wall of leaves after peak and on to loss

I didn't go to the studio yesterday because I wanted to head up into the mountains (before the local peak tourism season ends) to take more photos for the Tourism and Tragedy series I've been working on.

This is the time of year when people from all over drive up into the Smoky Mountains National Park to witness and photograph the fall colors. Seems everyone is looking for a beautiful view and for ways to preserve the experience.

When I got to the mountains I (and every other driver) found that all routes into the park were closed for some mysterious reason, which I've since found to be because hurricane strength winds knocked a bunch of trees down the day before.

So I had to improvise a strategy that didn't involve me going into the park proper... not that I wasn't already improvising. I just hadn't planned on all the roads being gated closed. The improvisation was more that I wasn't fixed on what kind of photos I was going to take. I only knew that they would be more immersion type images than sweeps of vistas from afar, and that they would be composites of a site (or sites) taken over a period of weeks (or months) as the season progressed and moved into winter... depending on how long I wanted to keep it going and how large I wanted the final piece to be.

The day's photos were so so, but since this particular piece/s is ongoing, that's not too much of a problem. Here are a few of the first images:







I should acknowledge that people are "loving this park to death," so to speak. Unfortunately all the pollution from the motorized vehicles, among other sources, is killing the trees. Here's but one of the many articles.

October open studio, artist's statement

The working title of this series is called Tourism and Tragedy or How I learned to love where I am.
Image from L.A. Trees #1 and Picture Postcards with Skylines

This body of work is a subjective look at migration, tourism and the difficulty of presence. I'm interested in how an individual experience of a particular place is mediated (and somewhat determined by) language, narrative, memory and experiences of other places – both real and imagined.

Formally, the work plays with stillness and sequences / place and time. For instance, still photography is paired with written narrative in L.A. Trees #1: Palm & Sunset (Paradise / Apocalypse). Although the video medium affords a more time-based approach, movement through this particular palm-treed space has been frozen with a short sequence of photos at sunset. This stillness allows the narrative captioning to be the driving element that marks time.

In Picture Postcards with Skylines, the medium has been similarly altered. The sequence of digital images marks not only the subtle changes in two different landscapes (CA and TN) over a period of a few minutes, but constructs a fragmented panorama of imaginary place. Powerlines intersecting the skies – accentuated with machine stitching – interrupt and fragment the postcard quality of the photos and draw the two places together.

Green is the Color of my Nostalgia plays with abstraction as a parallel to incomplete memory and the psychological processes that perfect and limit recollection. Here I have created a single representation of two mountain spaces (The Smoky and Santa Monica Mountains) and their details from memory. The choice of materials (cheesecloth, plastic, etc) combined with sparse drawing and machine stitching reinforces the feeling of impossibility that occurs when trying to match physical places to my memories of them.

New Studio and October First Friday

On Monday October 2, I moved my studio to the beautiful Emporium Building downtown that houses the Arts and Culture Alliance and their galleries. It's an exquisite space in a refurbished old building with lots of brick and hardwood. I'm so happy to be in such a location with so many other artists and part of such a great community.

On the first Friday of every month, the Emporium Building is the central host to the city's First Friday art events, the big opening night for all the galleries that spills out into the streets. Hundreds of people come to these events, and on October 6th there were over 1000 guests – pretty amazing for a small university town like Knoxville, TN.

During the opening, I met lots of great people. Of particular note is one of my fellow artists with a studio in the same building, David Habercom. The work he had up for the event was from the series Under The Bridge – really important work in a place like Knoxville at this time. His work and our conversation about the ideas behind it resonated with my own work and thoughts I have about nostalgia and the difficulty of presence in any one place.

So, I moved in on Monday and by Friday was experiencing my first open studio in the new location. I showed a couple of works in progress from the series, Tourism and Tragedy or How I learned to love where I am, and a related video I made while I was still living in Los Angeles, titled L.A. Trees #1: Palm and Sunset (paradise/apocalypse) and an artist's statement about the series. For an open studio exhibit in a space I'd only had possession of for a few days... it was enough.

Here are a couple of poorly lit pictures of my space that I took today:

another sky line study

As I was getting off the freeway from one of my Appalachian road trips this weekend, I saw this flock of migrating birds on the power lines, rolled down my window and took a few pictures. Here's one:

Fig Leaf Loincloth and yarn p0rn

Yesterday was the first opportunity I had to get over to Loops (here's the website). I've wanted to go to this yarn store since they opened in the spring, but never seemed to get around to it.

I got this lovely yarn in the picture below to finish off my fig leaf project – part of the Wardrobe for Paradis series. It was supposed to be the strategically placed focal point of the Bird’s Nest Dress, but the fig leaf has separated itself from the dress and morphed into a garment all its own – a loin cloth.


The yellow-green yarn is 100% bamboo. This stuff is luxurious. Silky and almost hemp-like. It's beautiful. The pink stuff in the left background is a silk / wool blend -- extremely soft and silky. Both are imported from Japan and carried by Habu textiles based in NYC. Check them out; they even have a silk covered stainless steel yarn. Wow wee. Both the yarns I bought have just the right amount of sheen for what I need in this piece.

Process notes and photos are in the previous post.

Fig Leaf / free-weaving process

I used my own free-weaving process that I sort of make up as I go along. I've laid out the steps I went through below. (Forgive the poor quality of the pics.)

I first drew a cartoon on cardboard from a composite of found photo images – the cardboard cartoon was both loom and a loose color / value guide

Then I cut around the cartoon

Next, I stitched in the main structures (in this case veining) with strong cotton yarn sewn directly to the cardboard

And then stitched it to another piece of slightly larger cardboard and outlined the whole leaf with heavy wool yarn that I secured with thread

I trimmed the base cardboard and cut notches in the edges to hold loose threads… then began free-weaving

I just kept filling in more areas and changing threads often

At this point, I’ve woven to the density I want. This is weeks worth of work for something not much bigger than my extended hand, but is exactly what I want as far as size and structure

…the back side with all the loose threads tucked in their respective notches… and here you can see the source of cardboard – a pizza box from The Red Onion, a fine mom and pop pizzeria with great pizza.

Then I separated the two cardboards with the seam ripper

The two pieces of cardboard

This is the tricky part: I had to cut away the structural yarns from the original cartoon being careful not to pull them out of the weaving

The freed form… looks like a sea creature

I wove the ends back into the weaving as I would with a tapestry… and again, a very long process… only half-way done at this point

The front side

Studio assistant and Bird’s Nest Dress

I'm making what I call a Bird's Nest Dress, which requires that I search out every string, cord, ribbon and yarn that I have to see if it's worthy to be woven into this piece... Thus I have created the perfect cat opportunity.

Actually the full title of the dress is Bird's Nest with Fig Leaf. Ahem. It's still all about the hair.

Home Studio

I keep my threads in a vintage card catalog indexed with paint chips. Above it, I have an inexpensive piece of metal from the hardware store used as a magnet board to hold images related to current projects.


I put the documentation of shows and projects in these black / gray project boxes, slides for teaching in the smaller boxes... more tools and supplies in the tall vintage filing cabinet. I use the smaller filing cabinet for paper filing. I found this great little filing cabinet (it opens from the top and is on casters!) for $6 at the St. Vincent De Paul thrift store in Los Angeles.


more shelving with wire baskets on lower levels holding projects and Frieda, my dressform, in front of some corkboards... and that'd be Frank in the background making salsa or something in the kitchen


more of the corkboards (which I painted white to reflect light and see work more easily) and my trusted old Singer and my and Lily the cat's favorite piece of furniture – the pressing table. I love my pressing table.


the pressing table again, the Consew industrial machine, and some tools

In the ways "we mock our eyes with air" and more about skies

And one of those near perfect pieces of conceptual work: Vik Muniz’s Pictures of Clouds
...right up there with Yoko Ono’s Painting to See the Skies

"It is one of the first imaginative exercises we perform in the world, looking up to find a horse, a flower, a belching dragon."

more pieces of sky

Garden Plot 19: fallow again