More on Slow Art

Yesterday’s post got me thinking about the huge variety of slow art, and the difference between assembling pre-packaged items and working with simple tools and creating on your own. I’ve had some more random thoughts that haven’t unified themselves, but may if I put them in one place.

1. Does the huge variety of pre-designed, cut, colored, pasted, printed and available products for collage, scrapbooking, and altered books encourage creativity or stifle it?

2. There seem to be a lot of specific tools that do one specific task–apply glue, heat objects, flatten clay. It seems to me that they could have designed a multi-purpose machine for a certain art. They invented the fax/phone/copier for communication, why not a die-cutter/color-applier/printer?

3. Is the flooding of the choices in paints, embossing tools, glues, fibers really to help artists achieve exact creativity, or it is more to sell product? If the favorite hobby among American women is shopping (according to studies I’ve read), isn’t is a great marketing idea to combine shopping with new craft products? Is the goal simply encouraging more spending, more acquiring?

4. When my son was small, I purchased coloring books for him and fell in love with the wonderfully soothing task of coloring. Then I purchased them for myself. I’d sit there and use new crayons–waxy and smelling of ideas. It was clearly not creative; I was prosaic–blue sky, green grass. I found it calming and soothing, and it was one of the steps that led me to other, more ambitious parts of my life–meditation eventually replaced coloring. So did making my own art. It was a step along the way.

5. What is the leading edge of art? What changes make progress and which ones are useless? Is there ever a way to know? When the computer came out, I scorned computer art, but now I use Photoshop to create virtual collages I could not achieve with paper and scissors. And those collages don’t exist anywhere except on my computer. They aren’t “real.” No one can hold them. Does that make them less art?

Just random thoughts from an art retreat. Nice to have time to think.

–Quinn McDonald spends time thinking about art, writing, and the connection the two make between people. See her work at QuinnCreative.com  Images, top to bottom: directomedia.com;  commons.wikimedia.com; creativespirit.com (c) 2007. All rights reserved.

Cover girl at last

 

About a year ago, I decided to give up my work a a jewelry designer and return to my roots as a paper-maker. I had made paper before, and found it deeply satisfying. Now I began to use other people’s papers as well, making notecards, bowls and journal covers. When I noticed that The Crafts Report had an issue geared to paper artists coming up, I followed up on the call for entries and sent in my pictures and summary for their “Insights” section.

An editor sent me an email and said the image of my bowls might make the cover. I held my breath. Jessica Marcotte took amazing pictures of the bowls, and I wanted it for her as much as for myself.

Then I got the news: the images would be on the April, 2007 cover. After years of trying new ideas, making bowls that worked and those that didn’t, finally, I made the cover of a national magazine.

Big grin. Happy heart. Here it is, and next to it, the inside half-page about the bowls. I didn’t even mind that the image was flopped on the cover. If you want to read the copy on the smaller image (on the right), click on the photo to see a larger, readable size.

–Quinn McDonald is an artist and writer. See her work at QuinnCreative.com