. I guess it’s the need to be seen that keeps me going sometimes.

So sometimes, there are moments of despair arising over whatever the complaint of the day is. “This is taking too long”, “This is too hard to do by myself”, “I’m doing all of this work and nobody but me cares” are some of the usual gang of suspect ruminations rumbling around inside of my head. It’s those moments when I have to remind myself that the reason I am doing all that I am doing is because it matters to me. I want to create art, I want to write about my work and I want to help others heal because I want to do so. There is nobody else in the world putting these “chores” on my head but me, so it’s at those times, that I re-frame my view of my world. Some of these reversed outlooks appear as ….”How lucky I am to have all of these marvelous supplies to create my art work!”. “How fortunate I am that I like to work early in the morning so that I can write my ideas down from the night’s thoughts”. “How blessed I am with my connection to the Divine that I am shown ways to help myself and others.” These are some of the ways I try to re-examine how I look at the world, which seems to take away the fear of drowning from my present state of mind.

Now that I’m writing all of what I do out, it seems to be a pretty impressive list of what I do get accomplished. I’m a pretty driven woman, so I always have very big plans and dreams for the future. Perhaps, I could also pare down my list of what I want to accomplish in a day, in a week, in my life…nah! I’d rather think big and not get it all done, then be sitting around with nothing to do.

 What are some of the ways that you have of maintaining your sanity? Do you have some special ways to trick yourself into getting more done?

Why not leave a comment as to your thoughts on this posting. Please take a minute, fill out the form below or by clicking on the “comments/no comments link” at the top of the posting, and then share your ideas with the rest of us. We all grow when we share our thoughts and impressions, so why not join our growing community of those who appreciate art quilts and textile arts. We’d love to hear from you!… and PLEASE tell like minded souls about this blog! The more readers and contributors, the more I write.

You can see more of my art work on my web site at www.fiberfantasies.com (be patient as it loads; it’s worth it), my healing work at www.hearthealing.net and can find me on Google + , Facebook (for Transition Portals) Facebook (for Fiber Fantasies),  and Twitter.

To find out how to buy my art work, please check out “How to Buy my Art Work” in the “Pages” section to the right of this blog.

Category: No Artwork - It's All About Me! / Tags: , , , ,

Finding Your Voice – What’s Your Style?

August 6, 2012 / / No comments

Nancy Smeltzer,art quilterTwo things have recently caused me to think about an artist’s voice, or what you as a creative person are trying to say to the world. One was a client in my long distance spiritual practice who doesn’t feel that she has an artistic voice, while. in her opinion, a lot of other people seem to have one. She has a lovely web site, with an interesting number of photos of her work which many people would be proud to call their own. My take is that my telling her she has a wonderful style of work won’t be real for her until she heals around what is keeping her from seeing that fact.

The second occurrence has been cleaning out my studio of a huge stack of art magazines. I’m making space in my life for all kinds of possibilities, including a new man in my life, and a lot of things need to go. As I was flipping through the articles, deciding what to save, I came across “Find Your Voice” in the Jan/Feb, 2012 issue of “Cloth, Paper, Scissors” by Julie Fei-Fan Balzer, and “… Finding Your Voice as an Artist” by Lyric Kinard, in the June/July 2012 issue of “Quilting Arts“. I love both of these artists, but I chose to deliberately not read their articles until after I wrote this piece, as I wanted to speak to how I found my own voice. Having a client bring up the issue and finding both of these articles on the same day for me was a great big tug on my sleeve from the Universe to write about the topic.

I guess that I don’t think of me having a voice, so much as I have a distinctive style. I’ve gotten to the point where people see my work on-line, in an article, or in an exhibition, and they say, “Oh. I knew that was yours’!” I guess I really am one of the most lavish with my button and bead embellishments on fabric, at least from what I can find on the Net. I wrote in a posting earlier that at first I didn’t want to be known for all those little tiny buttons and beads, but have accepted that people like the look. I also enjoy the Zen quality of the sewing, and so, after lots of years of sewing, I’m about buttons and beads. I invite you to poll your own audiences and ask for more specifics as to what people like about your work, and listen for what is repeated over and over. That will give you a hint as to how your public perceives you.

I also encourage you to produce, produce, produce. It’s like writing, the more you create art, the better you get,and the better you get, the more you create. I was at the Picasso museum in Barcelona, Spain, in 1982, where they had a rather long gallery of a week’s worth of canvases that he had produced. There were about twenty pieces, each about  26″ x 32″  or 66 cm x 81cm… (please note – this is an approximation based purely on memory, they may have been bigger.) He was working out a theme with a portrait that used pretty much the same colors throughout. One thing that I noticed was how prolific he was. The second thing, was that most of what he produced, IMO, was not very good, or at least not to the standards that he seemed to have set for himself at the time. I actually like the next to the last one he made better than the final piece. My big a-ha was that even the “Big Guys” don’t always hit home runs with each and every piece. That realization gave me “permission” to just play with my work and have fun, not setting out to make “BIG ARTISTIC STATEMENTS!” (neon signs and planes flying by with banners optional with this pronouncement.)

So, I encourage you to get out there and play, and your voice will evolve. You will become the voice of YOU, which will probably not be what you thought it was going to be. Some very good advice I got from Nancy Crow, a very famous art quilter, early on in my career, was to make art to please yourself and not chase after making pieces to be in a specific show. After you have a body of work, the exhibits and gallery options will open up to you.

Now, I’m glancing at the articles that I spoke about in the second paragraph above. A gem from Julie Fel-Fan Balzer is “What does it mean to be artistically authentic? For me, It’s about accepting and embracing my strengths and weaknesses.” O-O-Oh! That’s a good one! Lyric Kinard adds this brilliant insight… “Becoming an artist with a strong voice is the process of growing into your ability to portray your vision as you, alone, have experienced it.” That’s what all of the marketing classes that I’m taking have spoken about, too. In a world filled with so many look-alikes, only you alone has had the unique combinations of experiences that are YOU! I encourage you to go out and show us how you like to play and how your filters have shaped your view of the world.

 How did you go about finding your voice or unique look? or… What are you still struggling with in finding your voice? I’d love to see a discussion get started about some insights you’d like to share.

Why not leave a comment as to your thoughts on this posting. Please take a minute, fill out the form by clicking on the “comments/no comments link” at the top of the posting, and then share your ideas with the rest of us. We all grow when we share our thoughts and impressions, so why not join our growing community of those who appreciate art quilts and textile arts. We’d love to hear from you!

You can see more of my art work on my web site at www.fiberfantasies.com and can find me on Google + , Facebook,  and Twitter.

To find out how to buy my art work, please check out “How to Buy my Art Work” in the “Pages” section to the right of this blog.

Category: No Artwork - It's All About Me! / Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Button, Button, I’ve got the Buttons!

June 18, 2012 / / No comments

Nancy Smeltzer, art quilterOK, so what’s this fascination with buttons? There are a lot of art quilters out there who use buttons and beads on their creations, but I’ve yet to find one who is quite as obsessive as me. I suppose that in the big wide world of afflictions,a “button obsession” is pretty benign, but if you were to look at the bulging boxes on the sagging shelves in my studio, you might begin to think differently. Then, we won’t even discuss the strains on my checkbook. That problem might be just too scary to face!

There’s something about those little round objects that just appeals to me. Yes, buttons come in a wide range of shapes, but the vast majority of them are round. This arrangement makes for ease in slipping through a buttonhole, which I hear tell some people actually use buttons to fasten clothes together. Strange, but I rarely think of them in that way, as a clothes fastener, unless one of my own is dangling precariously by a thread or two. Then I will actually, out of sheer necessity, sew a button back on to one of my pieces of clothing. However, that very wise adage of “A stitch in time, saves nine”seems to be lost on me when it comes to my own wardrobe. An art quilt that has sagging buttons or beads, somehow, always gets cared for.

Most of the time, when I’m dealing with buttons, it’s with sheer delight as I am pawing through one of my boxes looking for the perfect one to adorn a particular spot on a new art quilt. Since they are color sorted, I have to haul them out one box at a time. That job is getting harder, since I recently pinched a nerve in my neck doing abdominal crunches in a folding chair with an overhead bar to pull down on. While my stomach sculpting endeavors have been put on hold for awhile, I still am trying to sew, albeit, in new ways of holding the frame and catching the needle differently. Sew, I will, no matter what the challenges.

However, I digress, which is not hard for me to do… back to buttons. The little round shapes seem to be the easiest for me to place as embellishments. While sometimes, I will use square ones, elongated rectangles, and the other countless shapes that buttons come in, they seem to be difficult to lie as straight as I want them to. If a square is off center a little, it quickly becomes obvious to the eye. If a round button wobbles a little, that doesn’t stick out as much as it seems that your eye movement just circles the shape. The flow of attention seems to go around that shape and then on to the next, which makes for a natural dance from one area to another on the surface of an art quilt.

Part of the fun for me is to combine a diverse number of elements into my designs. If you look back at some of my pieces, you’ll see how I try to balance the numbers of the same size, shape, type, and colors as to make for a co-ordiated look to the piece.After the fabric pieces are in place, I depend on the next smallest design elements, the buttons, to define the composition and to hold the viewer’s eye.

So buttons it is for me. I find them in numerous places, from wholesale accounts, yard sales, and people intrusting their grandmother’s button jar to me. I have often lusted after some lovelie on a friend’s blouse or dress, but have yet to cut one off of somebody else’s clothes…not yet anyway, although I have had people say as I admired a button… “You don’t have scissors on you, do you, Nance?”

Do you have an unusual design element that appears in your work? Where do you find your supplies? How do you feel about using them in your creations?

Why not leave a comment as to your thoughts on this posting. Please take a minute, fill out the form by clicking on the “comments/no comments link” at the top of the posting, and then share your ideas with the rest of us. We all grow when we share our thoughts and impressions, so why not join our growing community of those who appreciate art quilts and textile arts. We’d love to hear from you!

You can see more of my art work on my web site at www.fiberfantasies.com and can find me on Google + , Facebook,  and Twitter.

To find out how to buy my art work, please check out “How to Buy my Art Work” in the “Pages” section to the right of this blog.

Category: No Artwork - It's All About Me! / Tags: , , , , ,

Zen Hours of Stitching

June 6, 2012 / / No comments

Art quilter, Nancy SmeltzerI will have to begin today by giving credit to a fellow art quilter, Kathy Loomis for the title of today’s posting. In an email exchange, we talked about what I call “The Time of the Long Sew”, and she responded with “Yes, the Zen hours of stitching”. What we were referring to is that “zone” that artists find themselves in when the piece is really going well. Hours may have gone by, but it only seems like a few minutes. “What! It’s midnight already?” I’ve often thought, as I wanted to finish this one section before going to bed. At times like that, it’s as if the piece and I are breathing as one.

I think that any form of repetitive motion can instill in a person this inner peace. From my healing work, my take is that a bipedal induced soothing state of being was wired into us early on when we were still small enough to slosh around inside of our mothers. That right,left – right, left movement as our mothers walked seems to be inherit in the human unconscious. While I rarely sew while I walk, I do have a rhythm when I work. I stitch down through the top of the fabric with my right hand, catch the needle underneath with my left, and pass the needle back up to the surface. That counts as a rhythm, right?

People often ask me how I have the patience to sew on all those little tiny beads. I respond with the fact that my sewing requires no patience at all in comparison to teaching 7th grade science for 27 years. At least my art quilts don’t stick pencils up their noses or flick spitballs around the room to get attention.

My art quilts do command my attention however, as this Nancy “gets ancy” if I don’t sew on a regular basis. My fingers actually feel itchy as they need to be moving in their usual patterns, and I get quite grumpy if it’s been too long since I’ve had my sewing “fix”. To get it, I’ll even put up with the occasional spills and picking seed beads out of the carpet as an occupational hazard of my work in order to do what I do. However, on a plane, those little beads can really bounce quite a distance.

My final piece for my MFA at the Maryland Institute, College of Art in Baltimore was an art quilt. While I wasn’t adding beads to my work at that time, it took 650 hours to complete. I know this because the head of the Crafts department was a jeweler and felt that fiber artists didn’t put in enough time into their work. So in order to appease him, I had to keep a sewing journal of dates and times. He was rather amazed that one would spend that much time on “just a quilt”. I imagine that by now, he is long gone, but is watching from some distant place as I lean over my latest creation. “Sorry, I take it all back”, I can hear him saying. “I guess fiber artists do put in a lot of time.” “Ya think?” I respond.

What delights you about your own medium? Is there a special part of completing your creations that brings you inner peace?

Why not leave a comment as to your thoughts on this posting. Please take a minute, fill out the form by clicking on the “comments/no comments link” at the top of the posting, and then share your ideas with the rest of us. We all grow when we share our thoughts and impressions, so why not join our growing community of those who appreciate art quilts and textile arts. We’d love to hear from you!

You can see more of my art work on my web site at www.fiberfantasies.com and can find me on Google + , Facebook,  and Twitter.

To find out how to buy my art work, please check out “How to Buy my Art Work” in the “Pages” section to the right of this blog.

Category: No Artwork - It's All About Me! / Tags: , , , ,
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