Natural Dye Color on Wool, 1974
07 February 2009
Joinery Form
Joinery Form, 1983
private collection, Louisville
screen printed cotton, acetate, stitching, fiber fill
Republicant Party
No thanks to the many self-serving Senators from THAT party who created this Bush Stimulus package to begin with. Best wishes to the RNC attempt, after 6 votes, in selecting their new party chairman to lead the RNC into a 'new' direction as they lose more seats in the coming elections. Another Sarah Palin plan to fool WE THE PEOPLE. This country needs leadership, not (gridlock) business as usual. This old mode of thinking lacks creativity as Detroit can illustrate. Imagine if Social Security had adopted the Wall Street ethic! And you managed to remove EDUCATION from the formula! Brilliant!
Not ONE Republican voted in the first round for the approved stimulus package today possibly thinking they will not be blamed for the eventual collapse of our US economy for supporting such "pork". This economy headed south during the MARTHA STEWART diversion when fat cats used a successful woman as a one-year COVERUP of what they knew Wall Street was doing. Insider trading? How hypocritical for a Party to create a climate of FAILURE then deny a recovery plan to bail out what can only be called criminal activity. You have failed the Global Test again. You are the weakest link, goodbye.
We the people are about to remind YOU THE SENATE what you are hired to do. WE THE VOTERS will turn the tide; artists, laborers, union and non-union Americans will replace you in your comfortable jobs due to your lack of vision. It's all about JOBS. The people have spoken and when politicians refuse to HEAR the voice of the people you will be HISTORY, literally, past tense. Equal pay for women has finally arrived with this new vision.
This is just the beginning of the end to a two party system functioning in a bubble of TOXIC POLITICS as usual. Lead by Mitch McConnell, who thinks compromise is dangerous, but thinks Americans want cooperation from their leaders...will follow the likes of Jim Bunning who will be voted out of office and back to the century he knows best, the 20th.
And if another VietNam comes out of all this "strategery" then you just "misunderestimated" how intelligence and military planning never changes.
Not ONE Republican voted in the first round for the approved stimulus package today possibly thinking they will not be blamed for the eventual collapse of our US economy for supporting such "pork". This economy headed south during the MARTHA STEWART diversion when fat cats used a successful woman as a one-year COVERUP of what they knew Wall Street was doing. Insider trading? How hypocritical for a Party to create a climate of FAILURE then deny a recovery plan to bail out what can only be called criminal activity. You have failed the Global Test again. You are the weakest link, goodbye.
We the people are about to remind YOU THE SENATE what you are hired to do. WE THE VOTERS will turn the tide; artists, laborers, union and non-union Americans will replace you in your comfortable jobs due to your lack of vision. It's all about JOBS. The people have spoken and when politicians refuse to HEAR the voice of the people you will be HISTORY, literally, past tense. Equal pay for women has finally arrived with this new vision.
This is just the beginning of the end to a two party system functioning in a bubble of TOXIC POLITICS as usual. Lead by Mitch McConnell, who thinks compromise is dangerous, but thinks Americans want cooperation from their leaders...will follow the likes of Jim Bunning who will be voted out of office and back to the century he knows best, the 20th.
And if another VietNam comes out of all this "strategery" then you just "misunderestimated" how intelligence and military planning never changes.
Vegetable Dye Natural Color
Vegetable Dye Color on Wool
crochet joined squares, 1975
sold to Antiques Buyer at St. James Court Art Fair
In the early 1970s when I began off-loom weaving, self-taught using a crudely built rigid heddle (since my undergraduate school, ironically in the textile-rich hills of eastern Kentucky, (MSU) had no textile program) and my love for fibers and textiles had been nourished by my Swedish Grandmother (origin of magnuson in blog & DBA). Madelyn Magnuson entrusted me with several family made quilts, doilies, and my grandfather's cotton twill sailor suit worn in his child portrait around the age of five. "You will take care of these things your grandfather just wants to get rid of", she would tell me whenever giving me another heirloom. Using poor judgement in selecting an heirloom as a wedding gift, one Magnuson family quilt, would be lost through "heavy use" and baby-burping precious moments during the baby making phase in the '90s. Along with that loss, through my own ignorance, of the red and green textile would go a family baptismal gown, tossed away like a tea-stained dishrag, which had endured over one-hundred years of use, worn by my mother and uncle, my first mentor in photography. Some people want a brand new SEAR'S baptismal gown over 'tradition' when it comes to a photo-op. This would confirm one of the many things I would learn from a textile expert, Alma Lesch, Kentucky's pioneer in modern textile collage.
I would be introduced to Alma Lesch during the early '70s after publication of her 1971 Vegetable Dye recipe book (which many Kentucky fiber artists used as a resource, some called it the "bible" for Natural Dyeing) when Mrs. Lesch visited the local high school's art program, where I was one of three visual art teachers. Mrs. Lesch agreed to be guest speaker for the Art Club. Batik was a popular textile process at the time. By sharing my self-taught attempts with Alma Lesch in weaving, carding raw fleece (wool in the grease) and using the drop spindle to make thread, became a common ground after my first meeting with the innovator who created her signature form, the Fabric Collage Portrait. Alma Lesch, became my fiber mentor, eventually warning me, after becoming good friends and realizing we had a common denominator when it came to extended family, that ignorant people do not appreciate textiles on a level we take for granted being fiber artists. "They wouldn't know a K-MART quilt from a hand-made quilt", she remarked after declaring one of my great-grandmother's quilts as museum quality. Knowing how many people had commissioned fabric collages in which some family clothing was used, I asked Alma to consider a commission after showing her my grandfather's childhood sailor suit. "Why don't you make a portrait?" was her advice. Years later, while working on a series of knitted socks turning a pair into a trio of similar if not unmatching color patterns she remarked, after telling her I was giving a set to my growing family of neices and nephews, "You don't give them these socks do you?" I had learned to turn heels in the early '90s and shared this technique with her in our late night working sessions, often on weekends. I knew these socks would end up in a washing machine and felted to beyond use in the heat of a dryer...
Vegetable dyestuffs grow abundantly in any Kentucky summer. From walnuts to coreopsis, Queen Anne's lace to sumac many years of harvesting and preparation of the dyepot would yield pound after pound of durable color joyfully created in the practice eventually leading to my graduate study in 1980 during Mrs. Lesch's last year of teaching at U of L. My screened fabrics became non-functional forms based on Japanese Joinery forms used in carpentry and wooden contruction, far from the initial exploration of vegetable dyes and natural yarns.
01 February 2009
Ice Storm Meltdown
as the crippling '09 Ice Storm begins to thaw the smell of cedar reminds me of the magestic paintings of Emily Carr as I saw a fallen cedar tree at my back door steps... check out her Canadian paintings by googling her name