Cloisters – Daryl's Blog

Just do it…

I’m in the final prep stages for my fall teaching extravaganza, I’ll be bouncing all over the country for the next couple of months, with sometimes only 48 hours to change suitcases and head out again. I’d like to think I’ve got this, and having an assistant has really helped me stay on task and focused.

I’ve spent the last week redoing all of the handouts I’ll be using, increasing font size, rewording things that could be worded more clearly, I do this kind of regularly, but this revamp involves hundreds of slides and there are days I’m completely cross eyed. Cynthia and I laugh when we do really stupid stuff and can’t remember where we were and what we were working on. I’ll apologize in advance for any minor mistakes in the rewrites because, well, you know that’s going to happen. No matter how many times you proof something…

I had cut out a spread in the NY Times a while ago, and pinned it to my bulletin board in the mud room, of a couple exhibits I really wanted to see. At the time, I thought, no problem, they are in NYC and I should be able to skip in this summer. Hahahahahah…..

I revisited that article, and to my horror, one of the exhibits I wanted to see was closing on the 3rd of September. I’m leaving on the 25th for Harrisville, coming back Labor Day weekend, have to immediately drive to Peters Valley to pick up my piece in the faculty show on the 3rd, and then ship it out to Blue Ridge Fiber Show by the 4th. I’m not going to get into the city to see anything if I keep on this path.

I woke up this morning to a rainy dreary Sunday, all set to jump back into handout edits and I thought to myself, just get in the car and drive into NYC and see the damn shows already. Just do it.

And so I did.

In fact, I hit four museums and was home by 2pm, knocking off a number of exhibits that had been on my list. Driving into NYC on a Sunday morning is actually pleasant, the GW Bridge is beautiful and majestic and the Henry Hudson Parkway that follows the river south is dreamy with joggers running along the river on a Sunday morning, so NYC. I parked under the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which put me in walking distance range of three of the museums with exhibits I wanted to see.

First stop was the MET Breuer. There was an exhibit I had read about called Obsession: Nudes by Klimt, Schiele, and Picasso from the Thayer Collection. These were mostly drawings and sketches, little known works from these artists, and rarely exhibited for a number of reasons. But it is the 100th anniversary of the death of both Klimt, whom everyone knows, and Egon Schiele, whom almost on one knows, but is one of my most favorite artists. And of course Picasso. You can’t take photos of course, but I’ve gotten into the curiosity of well known artists’ sketch books, considering my own quest to draw daily (which I of course have not done, no surprise there) and it was a pleasure to look at these sketches and see the raw talent each of these artists possessed. I actually hadn’t been to the MET Breuer, since the MET took over the building vacated by the Whitney Museum when it moved to the Meat Packing district in lower Manhattan. I don’t know why, but more contemporary art, which it mostly houses, doesn’t appeal to me the way classic work does. The original MET Fifth Avenue is still my favorite place in the world to spend an afternoon.

Anyway, I walked about 10 blocks north to the Neue Galerie, Museum for German and Austrian Art. The gallery is best known for its acquisition of Klimt’s portrait of Adele Block-Bauer I, known as the Woman in Gold. They were also having a centenary exhibition of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele’s work, because they have a heavy collection of both artist’s work, and both artists died 100 years ago this year. Schiele died at only 28 of the Spanish Flu. Klimt was his mentor, and he left an impressive body of work for his short life. His portraiture was erotic, raw, graphic and I fell in love with it the first time I heard about him. And I even love his landscapes. Since I’d been to that museum before I’d already seen many of the pieces and I was in and out of there pretty quickly.

I walked back to the MET 5th Avenue, and decided to pop in and give another once over, as long as I was there, to the exhibit Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination. This has to be one of the best fashion exhibits they have ever done. And it ends October 8th. When I went when the exhibit opened in May, it was super crowded and difficult to navigate, but the brilliance of it all was to incorporate fashion into galleries that the public doesn’t usually visit. There were exquisite fashions placed strategically all over the medieval wing, you had to look up sometimes and and of course bump into people trying to capture everything on their tablets. The background sound track was haunting and I did a quick cruise around before checking on a couple other exhibits that were on my list.

One was a pretty obscure little exhibit, in a pretty obscure gallery, in the basement, called “The Secret Life of Textiles: The Milton Sonday Archive.” So this guy Milton Sonday was a pretty big authority on the structures of handmade fabrics, particularly woven works and lace. And I’m into weaving and lace. Apparently he created little looms and paper weavings to illustrate basic structures, and large scale lace fragments to show the interlacement or path of the threads in bobbin lace. I didn’t take any photos, silly me, except this one which I absolutely adored.

Last spring I did a research piece for a recorder group I occasionally play with, on the works of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, a Flemish painter, juxtaposed to musical works by Susato, who lived and worked at the same time as Bruegel in Antwerp. Both lived and worked in the early part of the 17th century. In my research I came across Bruegel’s mentor, Pieter Coecke van Aelst, a painter of considerable merit, but not one I knew. So I was completely enchanted with this work that hung over a display case of paper woven works.

The piece is called “Interlace after Pieter Coecke van Aelst and an anonymous lace designer, 2015. It is woven completely of paper strips.

I went from that basement gallery to the second floor of the MET, the ultimate treasure hunt to navigate this monster of a museum, to an exhibit of drawings of Eugène Delacroix. Again with the sketch book. Small treasures that show skill and yet the beginnings of something wonderful with no regard to the end product. I took a single photo here, of a lovely simple watercolor and pencil that is the kind of thing I’d like to see in my own sketch book, simple rendering of a lovely scene, captured quickly. This piece was the size of a post card and still in the opened sketchbook.

I got back to my car, and decided that if I didn’t head up to the Cloisters and see the second part of Heavenly Bodies, I’d never get to see it, as it also closes October 8th and I’ll be traveling most of September. The Cloisters is about 15 minutes up the parkway, only a few minutes from the GW Bridge, which I had to cross anyway to get back to Jersey. I love the Cloisters, it is part of the MET Museum, and though I’ve been there many times, I had never seen the cloistered area gardens because I always seem to get there in the winter. Usually for a concert or something.

So just seeing those lovely wild gardens was a treat. Made me want to sit and paint.

And the Heavenly Bodies exhibit continued. I have to say, this was even better than the first part at the MET 5th Avenue. Everywhere you looked, contemporary fashion was hidden in a way that you totally believed it was there all along. I actually did take a couple photos, since they were allowed, and this one, though not my favorite garment, looked amazing in one of my favorite galleries that houses the famed Unicorn Tapestries. This is a Thom Browne wedding ensemble from the Spring/Summer 2018 collection in white silk organza with white mink.

I came into this chapel, and audibly gasped. Ave Maria was playing over the sound system and I just stood there with my jaw dropped. This wedding dress from the House of Dior from 2018 was apparently modeled after the original design from 1961. It is also white silk organza.

And then I came upon these lovely pieces, there were about six in the collection, set up in a stone hallway that led to yet another outdoor cloistered area.

They were a series of ensembles from 2015 by Jun Takahasi for Undercover. I was not familiar with his work. But I was very familiar with the images printed on the fabrics, they are digital prints from Hieronymous Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. I studied Early Netherlandish painting quite extensively back in the 70’s as part of my Fine Arts Degree, and this artist was front and center. He died shortly before Pieter Bruegel the Elder was born, and his work heavily influenced Bruegel. Bosch was a whack job, his images were all over the place, haunting, erotic, grotesque, but the kind of imagery you can’t look away from. As a 20 something, I found a kind of naughty pleasure in his work. This is the triptych, it starts with the Garden of Eden on the left, and a grotesque hell on the right. A total expose on the fate of humanity, we are all doomed…

I was pretty proud of myself for achieving the Triple Play, all three MET museums in one day.

And so I had my fill of inspiration, that should last for a number of months. I will be packing of course my knitting and my sketchbook and pencils and watercolors, and armed with newly updated handouts, and some new patterns and samples, I start with Harrisville in NH next weekend, followed by a five day class in Inkle Weaving at John C Campbell in western NC, immediately followed by Sievers on Washington Island WI. That’s the 48 hour turn around. I’m going to try not to unpack after Harrisville. I immediately head to Arkansas and the Ozarks followed by three days of video shoots for Threads Magazine and then my retreat at the Outer Banks of NC. My guild show and sale is in November (I’m the treasurer) and I end the year in December with a trip to the Milwaukee Guild. And then I write an article for Heddlecraft. I do love my life, and I especially love when I can spend an unexpected day getting inspired. I’m madly trying to finish off this Krokbragd band on the inkle loom, so I can take it as a sample to John C. Campbell, and of course my shadow has returned, now that my daughter has moved back home to take a new job in central Jersey.

And about that daily sketching thing…

I did manage to finish up a drawing I did of the kitchen, that I started while I was at Peters Valley teaching a couple weeks ago.

But now I’m inspired to draw people. I know my portfolio of life drawing subjects from the 70’s is floating around the attic somewhere…

Stay tuned…

Severe Weather Alert…

The little stop sign with the exclamation point in the lower right hand corner of my Firefox Internet screen on my computer has been staring at me all day, with dire warnings of the impending nor’easter on its way up the coast. I’m checking the predictions, sort of, every once in awhile, largely because we have tickets to the Baltimore Consort at the Cloisters in northern Manhattan tomorrow afternoon, when the storm is suppose to hit, but I’m not paying too much attention, because weather patterns are unpredictable around here, they make better headlines than true predictions. At the moment, there is a 3-6″ prediction of snow for our area, which by Jersey standards is pretty nothing, if it turns out to be more like 3″. An hour south of us, there is a prediction of 6-12″. But the winds are suppose to be fierce, so weather patterns can shift a few miles and come in faster or slower, and the whole prediction ends up causing a lot of eye rolling and unnecessary panic. Nevertheless, I sent my son out to pick up a couple of things at the grocery store, that we desperately needed, like half and half, because you can’t have coffee in this house without half and half, and he came back to report that the grocery store was mobbed, and shelves are being cleaned off like there was a severe famine on its way up the coast.

So, I decided to spend the day, keeping an eye loosely on the radar, in my pajamas, in front of my computer, researching colors for next spring. Sounded like a good antidote to stupid headlines and dreary bleak weather. I have a couple of favorite sites, Design-Options, and Pantone, both have information about colors for the upcoming seasons, and I get an idea of the general direction of the trends. Not that it is that important, but I’m always curious, and sometimes I get inspired by a particular palette. I found a very cool You Tube Video on the Pantone site, and I watched it about 8 times, sitting with my little fan of Color-aid papers, getting a feel for the combinations. If you watch the video, which talks about how the colors are forecasted, make sure the sound on your computer is on, the adjectives the narrator uses are important, but comical at times, like the Thesaurus was brought out and dusted off. There were some great phrases like “subtly sumptuous”, “halcyon days”, tapestries of experience”, “adaptive attitude”, and “symbiosis of hues”. I particularly liked, “inventive integrity” and “soul searching and sustainability…”

I have a large block of Color-aid papers, there are 314 colors in all, and I lopped off the top one inch of each paper and put them on a screw post, so I would have an easy reference for playing around, while maintaining the paper order. Each of the papers in the full set has a code on the back that helps identify the color. So I watched the video, and pulled palettes that I thought I’d enjoy dyeing, I’ll spend more time this weekend tweaking and narrowing down, but I had a good start. Also, ProChem, where I buy my MX Fiber Reactive dyes, has a PDF on their website that gives the Pantone colors for Spring of 2010, with directions for how to dye each color. How handy is that!

And I spent the day just playing with color. I outlined the eight palettes as I interpreted them from the Pantone site, comparing them to the Spring 2010 colors from Design-Options, and I cut little Color-aid chips, and played around with arrangements.

This is the sort of thing I would do twice a year for Handwoven Magazine when I use to do the articles for them on Color and Fabric Forecasting. I’ve heard during my travels, how many mourn the loss of the column, but the reality is, the column was costly to produce and you the reader can easily with a handy computer and your own block of Color-aid papers, do your own search and experiment. Google “Colors Spring 2010” and see what you get…

Now that I have a bunch of potential palettes in front of me, I started looking at space dyed skeins I had laying around the studio, to get a feel for narrower palettes and more monochromatic possibilities, and largely this was just fun to see the palettes next to yarn. The skeins are from Cherry Tree Hill and they are a funky novelty knitting yarn. I think these were from the batch of novelties I picked up last summer at the Midwest Conference.

I may be housebound this weekend, but I have a bunch of white warps, and a cabinet full of dyes, and I can crank up the wood stove to keep the room temp about 70 degrees for curing, and I can have a colorful weekend in spite of the frightful weather outside!

The social season is in full swing…

The last days of any year are always a mixed bag. I find it hard to get any meaningful work done in the studio, there are so many social events on the calendar, some seasonal celebrations, some gatherings of friends, and on the other hand, there are so many social events on the calendar, seasonal celebrations and gatherings, that I’m forever grateful that I have opportunities like this to celebrate and see the world outside of the four walls of my studio.

Almost every night, since my last post (was it really almost a week ago?) I’ve had a major event on the calendar. Saturday had three events back to back! Friday night, I attended the reception at the NJ Center for the Visual Arts in Summit, NJ, for the artists who donated work for the Blank Canvas Benefit. You may remember my blog post last month while I worked on my piece. Since the handwoven scraps used in the artwork were from one of my jackets, I thought it would be fun to wear the jacket to the reception.

It was great to see all of the other interpretations of the claybord we were given to work with, we could pick the size, and many of the artists chose to use the claybord as a flat box/container, as a standing shadow box, as a canvas, some two sided, and there was my piece, wrapped like a present, completely encased in fabric. The food was delicious, and in any art venue, there are always interesting people to meet and chat with.

Saturday morning was the holiday party for my American Sewing Guild neighborhood group. It was a pot luck luncheon, and a lot of fun.

One of the members had been to a book sale, and she saw this little tome and because it said Hand-Loom Weaving on the front, she thought it was something I could use. She herself isn’t a weaver. It is little kindnesses like this that make the world a better place. I was THRILLED! I have never seen this little treasure, written by Mattie Phipps Todd, in 1902. The book was revised in 1914, and that’s the version that you see here on the right. It is a small little book, and it primarily focuses on teaching weaving in a classroom situation, using the new modern loom, which looks remarkably like one of the 25 small frame looms I have stacked up on a shelf for those occasions when I am demonstrating to a school group. They have end rods that run through the frame to keep the weaving square, and adjustable end caps so the weaving can be sized. The book, discarded from the New City Free Library, in New City, NY, (I’ll bet that’s a story in and of itself!), starts out with a fascinating chapter called “A Chat on Weaving”. Small phrases in the side bars act like little highlighters, phrases like, “Community feeling continued”, and “Nature knows no hurry”. Since this is a teaching manual, there are lots of phrases like “A child’s work should be suited to his capacity, without regard to grade”, and “If you would develop morality in a child, train him to work.” This particular paragraph gave me a huge smile:

“The child not only recognizes the value in honest labor, but his sympathy with all labor is aroused through his own efforts and through the stories told of weavers in all lands. He realizes, also, although in a limited way, the interdependence of the whole world. If the sun did not shine, and the rain fall, there would be no grass. If there were no grass, what would the sheep do?…

Could it be this little treasure, discarded long ago from a library in an unknown city, holds the key to world peace? 🙂

Saturday afternoon my husband and I drove to western NJ, where we attended an annual holiday gathering of friends, more interesting people to meet, share, and enjoy. We raced back home, in time to meet my step-sister and her guy, have a quick bit to eat, and race over to the IZOD center to watch the holiday extravaganza of the Trans Siberian Orchestra. Wow! I actually had never heard of this very popular orchestra, a combination of rock, opera, classical remakes of the greats, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, with an added twist of pyrotechnics, fireworks, laser lights, and some pretty mean guitar work. The newest member of the Orchestra was a keyboardist from Russia who began his number with a rapid fire run on the keyboard of the third movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata!

Our seats were amazing, and the moving banks of lights, parts of the stage rising up, and walls of video images, made for quite the show. I enjoyed it a lot, and it really set the stage for the holiday spirit. The whole first half of the three hour show, with no break, was a lovely Christmas story of an angel flying the world in search of world peace.

Sunday I set out for my recorder consort rehearsal, we have a performance Friday night, and was horrified to see the havoc the unexpected freezing rain was having on the roadways. I almost turned around a half dozen times, but decided it was more dangerous to do that than just keep on going. I’ve never seen so many accidents. When SUV’s are creeping along at 20 miles an hour on a slick interstate, with their flashers blinking, you know something is up! And once I made it to Morristown, the sidewalks were complete sheets of ice. I teetered along, digging the four inch spike of my new killer boots into anything I could to stay upright. I made it to rehearsal, late, but safe, and by the time I headed home, the road crews were out spreading copious amounts of road salt and the traffic began moving at a steady pace of 45 mph.

Sunday afternoon, my son returned from his weekend at the Army National Guard. This is his last weekend there, before he ships out to Boot Camp on January 4th. It is the first time I’ve seen him in uniform, and I will say, there was a little bit of pride and a misty eye, my son has grown up. That’s me over there lurking by the front door.

Sunday night, I had the annual holiday gathering with my “mom’s group”. This is a group of six powerful women who all raised their kids together, meeting monthly for lunches for about 15 years, and then, once jobs took over, and crazy school schedules took over, a quarterly dinner is about all we can manage. Still, there is a bond there that goes back 20 years, and we celebrate each time one of us hits a birthday milestone. We celebrated Patty’s 50th birthday as well as the holiday, and everyone loved my coiled hot mats I’ve been working on for the last couple of weeks.

This morning, I’m about to shower and head out to the Frances Irwin Handweavers annual holiday luncheon, I’m really looking forward to that, and I actually bought an additional luncheon ticket for my husband, he has never attended a guild function, and I know there will be other DH’s there, so I decided it might be fun to have him along and accompany me on the hour long drive to Pennsylvania.

Tomorrow night is the High School Holiday Concert, my daughter will be playing the trombone. And Friday night is my recorder consort performance. Saturday we have tickets for a performance of the Baltimore Consort at the Cloisters in NYC, you cannot imagine how spectacular an early music performance is in this particular venue, the vaulted stone ceilings of the 15th century cathedral like space, it is positively haunting.

And tomorrow is the one year anniversary of this blog. I have completely enjoyed the year, writing about my creative adventures, as they parallel my life and all of its crazy meanderings. And I find it a great resource for me when I can’t remember how I did something. Makes for a great record keeper… Stay tuned…