Carol Larson - textile artist

Today I volunteered at the local art center. It was a festive experience and a very busy afternoon with lots of visitors. Their annual Dias de las Muertas exhibit is up and in full bloom, along with artwork from artisans north and south of the border.

When I wasn’t restaining 8 year old boys from continually ringing the service bell, cutting out leaves for the memory tree (I would have made a lousy kindergarten teacher!), or selling artwork, I was reading one of the magazines in the stack from a previous post. The magazine is Body and Soul, a Martha Stewart company publication. And while I am no MarthaStewart-phile, this is a really great periodical for those of us who believe in taking care of and extending the natural life of our blessed bodies.

I came across a regular feature titled Reader to Reader and this month’s topic was When Saying Goodbye is the Best Decision You can Make. As I read the brief stories, I kept thinking this subject sounded really familiar. And then there was a story that read just like mine, and at the end of it learned OMG, it is mine! Some months back I sent in my wisdom about saying goodbye as a good thing and never heard another word, until now, when it appeared in the November issue. So now I have been officially published in mainstream press!

Later in the day, I received an email about an online video of the exhibit Sense of Humor featuring my work Anti-Aging: Chemical Warfare. It can be seen here. It is several pieces into the video. That’s all the news fit to print!

Probably no other time do I feel like time’s a wastin’ than fall! My primary healer talks about how our bodies crave warm foods, rest and quiet even when it still feels like summer outside. How challenging it is to eat a bowl of beans on a hot October day! So I imagine this internal voice saying time’s a wastin is also connected to the change of the seasons.

This is the time of year when I also begin to evaluate changes I want to make in the coming year. There is something incredibly satisfying about the proscrastination of putting off to the new year that which one could really accomplish today!

Today I am captivated by how much I ‘have to’ do, and how one of my goals for 2010 should be time management. The total irony in this is I chose to retire at 50 (over a decade ago) so I no longer had ‘have to’s.’ Why I need time management is beyond me. My days are all mostly the same length and I certainly am no slouch. If I were any more prolific at the times when I do make art, we would have to add storage onto the house!

I could spend less time on the computer and sometimes I do. On the flip side, it is wonderful to have that connection to the outside world when one has chosen the life of an artist. Solitude is essential to the process, whereas interaction with others is essential to one’s peace of mind.

Some of the things on my to do list are to read through the building stack of periodicals on the kitchen table. Maybe I could terminate some subscriptions to give me less to read? Another on my to do is to practice using some software more so I really know how to use it and not just eek by everytime I do. Ah, but that is way too practical! And how about the stack of half-read books; actually only two are half-read, one read and forgotten so I want to re-read and one not read at all. Add to that the one my daughter is giving me that I just need to read! Ack…I should hire a reader.

Frankly, I am quite pleased with my use of time. I do take time to smell the roses, dine with friends, go to the movies, watch ‘drivel’ (as my husband calls it) on TV, sleep, eat well, exercise, contemplate, in addition to the business of art. I am present enough in my body to remember details of this year, which has just zipped by. So really, time is not a wastin’. I am just really choosy as to how I spend it. And one of my choices is to not do time management!

I have been swamped the past couple of weeks, completing new work to take to the gallery, and otherwise running the wheels off my car. Just this week alone I have four trips to Berkeley! I am beginning to know my way around the city with multiple and random concrete barriers, quite well.

While I shot this work earlier in the week, I just have not had the time to load it onto my website until now, so I invite you to have a look!

All five are wrapped onto stretcher bars and look fabulous! I have been toying with this idea for over a year. My main concerns had been about storage and shipping of inflexible work. Finally, I just decided to do it, and I may never again do flexible work! I love the entire process. Of course this will boot me out of quilt shows, but do I care? No! That is not my target market anyway.

I do not have the strength in my right hand grip to work the staple gun myself, so now hubby is involved in the process. He went from artist’s apprentice to artist’s pimp in less than 24 hours. Last I heard he was peddling my art at a local coffee house. I should be totally grateful now having an agent, but I am not feeling the mojo yet!!!

Coffee houses are not exactly the venue I am seeking, but if it gets my work out of the studio, perhaps it is okay. It is best to be gracious about it as I know from nearly 39 years of marriage that these are his love letters. It would be heartless to treat it or him any other way.

Today we braved commute traffic and a San Francisco full of tourists and sold out hotel rooms to take this piece to the San Francisco Design Center at 2 Henry Adams Street. Currents #7 will hang in the Baker Knapp & Tubbs showroom in the design center until November 13th. The design center is open to the trade and anyone with a resale card and is a veritable feast of all things decor and architectural. It is where architects and interior designers shop for their clients. In addition to drooling through the BK&T showroom, I also had a chance to look at another with an Asian flair. They had the most exquisite light fixtures made of pleated fabric, top to bottom and twisted into various shapes to resemble mushrooms of all varieties and flowers. These lights were fabulous.

I learned the design showrooms shed excess fabric weekly. These panels hang in the wings (picture a giant book) which decorators look through. They purchase from these samples and then sewers make up the pillows, linens, etc for the clients. The fabric samples change very quickly and those which are not snapped up by art students, designers and other textile junkies are then hauled off to be recycled somewhere.

The key is to be in extremely good physical shape for hauling large amounts of fabric, and running up and down the street doing so. I think I will set this as a goal! In order for me to be in the city early enough though might require an overnight in a 5 star hotel!

What I love most about putting letters into print is how cathartic it is. Often times when I am journaling, writing down the details of a dream or even writing this blog, I literally get an oh yeah right in the middle of the third sentence in the 2nd paragraph of the last page. And why is it the last page always? Because once I figure it out, I stop writing!

So it came to me after the last post that the reason I have been procrastinating on the marketing the Tall Girl Series is my life has become a desk job! I have no one to blame but myself, as I am a recovering workaholic. I can always find more work to do, more papers to push!

What came to me is this passive activity of propping myself in front of the PC for the majority of the day; day in, day out has just gotten quite frankly boring! And my well is empty. Rather than wait until January to start anew, I am starting now! I am stitching new work with ideas and fabrics for 3 more on the wall. I have been printing and dyeing fabric. I have been an actual artist…shocking as it may seem!

Today I took myself to lunch, tomorrow a movie. I even read today…wow! And a great article to boot about how when we choose to be artists, we choose a life of judgment. Someone is always judging us and our work.

And here I thought I chose a life of judgment just because it was familiar! The cloth in the photo is early Tall Girl Series work.

The amount of time I spend making art in comparison to the amount of time I spend marketing art is far less than one would believe. It is a good thing I am prolific when I do go into the studio or I would never make any new work! In addition to the nearly full-time job of record-keeping and marketing, I do my fair share of procrastinating.

The most frequently neglected is marketing the Tall Girl Series. I have a full spreadsheet of hot tips and referrals, a pile of calls for submissions and the time to do the work. But do I? No! I am so weary of marketing this project that I mostly procrastinate instead of just sitting down for a day or two and doing it. Like the laundry or the dishes, in a day or two, they repeat and there will be another pile!

Somewhere in my infinite wisdom I signed up for a team project through SAQA called the Visioning Project. The idea is the team approach to we get what we put out there. Thinking someone might have the easy button, I signed up. So now what I have is an audience to my procrastination. As if I don’t feel bad enough, I have a team of rah-rahs egging me on.

From the get-go I have been uncomfortable with the word TEAM. To me teams belong on grass, the green kind that stains your pants, but nowhere in the business world. I do not need a team to support me in delaying this goal! I will reach this goal, eventually but it may not be on the team schedule.

The deal is I had already accomplished much of my goal before the project even began. So once again I began by keeping company with people who are now learning what I learned some time ago. One of my personal goals this year was to remove myself from situations where there was nothing for me to learn. I had become the smart person in the room, as my friend calls it. Once again, on the visioning project I fear I am the smart person in the room.

What I really need from the team is a swift kick in the rear to get me re-motivated to keep trudging through the paperwork to market this socially important message. In the meantime, I’m playing WordSense!