What I've Learned Since Last Year

My first art piece of 2015 -- a beaded portrait of Karen O (lead singer of Yeah Yeah Yeahs) titled They Don't Love You Like I Love You, part of a series I'm calling IDOL EYES.

~

What haven't I learned since last year?

2014 was a big year for me. I decided to prioritize my art career and it took me to some great places -- the most thrilling being that, for the first time in my life, I felt like I found a path in the right direction. I've got focus, motivation, excitement for what I am doing and deep down it feels right.

Can I get a  HELL YES  for that??!

As much as I avoid lingering in the past, I have found that a little self-reflection on where I used to be can be a great indicator on how far I've come. If you're familiar with me or this blog, you get the idea that I like to dabble in a variety of crafts and mediums. I've put on a lot of different shoes in my short adult life and a lot of them have already been tossed off or buried at this point. The ONE THING that I have been very dedicated to is journaling. I've been consistent with my writing since I graduated college in '08 and started this journey into figuring out a career path. In fact, my journal has been a continuing source of inspiration for my art -- it's where I tend to find the fragments of words and thoughts that turn into artworks. 

One rando thing I started doing, would be to open up my journal to today's date last year or years prior and see what I was doing then. (It's amazing the things we forget!) What I discovered in this little game is how powerfully it has shown me just how far I have come. It's easy to get wrapped up in your plans for today, this month, this year, and forget how hard you work just to simply be where you are today. There's an entry in 2009 where I announce to myself that I want to be a textile artist. I say I don't know what that looks like or what kind of work I want to make, I just know that that's the title I want. I was blown away when I saw that because  1). I had no memory of wishing for that and 2). I'm there now. That dream I wished for came true. Or maybe more like, I made it happen. It gets me thinking about what I can wish for today that consciously or subconsciously I can work towards in the years to come. Sometimes I get wrapped up in developing a business plan with clearly-stated goals (not easy) but sometimes if you take the first few steps, you can be led to beautiful possibilities that your mind hadn't even thought to go.

Moral I'm getting from all this? 

I should do now, worry less about defining the big picture, trust the process, appreciate how far I've come and look forward to the open doors that I didn't see coming.

Watch Him As He Goes (Dave Grohl), 2008. Back in my Foo Fighters phase (hey, can't say no to a good beard!) 

My year started out with one of those unknown doors swinging in my direction. When I built my website, I put all work I had on there that reflected my self-appointed title of textile artist. Not much at the time, but I did have these beaded portraits that I made in school and had always enjoyed. I hadn't thought much about getting back into beading, it was another one of those crafts that I had dabbled in at one point in my life and then hadn't picked back up. 

I Would Die 4 U (Prince), 2013. Bow down to him, children! (Still in my Prince phase :)

Then here comes the door a-swinging...

Remember how I made that piece for a poster competition? Welllll, one of the reasons I wanted to enter something was because the competition was being hosted by the best gallery in Greensboro, and probably one of the best in North Carolina. And I thought maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea to put my name in front of their faces. Really, I was going for the prize money but there was also a little voice in the back of my head that told me this was a good move. And I was right. The fabulous lady who runs the shop in front of the gallery saw my knitted piece, sought out my website, and found my beaded portraits. Turns out that Greenhill Gallery had an upcoming self-portrait exhibit and she thought these pieces would be perfect for the shop at that time.  !!!!!!!!!  

Those eyes, Frida! 

We met, she provided me with wonderful words of encouragement and gave me the idea to build shadow boxes for these lil' felt pieces, along with giving me motivation to build them, a place to hang them, and (painful but oh so helpful) a deadline. Like a 2-week one!! I also knew I needed to make one new beaded piece to give myself a good number. 3 small ones and 1 larger one. Frida actually was sewn to a dress for my senior fashion collection and I made the decision to cut her from the cloth. The dress proved to be impossible to hang in an art setting and it was so small and it had sat in a trunk for years collecting weird smells. She needed a new life.

 So this all added to the super speed of last month but I couldn't be happier with how these turned out. Thankfully, Adam was willing to build me some last minute frames and I slowly got better with sanding and finishing. Seriously, how are you supposed to get a good lacquer finish out of a spray can in 35 degree weather?? I scraped by.

OBSESSED with how this matte black turned out behind Frida. We added a block behind the felt to give them a floating look and have them hanging from a nail. That way they can still be removed and held. I couldn't bear the idea of making fiber art that can't be touched. And I winced every time someone mentioned velcro.

After all the hustle and bustle of getting these finished, I realized that I was fulfilling another unspoken dream: to get a chance to show at Greenhill.  Well, I really want to get in the gallery but the shop is still a very respectful place to be, and now it's only a matter of time before I'm in the big room :) Mind you, I wasn't just blowing on dandelions and sitting on my butt, I've worked consistently to put myself in the way of influential people and places. What I'm saying is, I think it's okay to not have supremely-defined goals but if you put yourself out there in ways, dreams can come to you. Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes..

"The harder I work, the better luck I have."

 SIDE NOTE: I jumped for joy when I found this single, wild daffodil blooming in the wreckage of what used to be my wooded backyard. I thought that their great shoveling machines would've all but destroyed their vast rooted network. They used to bloom all over the place. I know that this is a good sign for the coming year and all that was destroyed was not totally lost.

I can't wait for spring.

Defining Success

My thinking of late seems to be maintaining a consistent theme: success. What does it mean to me and ... is it important?

A while back I made my frustrations apparent through a mostly negative blog post about, what I perceived to be, failed opportunities. Since then, I've been doing some soul-searching on where I'm going, what I really want, and I'm finding that I have a lot of preconceived notions on what "success" means. 

         For example, I thought that having people write about your work, buy your art, or even having lots of comments on your blog meant that you were successful. When you break that down, it means that I'm relying on justification from others to prove my worth. When I think about it, that doesn't seem to make sense. Only doing things for the approval of others? 

It reminds me of watching Project Runway (before I realized how much I couldn't stand that show) and how the designers that tended to fail were the ones who listened to the judges' advice maybe a little too much and changed their idea too frequently, to the point where it wasn't even their idea anymore. And then failing in the same ways, my senior year of college because of the same issues. That's why you hear so many people say 

trust your gut 

and

be true to yourself/your vision/your idea

...

so why am I not considering such sage advice when it comes to defining success?

Yesterday, I was watching a documentary on fashion designer, Marc Jacobs, and was so utterly struck by a comment the narrator made. It was talking about an earlier fashion show he did (if you know about his career, it was the grunge collection he did for Perry Ellis), he said, and I quote: 

"It was a critical success 

but a commercial failure."

What? So you're saying ... one of his most iconic lines, a show that I was taught in fashion school, the one that created a shift in the way modern women of the 90's dressed ... was a failure? I had to laugh at the dichotomy within this sentence. That's another point I've been coming back to this week       ..............       equating success with money.

I don't want money to have such a hold on me that it becomes the platform in which I make all my career decisions! Alas, I know too well that our society is built upon it but dammit! I don't want it to wholly dictate this part of my life; a career that I am attempting to build in the name of creative fulfillment!

So, I'm working on a new way to define success in my own career, in my own life, in my own heart.

My success is not determined by how many hours in a day I spend "working", or what kind of press I get for an art show, or how many people visited my website in the last month, or what OTHER PEOPLE are doing in their lives. 

From now on, I'm defining success by how excited I get to come up with an idea and see it through to execution, by the connections I make through my work, the observations I learn about myself that help me grow, my ability to keep a clean kitchen, exercising and eating healthy on a daily basis, staying positive and being a source of support for the ones I love.

My career is not my life, but it's a part of it, and I think I will be a whole lot more happy if I base my success on my own terms.

:)

A quick snap of the art show as it was being installed in Durham last Monday. More photos coming soon of the completed space!

I found a great quote the other day that I wanted to share. 

"The important thing to remember is that no project is the ultimate; each is a step along the road. Enjoy, experiment, take chances, have fun: this is the learning process. Learning to see, then using what we see is a lifetime project. I have yet to finish a piece that I couldn't visualize improvements to. I keep reminding myself of what a gallery-owner friend once told me. She said that she differentiates between art and craft, not by the medium, but by the attitude of the person who created the work. A craftperson produces the same thing over and over, an artist continues to change and grow."   

                                ---- Dorothy Bird

I feel like I have been straddling a line between art and craft for years; and the way I have perceived my own work, along with others' perceptions, has led me to constantly re-question this idea of what is art and what is craft, and what the hell am I doing??

In the Fashion Department at SCAD, craft was a 'dirty' word. A fashion designer was NEVER a crafter and the very idea led my professors to sticking their noses even higher in the air. Of course, this made me want to incorporate crafts even more into my designs. It was easy for me to see past the kitsch, housewife stereotypes that I believe they were hung up on, and instead saw the variety of skills and techniques that encompassed my notion of craft. Honestly, to this day, I still don't really get why they abhorred the idea so much.

In my need to always be different, I have relished the idea of blending two supposed different areas of concentration, in an attempt to see both of them in a new way. I have never once doubted my ability to blend art and craft successfully, but I can't help but hear the naysayers. The galleries that turn me away because they don't perceive what I'm doing as fine art. The people who look at my work and can't understand that it's not a sweater.  I guess there are those who have such ingrained ideas as to what fine art is and what knitting is that I perplex them with my muddling. And now I'm so far deep into it that I don't get what's so hard not to get. 

Today, as I slowly carve an art career path, the foundation I am building my name upon is entirely craft-based. Knitting, crochet, have completely replaced the traditional canvas, paints, brushes. I find that the limitations of knitting, the rules that cannot be changed, give me enough parameters to allow my creativity to flourish, and free myself from the 'blank canvas' syndrome. To me, this all feels right. 

So how do I define art and how do I define craft? I don't think either need to be limited to one person's definition. Isn't art a visual display of hand skill and execution? Don't tell me that you have never seen a quilt that expresses love and beauty. (If you haven't, let me know, and I will show you.)

So let's have a big middle finger towards the boundaries of definitions and stereotypes, and show the world what creativity really means by being open to it all.

Have to point an arrow towards this article from Beautiful/Decay  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------>  FIBER ARTIST LOVE

I'm sure y'all are aware of Google Alerts. A friend set me up one where every time my name gets published on the Internet, I receive an e-mail with a link to the article. This was about 4 years ago and since then I've only gotten obituary notices about Ann Tilley Shaw from Texas or Ann Tilley Wills from Alabama. Occasionally a genealogy notice but never anything that actually has to do with me. Needless to say, I was pretty floored to find a link to this article in my inbox that was not only about me but a rather glowing criticism on my art! I though Kristin Bauer summed me up pretty well, and I got to learn about some other artists that I hadn't heard of before (Hello, Erin M. Riley! Baller!) Anyways, I highly recommend setting up a Google Alert on your name because I'm sure there are people out there saying wonderful things about you and it will be just the thing that makes your day!

"Ann Tilley's fiber works, specifically her text based works strike a chord of nostalgia and domestic irony.  They are incredibly clever in their usage of phrase and their rendering and delivery captures certain moments of awkward American culture.  Patterns that are reminiscent of doilies and Cosby sweaters deliver humorously mismatched phrases in an aesthetic of cuddly kitsch."

IT'S ALL FAME FROM HERE, MOM! 

"Often people attempt to live their lives backwards: they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want so that they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then, do what you need to do, in order to have what you want."

                                              -MARGARET YOUNG


My new 5-year plan!

There are the moments that we save,

And the dreams that fade away.

And sometimes, they come together,

And we can walk through the room we made.

                                                                 -Future Islands    

Happy engagement, Katelin! We're so excited to celebrate with you in Durham!