The Thing You Just Knew You Could Do

Image: Sarah drawn by Sarah's Mom, circa 1984

Remember when you were a kid and when you saw someone do something, you thought, “I can do that, too?” And then you just DID it, in your kid way? That hopefully didn’t result in serious injury? :) What was that thing for you?

I remember an episode of Reading Rainbow that showed a person playing a Koto. (I’ve already gone down the Youtube hole looking for this episode, I think it’s s05 e04, “The Paper Crane.” Here's a different video example.) I gathered up an empty shoebox, paper cups, and rubber bands. I wrapped the rubber bands around the shoebox, using the paper cups as bridges. Then I put paper clips on my fingertips and plucked away at my instrument. And then it was time for dinner.

I haven’t always been that confident. But as an improvisational quilter, I keep that YES sign turned on. I learned to apply the “Yes, and” mentality to quilting from Sherri Lynn Wood. If that sounds familiar, it’s a principle of improv theater as well. In my studio, the conversation is usually, “What if I did ____?” followed by “YES. DO IT.” 

Try saying "Yes, and..." to something today.

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All Things Fowl for A Hiding Place

All Things Fowl Scratchboard, 10 x 8 inches, 2016 by Sarah Atlee. $330 For purchase inquiries, contact [Artspace] at Untitled at info@1ne3.org or by calling 405.815.9995

This post first appeared on my Patreon page.

A Hiding Place: Artists Respond to Poetry

"As children we all played hide and seek. We learned through that game: the stillness of hiding and the necessity of being found. Both are essential to living the communal life. this collaborative project expolores these themes through poetry and art. We have generated a creative conversation of the senses, of image and movement and language, so that what is hidden can be known."

- From the statement by curator and poet Jane Vincent Taylor

All Things Fowl is based on Jane Vincent Taylor's poem, "Being Little Catholic Girls." A snippet:

We lit candles. It was dangerous. Incense smoked out all things foul.

About the Imagery

The composition is based on traditional Byzantine icon paintings. Guillem Ramon-Poqui's book The Technique of Icon Painting (Amazon) is a great resource on this topic.

Who's that hen? The nun's habit and background images are inspired by the early Christian mystic and polymath, Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179). You can read about her remarkable life on Wikipedia.

Among her accomplishments, Hildegard invented an alphabet and language known as the Lingua Ignota. The little hula doll in the corner is using Hildegard's Litterae Ignotae to say "Aloha."

Scratchboard is a wonderful process of reductive drawing. It's all about what you take away. And the level of detail I can get with my x-acto knife is so pleasing.

A Hiding Place opens at [Artpsace] at Untitled on Thursday, July 28, and will be up through September 10. Visit the gallery website for more details.

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From the Archives: Fictional Portraits, 2005-06

Stripey Lady. Mixed media on found fabric, 2005 by Sarah Atlee.

Mask Lady 2. Ink on paper (sketchbook page), 2005-06 by Sarah Atlee.

Yellow Girls. Mixed media on canvas, 2005 by Sarah Atlee.

Brideshead Revisited, Revisited. Oil on found fabric, 2005 by Sarah Atlee.

Eggs (I Only Gave You Some) for Shopper!

Eggs (I Only Gave You Some) Graphite on archival digital print 20 x 16 inches framed, $895 2014 by Sarah Atlee - some rights reserved

Shopper! The Art Show A Curious Collection of Found Shopping Lists & Artists' Renditions of Those Who Made Them

Curated by Tessa Raven Bayne

When: 16 August - 14 September 2014

Where: Hancock Creative Shop, 116 S 2nd St., Guthrie, Oklahoma (map link)

Take a decade's worth of found shopping lists, add visual artists to reimagine the lists' authors, mix with writers spinning colorful tales of these shoppers, and you get a collaborative summer art show that's sure to deliver.

The shopping list that inspired Eggs.

The shopping list that prompted my imagined portrait.

Eggs (I Only Gave You Some), detail view, graphite on archival digital print

A closer look at Eggs.

I created Eggs using an experimental process. I began by taking hi-res scans of ledger paper, moving the paper around during scanning to achieve interesting distortions. I printed the resulting scan onto several different high-quality inkjet papers. Using a range of soft pencils from 3B to 9B, I tested the tooth of each paper to see which surface held up best. I settled on Hahnemuehle Museum Etching.

The drawing is based on a collage sketch:

Eggs (I Only Gave You Some), collage sketch, 2014 by Sarah Atlee

Many different sources went into this conceptual mockup. Photographs of Evelyn Nesbit (who inspired the Gibson Girl image), the New York Public Library's Maps archive, and postcards from Google Earth, just to name a few.

As I predicted, the distorded grid of the ledger paper background image informed and melded with the shapes I drew. I'm very pleased with the results and will repeat this process for future drawings.

Sketchbook 2012: No Trespassing Quilt

No Trespassing, mixed media collage sketch, 2012 by Sarah Atlee

Like the Millennium Quilt series, I made this drawing while my mother was recovering from surgery. I thought it would be interesting to create a geometric composition based on a (blurry) photograph. Abstraction through pixellation, although the original photograph is the digital media, whereas the drawing below is analog.

Fijian, jiving, and scheme are cool words.

Sketchbook 2012: No Trespassing quilt sketch, ink and colored pe

No Trespassing Quilt, ink and colored pencil on paper, 2012 by Sarah Atlee