Black Gold Tapestry

Listening and Meditating

2012-02-18T19:34:00.000-07:00

At last needle and thread contacted with linen fabric. No more samplers, this is the real thing. To the right of the embroidery frame sits 28 odd feet of linen while the other five feet snake over and under the hoops waiting to be stitched.

One foot of embroidery is nearly completed. Nearly. Because of course starting up is full of the usual snags with things to troubleshoot. For starters the 24 inch square hoop on the Grace embroidery stand was too big to get proper tension an slowed the stitching down. Swapping in the 18 inch hoop made a difference. Brad, my troubleshooter, suggested a band of weatherstripping on the outside edge of the inner hoop would tighten everything up and it did. Now the tension is tight and the fabric is like a drum instead of a sagging rooftop. Brilliant. Just like with a sewing machine the proper tension makes stitching a pleasure instead of a pain.

This week while I sat for hours stitching away I listened to two books, Diane Keaton's memoir Then Again and Alain de Botton's book Status Anxiety. Even though we assume actors bring characters to life through their ability to observe, Ms Keaton does not think it is necessary when telling her story as she does not provide enough of the telling details or nuances that are the tools of a good raconteur. The message I took away from listening to her voice and story was one of regret and self-absorption. Mostly she regrets being so self-absorbed she missed out on the events and people of her life. Message to all who spend too much time naval gazing. Be here now or stupify others with a litany of should haves could haves.

Alain de Botton, on the other hand, supplies a plethora of observations. With humour he brings the minutia of everyday life together with historic antecedents to show how status anxiety runs the modern world to regrettable outcomes. Diane Keaton might want to read Mr. A de B's work to help her understand that all along it's been her anxiety about what people think of her that stands in the way of her appreciating life for what it is.

Stitching is an activity conducive for both listening and meditating, yet I have to admit after listening to two books back to back I need respite from listening. A de B in his book How Proust Can Change Your Life memorably quotes the worthy Marcel Proust who said the purpose of reading a book (or listening to it) is not an end unto itself but the beginning for enquiry into one's own ideas on the nature of things. Here here.

These precious few

2012-02-06T13:57:00.001-07:00

Belly Boat Hustle

A couple of weeks ago I ran into Paul Chambers, a dancer, who once upon a time gracefully pirouetted in a belly boat on Wedge Pond in Kananaskis country for one of my films. While we were catching up I referring to oil as a precious commodity. A bemused expression rippled over his face. He told me it was a long time since he had heard the word precious in reference to something valuable since the word has been co-opted to mean affected - like Rupert Everett's Prince Charming in Shrek.

His comment has stayed with me because I have been thinking the more the future of this world is paying dearly through our profligate ways, the more we up the ante of our profligate ways. Cheap gas and oil enables us to enjoy the cheap life and we want more not less of it. We spend weekends burning cheap gas to drive for miles up and down suburban main drags where we eat cheap fast food and then drive to cheap box stores where we can buy whatever we're in the mood for - so long as it is cheap - even if we don't need it. Like a bulemic stuffing her body with food it can not handle we stuff our home and closets to overflowing with furniture, chotchkies, clothes, jewelry, makeup, perfume, shoes, electronics. If it's on sale we buy even more - just because it is there.

Inevitably what we bought so cheaply looks cheap and boring. So then we host a garage sale and sell off our old cheap stuff for a couple of bucks and then get rid of the rest of our junk in a land fill with all the other crap.

Buying into the breezy "shop 'til you drop" way of life has left us with stuff, junk and crap. This mindset slops over into every aspect of our psyche infecting us in ways we never intended so that we begin to see the world and our fellow travelers in life as seventy-five percent off twice reduced soon to be tossed in the landfill. Disposable. Valueless. Not precious.

William Morris, an exacting man who led the Arts and Crafts movement, said, "If you want a golden rule that will fit everything, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful." Beauty in the natural world takes millions of years to evolve. Anything useful and worth doing, like raising children, loving another person, following a calling, is difficult and won't come cheap. It will exact sacrifices. Making Two Steps Forward One Step Back has been difficult and will continue to be difficult because it is labour intensive, expensive, consuming, and complicated. Yet for those very reasons, it reminds me of what is precious. Energy, Beauty, Life and Love.

The Girl Who Married a Ghost

2012-02-01T15:26:00.000-07:00

My feature film The Girl Who Married a Ghost is now available through Amazon. The film tells a supernatural aboriginal tale that goes like this. A powerful chief lives in luxury on a paradise island with his wife and beautiful daughter. A handsome young shaman transforms himself into a spirit and tricks the girl into running away with him. The next morning on a deserted beach she discovers he is a pile of bones and that she is pregnant. It is a universal tale of love and revenge based on a myth of the West coast Nisqually nation in the Seattle area.

The film was shot in Bamfield on Vancouver Island in British Columbia.

Making a film is a process of endurance. It took four years to raise the money to produce the film. But we only had enough money to shoot for two weeks. The two weeks seemed like an eternity because of the shooting conditions. And when all was said and done even though it received some good reviews the distributor for the film went bankrupt shortly after we completed it.

Filmmaking in Canada can make one bitter. However time heals. And now that I have had a long mourning period I can give my film a small ghost of a chance of being seen through Amazon.

Colour makes the world go around

2012-01-25T14:23:00.000-07:00

Initially I was going to use the colours from the Bayeux Tapestry for my installation tapestry - try to match them up as close as possible as a homage to the work. One art gallery curator, an austere man in a black turtleneck, told me he thought I should embroider the outline of the drawing in black and forget filling it in or adding any other colour. And another gallery owner wondered why I wanted to limit myself - especially to colours from a 1000 years ago.

Limits have to be made, but I understood his point. So the colour palette I have chosen will be based on ceramics glazes from Ancient China. Symbolic and beautiful. Who says old can't be fresh and bold?

The purpose of repurposing

2012-01-20T11:08:00.001-07:00

This video was made in December at the end of the campaign I ran on Indiegogo. Sometimes there just isn't a way to make things happen sooner. And I am elated it got done. It has already paid off in its re-purposing value because it succinctly describes the project.

Spin offs

2012-01-18T14:51:00.000-07:00

David Finch at Turner Valley

A local oil historian in Calgary, David Finch, told me he tries to make any endeavor he works on pay off by spinning the research into more than one end product. We called it "repurposing" when I was working in corporate video production. Clips of video that were used over and over again to different effect. Effort is most rewarding if it pays out in more than one way. You know like a movie has products and rides and theme parks. Or a website begins to monetize. Or an I Pad that uses its interface/operating system to play music, movies, become a photo album, drawing pad, dictionary, encyclopedia etc.

So while I am producing Two Steps Forward One Step Back, I am pursuing an artist residency here in Calgary, the Cultural Capital of Canada for 2012. The idea is to work on the last 9 feet of embroidery in a public space, and engage the public in embroidering samplers, using drawings from The Black Gold Tapestry, in a cafe setting where the coffee pot and tea kettle are always on.

I'm lifting the idea off of the Glenbow Museum's art room where I had my first transformative idea about embroidery. The cafe with tea and coffee is a nod to the many pioneer women who would gather together and sew, sharing work, companionship and brain stimulants.

Over the holidays I read Walter Isaacson's book about Steve Jobs. In the book the recurring theme is how difficult he was to work with and this point is belaboured to the point that it becomes hard to fathom that his other side, the side where he was a charismatic leader, even existed. Here is a documentary from the early days shortly after Macintoshes were introduced that better illustrates why he was so successful. The people who worked on it are interviewed along with Steve and nobody seems angry about how they were treated by him. Instead the euphoria is like that of a new mother who is high on the hormone oxytocin.

This is my take away quote from the video. Steve Jobs said "The greatest people are self managing. They don't need to be managed. Once they know what to do, they'll know how to figure out how to do it. They don't need to be managed. What they need is a common vision. And that's what leadership is. Having a vision and being able to articulate that so the people around you can understand it."

Making choices

2012-01-10T13:16:00.000-07:00

My lovely sister Wendy Crawford joins the list of friend patrons. Thank you Wendy.

Since Christmas I have been busy. The fabric for my project has been purchased. I had a small handkerchief sized piece of linen bedding fabric left over from those halcyon days when Anthill Fabrics ruled Western Canada as the primo fabric store. It is a beautiful linen with a smooth luxurious hand and a soft sheen in an eggshell/ivory colour, perfect for what I wanted to do, but not readily available. Wherever I have traveled in the past 2 years I checked out fabric stores with no luck. I googled every string of words that included linen and sheeting. When companies sent me fabric swatches they were too white, too yellow, too coarse, too thin, too weak.

As it happened we traveled to NYC for a week and armed with a list of fabric stores I scoured the garment district. It was painful. Painful. Every store, even the high end ones, are a hoarder's paradise. None of the shops know a thing about merchandising. They hang on to moldering, pill covered 40-year old fabric and stuff bins with hundreds of rolls of fabric so that no one can see what is in there. If one does find something that looks promising it takes a weightlifter to pull it out from under the hundreds of other rolls and bolts. If every store cut their inventory in half and merchandised with ease of a customer's decision making in mind, they would make more money and there would be more sewers.

I did not let myself be overwhelmed in this perilous journey and finally found the right linen at Beckenstein Fabric Czar.

Let me just reiterate the late Anthill Fabrics was a cathedral for inspired shopping. It was to fabric what the Apple store is to mobile devices. Sigh.

Today, after researching and comparing. I ordered the embroidery frame I will be using. It's called a Grace Company Wood Hoop 2. Most people use it for hand quilting but it is perfectly and admirably adaptable for embroidery.

Weighing in at fifteen pounds, it is completely adjustable and folds up so it can be stored in a small space. The 24 inch embroidery frame swivels 360 degrees and there is a place to attach a lamp and hang scissors. It's pretty fabulous and I can hardly wait for it to arrive.

If Wishes Were Horses

2011-12-29T16:18:00.000-07:00

My family and I are going to New York for a week. It is there I hope to find the linen fabric for my tapestry. The search has been ongoing for the past two years because I have something specific in mind. Once upon a time there was a magnificent store here in Calgary called Anthill Fabrics. It was there that I found the best linen for embroidering upon - a beautiful off white, fine grained linen sheeting. That store has gone the way of the dodo bird. In this crazy mixed up world, in this city of more than a million people, there is no place to find it. Every place I have checked comes up short. Unfortunately trying to buy fabric over the internet, sight unseen, is like trying to eat a meal in the same way. I need to touch it. If I am going to work with a fabric for eight months the way it feels to my hand has to be considered just as much as how strong and durable it is. But New York is like Paris. It's supposed to have everything. I have contacted a company that makes sheets from Belgium linen. The fabric comes in widths of 104 inches.

My fingers are crossed.

Sustenance for the soul

2011-12-24T16:04:00.000-07:00

The gifts for Two Steps Forward One Step Back continue to flow in. Thank you David Christensen for your friend support. Patronage is doubly meaningful at this time because there are hundreds of ways that people could choose to spend their money.

Next year in 2012 this grand scheme of mine comes to fruition. A toast to all who donated to the campaign, gave advice and provided technical support. Remember small is beautiful and art is sustenance for the soul.
a partridge

in a pear tree

Small is beautiful

2011-12-18T12:33:00.002-07:00

Mesopotamian ecosystem

My friend Emma Berry asked me to go to the mountain film and book festival in Banff last month. She spent years there, working both in town and out in the back country as a cook. She has a wonderfully infectious and intense enthusiasm for the wilderness. So when she tells me to pay attention to what's going on out there I do as I am told.

So that was why we were off to the Banff mountain film festival on our way to see Wade Davis - an amazing Canadian anthropologist, ethnobotanist, author and photographer who described in his presentation "The Sacred Headwaters" how disaster threatens the Stikine river that flows in First Nations land and where home is for Davis too. Imperial Metals and Royal Dutch Shell, with the BC government's blessings and against the wishes of the First Nations, propose an open-pit copper and gold mine and coal bed methane gas extraction that will affect over a million acres.

Wade Davis is not against mining per se - the area has been mined in small ways for a long time. It is that the size and methods used to mine and extract gas will erode and poison the area permanently. Permanently. The poverty in the region is grinding and suicide festers among the young claiming too many lives. And yet none of the Taku Tlingit and Dena nations who live in the region will benefit. Not one iota.

A few thousand years ago in Greece, where democracy was born, every citizen in Athens contributed to the health and wealth of the community. They all served in the navy together as equals. And if a citizen was rich then the expectations to contribute were justifiably higher. Not only did the rich spread wealth it was considered an honour to do so. As long as they all drank the same koolaid the success of the city was astounding. Their culture flourished. However people being what they are, eventually some of the noble elite, the haves, wanted to keep it all. Through a couple of coups they seized power and the imperialism that had already taken root resulted in an eventual cultural collapse.

Today our democracy is not as we imagined. We citizens are outgunned by globalized corporations who play out coups in corporate takeovers and invade our country through maneuverings like Imperial Metals and Shell. Big businesses are the Greek and Roman empires of today and operate like a hierarchical medieval fiefdom. They are supported by our mutual funds and taxpayer's dollars and we work for them and pledge allegiance to them until they purge us during economic downturns. They run the government not us.

On the drive home Emma told me to watch "Vanishing of the Bees" It's a film that chronicles the horrendous decline of bee populations globally in what has been called Colony Collapse Disorder. It suggests the link is monoculture crops using neonicotinoid pesticides, where seeds are treated with pesticides. France's beekeepers fought and won the war and there is now a ban on this kind of pesticide in Europe and bee populations are coming back. Not so in the US where global corporations fight to keep their product on the market.

Big Corporations are the equivalent of a monoculture, where we push out small ecosystems that sustain a wide variety of life, and in so doing weaken our own chance of survival. The famine in Ireland two centuries ago was caused by a monoculture, wiping out both the only crop and a quarter of the population. We must all pay attention. Small is beautiful.

Friends and Supporters

2011-12-12T21:42:00.000-07:00

Dale Wright and Carol Greyeyes joined Friends of Two Steps Forward One Step Back and Emma Barry and Carey Parder have graciously supported the work. My sense of mission grows. This week is the final push of the campaign.

Sid Bailey shot the footage for the new video that replaced the home page of the Indiegogo campaign. When I was editing it I had a case of "why did I bother?" I could barely stand looking at my old mug and I sounded stiff and wordy. The shot that saved it and changed my mind about ditching the whole thing was the wide shot where I roll out the thirty foot drawing. The epic-ness of the project had been captured. And it did not hurt that I look cute and spry in great linen pants. So I cut cut cut and what remained nicely bookended the shot of the drawing, the embroidering, the model of the installation and all without over explaining.

Planktonic Foraminifera - Origins of Oil

I Pad drawing

New perk for Indiegogo campaign

2011-12-08T19:36:00.001-07:00

Three cheers for Wendy Bakgaard. She stepped up to become a patron friend. Wendy is an amazing textile wizard - sewing, indigo dying, knitting - whose attention to detail inspires me. Her blessings on this project is a boon to my spirit.

Here’s the latest perk for all patrons -past, present and future – who have supported the Indiegogo campaign Two Steps Forward One Step Backwith a contribution of $50 or more. They will be eligible to win thehand-embroidered sampler “The Quadricycle”.

This sampler was the historical piece Isewed when I applied for Canada Council funding to draw the 220-foot cartoon for Black Gold Tapestry whereinlays the genesis of Two Steps Forward One Step Back.

The story in the sampler depicts the headyyear 1896 when Henry Ford completed building his first combustion enginevehicle that ran on pure ethanol alcohol. Most early automobiles at the timelooked like a carriage without a horse. An even bigger and much more profitablecraze at the time was the bicycle. So it appears Ford cleverly knit the idea ofa combustion engine onto bicycle wheels with a tiller steering unit that somebicycle designs had at the time. In that same year the first car accident tookplace in North America. A man driving a horseless carriage hit a woman on abicycle, breaking her arm. The driver spent a night in jail for the incident.It was also the same year Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Isadore H. Hellerhouse. In the sampler it sits beside a more typical bungalow of the era. Ithought it was a nice way of showing that architectural design had come intoits own whereas car design had a way to go. Up in the left hand corner is theLilienthal glider, a precurser to the airplane the Wright Brothers built and flewseven years later. Otto Lilienthal built his first glider in 1891. By 1896 when he died in a glider crashhe had taken more than 2000 flights.

So if you have not stepped up to the plateto become a patron here’s your chance to contribute to the campaign and getyour name in the hat too.

The lucky winner will be announced afterthe official closing of the campaign on Saturday December 17, 2011 at midnight.

Big Day

2011-12-06T19:05:00.001-07:00

Sid Bailey was able to come to the house to shoot my re-do of the Indiegogo video. The man has been busy busy busy, and has just returned from Jamaica and Vancouver where he filmed stories for the 2012 summer Olympics. He brought along Per Asplund, a wonderful sound man who I last saw when I was making a feature film The Girl Who Married a Ghost, out on the coast, almost a decade ago. It was like old home week. In preparation I wrote a script, made cue cards, scrubbed floors, moved furniture, reassembled the scale model of the installation scaffolding and started a sample embroidery for the camera. Three hours and many takes later the video is in the can and all shot on a Sony PDWF800 and XDCAM HD Camcorder.

The picture looks lovely. But I can't begin editing until the PFD-23A

has been transferred to DVD.

So what would Marshall McLuhan's have to say about new media? He said film was hot and television was cold. But now that film has turned digital and is being shot on HD digital and Red cameras, and recorded onto chips, sticks, CFs and discs where does that leave us? And at some point television went from video to film, and is now converging with film, because everything is shot on the same gear and appears as 1080 pixels of high definition on TV. For that matter what would Marshall say about my multimedia installation using sensors, lights, computers, sound systems and embroidery? Maybe he'd sing like Katy Perry - "You're hot then you're cold..."

Stay tuned for the new glorious hot hot hot intro video for Two Steps Forward One Step Back that will be cool, cool, cool, coming to Indiegogo soon.

Thank you Sid. Thank you Per.

Keeping in Shape

2011-11-27T13:14:00.001-07:00

Just like pianists and soccer players who practice to keep up their game I practice artistic calisthenics every morning. The idea is to produce four to six figure drawings. Aiming for fluidity is the main objective. Another is to play fashion designer using ideas I have absorbed studying western cultural history through art, textiles and fashion. Most often I work in pen and ink and in the past couple of years I have taken up the I Pad too. Visual artist David Hockney is the most famous champion of the I Pad as artist's medium. What I love about the I Pad is working in that luminous saturated colour and that it forces me to loosen up as neither the stylus or finger are particularly accurate drawing tools. Recently I've begun posting the sketches on my other blog Poppiculture.

Here's a little piece of cultural history for people who poopoo the fashion world - and its fetishistic adoration of adornment. Two hundred and ten years ago Joseph Marie Jacquard invented a loom that used cards with punch holes in them.

The punch cards allowed weavers to produce intricate damask and tapestries - woven fabrics favoured by the fashionistas of the Romantic age.

Prior to the punch card loom, small children, mostly male, known as drawboys, would nimbly lift the individual warp yarns that ran the length of the fabric, so that the shuttle could pass over and underneath to create the patterns. A slow and complex process it was.

In time the punch card was adopted for operating fairground organs and related instruments like player pianos. And in the 20th century punch cards made their way into unit record machines made famous by IBM - all leading to this new digital age and computers. Without fashion there would have been no punch cards, no computers, no I Pad. That's how I see it.

I Pad drawing

Bouquets for my friends

2011-11-24T16:27:00.001-07:00

Today Diane Field joined the Friends of the Arts ranks on my IndieGoGo campaign. She is the executive director of SEEDS Foundation, a non-profit organization, that provides energy literacy to schools across Canada K-12. As an early champion of my project she helped expand my ideas of the project's potential.

Alane Wilson, a good friend, has supported my campaign twice! She made the point that it is "too bad we can't sign up for an automatic monthly contribution... that is an easy way to provide an ongoing smallish donation that adds up."

I forwarded the comment to the IndieGoGo team, but don't know how quickly they act on feedback. Surely this can't be the first time they have received this comment.

Beautiful People

2011-11-21T11:09:00.001-07:00

Two more people have contributed to my Indiegogo campaign, Allan Sayegh and Patricia Marr. The thrill when another good person lays real money down to support my endeavour never never never diminishes. It sparks me to do more and fulfill this trust. Today I'm off to the university to take photographs of the future home of the Nickle Galleries, formerly the Nickle Arts Museum. I liked the stop motion capture I did of the tapestry drawing enough that I want to try something like it to capture the future exhibition space of Two Steps Forward One Step Back.

What the galleries look like right now is hard to say. A couple of weeks ago I was working on a freelance gig - which happened to be the official opening of the Taylor Family Digital Library. At that time the gallery space was a black hole of construction. But in this modern era where wall systems can be installed practically overnight perhaps the black hole is now something entirely different. So armed with my trusty camera I will investigate and photograph and post the results on my campaign site.

There's something riveting about the way any endeavour comes together. How and when the pieces fall into place. Perhaps on this artist date to the new Nickle Galleries some step of my own process will be revealed and help me down the road.

Just do it

2011-11-16T16:16:00.001-07:00

Momentum is about keeping that ball rolling forward. Keeping those plates in the air. Juggling life events and interruptions to get in and do the work that needs to be done to keep the dream alive. Today I sent in an electronic grant application to Calgary 2012. Yes Calgary is destined to be Canada's Cultural Capital of Canada next year. And in the spirit of leaving no stone unturned, no grant fund ignored, I sent in the application.

I am sort of the queen of grant applications, having sent dozens in my life. Successes and failures are about equal. 50/50. What is clear is that any successes I had were achieved by spending enough time to really do a thorough job which include: Ask the hard questions. Fix the little things that do not seem quite right. Remember to let personality show through. Don't bore the reader. Answer the 5 Ws. Demonstrate know-how. Show and tell. Tailor the application to the fund. Never rest on past laurels - there's a reason they have a pointy tip. Check spelling. Check paperwork for missing bits. Then do what my cousin Shirley Wiebe does and kiss the application good luck and mail it off.

Heave a great sigh of relief. Drink a celebratory coffee and eat something chocolate afterwards.

Then find the next thing that will help the cause of the project.

Things are Getting Better

2011-11-12T10:22:00.001-07:00

Great news on the funding front for Two Steps Forward One Step Back. Melissa Trono the director of Advancement and Alumni relations shepherded me toward making an application for a TD Insurance Meloche Monex Professional Development Grant after I made the announcement that I was crowd-sourcing on Indiegogo. It took a day to get the paperwork ready and then send it in. Two days ago she sent me word that my application was successful. So there is another $1000 dollars towards realizing my goal to create my installation. I am thrilled that so far between the funding on Indiegogo and this grant I can begin the next stage of the work. Fabric and yarns can be purchased. The embroidery frame can be purchased. Step by step. Little by little. I am delighted. May the momentum continue.

Another view of scale model

2011-11-01T22:07:00.002-06:00

Big thank yous to Alane Wilson, Patricia Cameron, Gail Yakemchuk, and Al Cameron for supporting art.

Friends

2011-10-16T11:33:00.000-06:00

Stewing about the video posted on Indiegogo I picked up the phone and called my good friend Sid Bailey, a wonderful cameraman and asked him for a favour. He, dear man, has agreed to help me out and we are shooting the replacement video this week coming up. Now that I have someone running the camera I can expand the scope of the work. I've put in a phone call to ACAD to ask them to let us shoot in the Illingworth Kerr Gallery where I will unscroll the drawing for Two Steps Forward, One Step Back and with Sid's magical lighting and camerawork it will look compelling. I also dreamt I made a time lapse photo series showing my hands embroidering, which in the light of day sounds kind of cool. I'm looking into it.

Susan Lyons Patroness of the Arts

2011-10-13T20:20:00.001-06:00

Today the heavy lifting has paid off. Funding for Two Steps Forward One Step Back started coming in. Thanks to extreme generosity from my first two funders I'm one twelfth the way to my goal. My mind is a whirl. Number one priority on my list of whirling thoughts is to get the campaign video replaced with a higher end video tout de suite. It's driving me crazy that it looks so grainy, underlit, and the audio stinks. It will require convincing certain parties to help me out. Should my sweet talking work you will see the results.

IndieGoGo Go

2011-10-12T15:16:00.000-06:00

Here's the link for my campaign for fundraising at IndieGoGo.

The idea for fundraising on a crowd sourcing site began last year when I found out about Kickstarter. I did all the footwork and sent my project in and was accepted but then realized in the fine print they don't support projects from Canada unless there's a way to set up a bank account in the US. Then I went back to trying to raise funds for TBGT here in Calgary with a group of people from SEEDS Foundation. And somehow no matter how we twisted and turned the project around it would not fit neatly into the local oil company mandate of community building or their own educational mandate. If I was ever going to get this thing done I'd be doing it myself.

So in order to post on IndieGoGo I did have to relearn how to shoot video with an ancient (5 years old) digital video camera and upload it to a dated iMovie 08 editing system.(later updated to 09) The footage is grainy and the audio is a bust. Oi. I'm a filmmaker, but I'm no technophile. I hire people to do this work. Still I got the video made and uplinked to VIMEO and IndieGoGo and the thing is done. There's lots more to do and for the next two months one of those things is to monitor the fundraising site and do my best to direct traffic to it. Only $10 gets you ground floor status as a Good Fellow patron of the arts.

Here's something I'll be changing in the drawing. The first spring pole drill was made of bamboo. Something I learned only recently. Isn't that cool? There are always little details to be discovered.

It felt so good to get the campaign posted on the web. Good and scary. In fact I pressed the publish button before I meant to press. How's that for the flying fickle finger of fate?

ChChChChanges

2011-10-07T17:37:00.001-06:00

Paper and Ink drawing coloured on the Ipad

I changed the appearance of this blog to herald how the project The Black Gold Tapestry is morphing into a new media installation. It will be called Two Steps Forward, One Step Back. The installation will feature a 30 foot embroidered tapestry about how the Chinese harnessed oil and gas two thousand years ago. It will be mounted on bamboo scaffolding. Why? Because the Chinese built gas pipelines out of bamboo back then and continued to do so right up to the 19th century.

The bamboo scaffolds will be embedded with LED lights and speakers and proximity sensors to activate light and audio combinations as gallery visitors go around the tapestry. The work comes alive through the movement of people making it interesting to investigate what will happen if they step closer or move back. Two steps forward, one step back. The number of people and where they are standing will create new permutations of sound and light. And the sound and light will influence their perception of the embroidery. I am hoping to capitalize on the permutations that will be possible so that each person has a unique experience that he or she controls through moving exploration.

Currently I am readying an IndieGoGo launch to crowd source funding for the project. The print material and images are done and when the descriptive video is done at the end of next week I'll launch the campaign.

Don't these dinosaurs look anticipatory?

Sound of Silence

2011-01-18T10:32:00.008-07:00

Drawing using IPad app MirrorPaint

This week I have been juggling the writing of a treatment with my writing partner Emma Barry with activities related to Black Gold Tapestry discovering where its “adjacent possibilities” may connect. And as always I troll the websites and books for creative tools that may not be in my kit. Solitude is the latest subject in The Talent Code. Daniel Coyle says nurturing ideas requires “alternating periods of utter solitude followed by periods of robust connectivity.” Phew, now I don’t have to feel guilty about being a hermit and a social butterfly. Steve Johnson’s book, which I extolled in the last blog, has a nice list at the end of the last chapter (page 246) that sums up habits that will fertilize any old thing you might be creating/ inventing. I have seen lots of the items on this list in other lists about ways to have a happy life and live a healthy long life. So you can see healthy and happy go hand in hand with vigorous creating and inventing. This is a good list to live by don’t you think?

Go for a walk

Cultivate hunches

Write everything down

Keep your folders messy

Embrace serendipity

Make generative mistakes

Take on multiple hobbies

Frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks

Follow the links

Let others build on your ideas

Borrow Recycle

Reinvent

Build a tangled bank

Drawing using IPad app Mirror Paint

I like the one about taking on multiple hobbies because for as long as I can remember my sister Wendy and I have bemoaned how we have too many interests – that we are a couple of dilatants. Barbara Milne, an artist friend of mine, put it into perspective and said her many interests and hobbies feed each other – and provide multiple experiences she can cull from for her work. When fishing for ideas you want the lake to be full of possible bites.

Innovation

2011-01-09T14:52:00.003-07:00

There’s a new book out by Steve Johnson called “Where Good Ideas Come From – The Natural History of Innovation”. The title does not have the snappiness of Malcolm Gladwell’s books The Tipping Point, Outlier, Blink, where you can just hear his impatient fingers, snap, snap, snapping, demanding us to hurry up some more.

No Steve Johnson takes his time. That’s a good thing considering he’s discussing the connection between the ultimate in slow movements evolution with incubating ideas.

He introduces the layperson to the term “adjacent possible” coined by scientist Stuart Kauffman.

Here’s the summary of the way it works biologically:

“Think of all those initial molecules, and then imagine all the potential new combinations that they could form spontaneously simply by colliding with each other. If you could play God and trigger all those combinations, you would end up with most of the building blocks of life...”

It is compelling concept Johnson links to the way creativity works. Ideas and innovations proliferate and change when they knock up against each other, leading to more variants. People cobble together new things from the old things at hand.

First there’s the egg, then the chicken, then chicken broth and chicken soup, and then, oh look, “The Little Red Hen”. Which if you remember your folk tales, is about how a hen that makes bread, while her fellow barnyard animals loaf around until its time to eat it. Both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush used this story to illustrate and defend their decisions, while Malvina Reynolds, the folk composer, wrote her own version of the story, but made it a socialist anthem.

Going back to biology, Steven Johnson points out that in order for a sunflower to become a sunflower it has to rely on evolutionary steps. There is no way to hopscotch through it. Likewise an idea, whose time has come, arrives through an evolution of steps.

My musing for the week is “As an artwork where will The Black Gold Tapestry adjacent possibilities lead?”

Partners

2010-12-31T17:20:00.003-07:00

In May I set myself to the task of finding a partner or benefactor for The Black Gold Tapestry. There is no map or set of guidelines to find a partnership such as the one I was seeking. All I had was a pocketful of encouragement from friends and family who said, “Oil companies will love this.”

So here’s what I did.

I got in touch with the top galleries in Calgary, including our wonderful museum The Glenbow. My line of reasoning was if topnotch galleries are willing to show The Black Gold Tapestry perhaps an oil company would support the sewing of it. The first thing I did was email the galleries. It took three hours to draft two paragraphs. There is only one opportunity to make a first impression and I sweated over every detail, tailoring each letter to connect what they do to what I do.

The next day I followed up with a phone call. By the end of the week I had meetings set up. And by showing the drawing and samples of embroidery I got five letters of support.

Armed with the letters I contacted Calgary Arts Development. I knew Terry Rock the president and CEO because he used to live next door. I hoped he could suggest ways to enthral the business community. He told me to create a document that explained what I was doing, include images of the drawing, and then send it out.

It was the first time I ever made a power point and proved to be a learning curve. Brad, my husband, made the power point small enough to send electronically. The photographs were squeezed and looked insignificant. The epic-ness was lost.

I sent the power point to a few people in the oil patch. It did not make a splash. I did not get even a nibble. I also sent the power point out to my very talented cousin Shirley Wiebe. She gently pointed out that the drawing was not being given its best shot. She had just made a book of the art installations she did in Berlin using Blurb and suggested I should do the same. Building a book forced me to improve the techniques I was using to photograph the drawing.

Since finding a partner had not yet been achieved I applied for funding from AFA and the Alberta Creative Development Fund again and had to include images of the work. By this time I had figured out a way to photograph the line drawing that hinted at the expansiveness of the piece.

I posted the photographed drawings to the Shaw Photoshare site.

Then at one of the Stitch and Gather meetings Jane Poole told me about her friend David Finch who has published books on the subject of oil. I sent him the photoshare site link with a request for a meeting. He agreed to come and look at the drawing. He was the first person to see the work that was connected to the oil industry in a real way. He liked what I was doing and gave me two things to think about. Find at least five ways to use the work and research. And look for financial support from industry associations who put money into education.

I went on the web to find oil industry associations. There I found SEEDS Foundation – a non-profit organization that provides balanced education about the world of energy – oil, gas, wind, hydro.

So again I spent three hours writing a two-paragraph email to Diane Field with my request for a meeting and included one image of the sample embroidery. It turned out she has visited the Bayeux Tapestry and has cross-stitched an image from it. Intrigued by my project she agreed to a visit.

SEEDS Foundation funds their activities and programs through industry partnerships. She liked the way The Black Gold Tapestry could be integrated with the SEEDS mission, and deliver energy education in a new way. We agreed to partner.

Just like Twyla Tharp says, taking action begins the process of commitment. The most important step I took was the first step. Along the way I met new people, learned to do things I had never done before, and was encouraged to evaluate and refine along the way.

And so the next stage of the journey begins. Money still has to be raised, but I am not alone anymore. There’s infrastructure and a team of ten looking out for my project now.

Energy Obesity

2010-07-04T16:03:00.008-06:00

You know times are a changing when a chief energy economist tells the world we must change our oil consuming ways. Peter Tertzakian has written two books “A Thousand Barrels A Second” (2006) and “The End of Energy Obesity” (2009) and both do a good job of expressing the key issues pushing us toward rethinking and reconfiguring our energy consumption.

Tertzakian confirms we are at peak oil and near capacity production worldwide. Peak Oil means we are never going to pump more oil out than we do now. All the big fields and easy to get at oil have been found. Near capacity production means that the amount of oil being pumped out meets the demands of the world by a small margin. The western world, in particular Canada, burn black gold like there is no tomorrow. With so many developing countries experiencing their own industrial revolution the demand for oil increases. Political instability in oil producing nations creates fear that the taps will be turned off for the western world and hoarding and wars are the outcome. The aftermath of war always reduces oil production.

“The End of Energy Obesity” argues convincingly that the sun, wind, hydro and biofuels are not the magic bullet we wish they could be. Tertzakian seems to be in agreement with James Kunstler (Clusterfuck Nation) that all those options mean more inputs from the energy we already use - oil, coal, natural gas, hydro, nuclear.

Then we have the little problem of climate change to throw another spanner in the works.

So here’s the thing about human beings. We rarely change our ways until push comes to shove.

Even though almost 50 percent of all oil is distilled into gasoline for transportation, the only time we dial back our consumption is when prices go up. European countries experience higher prices and guess what? They drive smaller cars. They build and use more public transport. Fifty percent of vehicles in Germany today have diesel engines – a way more efficient engine.

Be assured the price of oil is going to go up again.

According to futurists Smart technology is the road to conserving energy. It will help us meter energy and turn down the heat and the air conditioning or shut off appliances and lights that are not in use. More important virtual workspaces using the Internet and telecommuting in business hubs close to where people live will decrease the need to travel long distances to the office or for business meetings. Imagine walking or taking a bike to work instead of driving. Imagine not having to sit in rush hour traffic with the car idling. Imagine being able to save taxes on road maintenance and even more road building. Imagine fewer cars on the road.

The key for changing our ways is to change the technology and make the price right for consumers and business - just like people did in the nineteenth century when oil replaced coal.

Celebrate

2010-06-22T21:01:00.005-06:00

The drawing for Black Gold Tapestry is done. Like a soccer player, after scoring a goal during The World Cup, there is a brief moment of delirious celebration before returning to the field to score again. So while I’m doing the dance of joy I also want to give thanks.

My family, Brad and Lucy Cariou, my sisters Patricia Cameron, Wendy Crawford and Heather Gevertz, my mom Vel Sawatzky, my dearest friend Diane Shaskin, my long distance pal Sue Willett, my writing partner Emma Barry and my lovely group of friends in Stitch and Gather have all provided me with food for thought and encouragement and much needed advice and brain storming. Kisses and hugs to all.

I want to give thanks for the biscotti I ate and the coffee I drank each morning, imparting a delicious and sweet focusing ritual to get me started every day.

I want to thank CBC Radio for uploading all the Vinyl Tap episodes so I could listen to Randy Bachman and his wife Denise McCann and enjoy the show’s mix of pop songs and musical commentary and back story insights. I particularly liked the show about Galileo, The Summer of Love, and the one about songs that were so long and strange they should never have made it to the radio much less become hits. The show delivered a perfect soundscape for me as I worked. I never felt lonely.

Thank you to my seven blog followers who took the time to become one - you are much appreciated. And thanks to the others who read this blog on a more occasional basis.

I’m very thankful for the past year’s support from Alberta Foundation for the Arts and Canada Council through the Alberta Creative Development Initiative.

And of course I can’t forget Marshall my cat who sits on my lap while I write this blog – overseeing the details, tapping my hand with his paw for attention and meowing at the door when I’ve banned him from the room. He’s there to remind me that all work and no play is boring and that we are stewards of our four legged friends and the natural world.

Thank you Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne for bringing apple computers into the world.

Without the Calgary Public library and the Internet I could not have researched this project. “All that (wo)man has thought or dreamed preserved as if by magic in books.”

Oil is the most creatively used matter in the world. It is the most squandered precious substance in the world.

The final ten feet of drawing depict the end of the honeymoon with fossil fuels in general and oil in particular.

Scientist Charles Keeling warned us back in the early 1960s that we are causing global warming through the burning of fossil fuels. Today we know that industry creates the largest amount of pollution followed by cars. I chose to depict the Alberta oil sands where dump trucks the size of three-story buildings, move the vast amounts of earth dug up in the ongoing search of oil, creating a nightmare of ecological destruction.

Then there are the refineries that process the tar sand oil spewing exhaust into the air.

Finally there are the people in large cities like Beijing wearing masks for protection from pollution both cars and industry.

Here’s a quote from the New York Times before the Olympics in 2008.

“But just as the speed and scale of China’s rise as an economic power have no clear parallel in history, so its pollution problem has shattered all precedents. Environmental degradation is now so severe, with such stark domestic and international repercussions, that pollution poses not only a major long-term burden on the Chinese public but also an acute political challenge to the ruling Communist Party. And it is not clear that China can rein in its own economic juggernaut.

Chinese cities often seem wrapped in a toxic gray shroud. Only 1 percent of the country’s 560 million city dwellers breathe air considered safe by the European Union.

Public health is reeling. Pollution has made cancer China’s leading cause of death, the Ministry of Health says, “Ambient air pollution alone is blamed for hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. Nearly 500 million people lack access to safe drinking water.”

The tapestry ends with the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Workers, in their plastic slickers and rain pants and bright orange gloves, shovel the heavy oil off the beach. Birds, encased in a thick coat of oil, sit rigid on the beach, unable to move.

The eleven men who died in the disaster are lost to the water.

Analysts tell us the cheap, easy to get at, oil is gone. We can expect to continue to experience more oil spills and environmental atrocities in the future along with war over remaining supplies. Our dependency is not going to go away and it will take decades and decades to forge new ways of doing things. As Bette Davis said in All About Eve, “Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.”

The last image I’m leaving you with is Pandora, a seductive woman made from clay by the gods on Mount Olympus. Zeus gave her a sealed jar and then sent her to torment men as punishment after Prometheus stole fire from the gods. In the version I remember Zeus expressly tells Pandora not to open the jar, knowing her curiosity will overcome her. Of course as soon as she’s alone with the jar she opens it and evil and calamity escape and are forever loosed upon the world. I think oil is like the fire Prometheus stole and the beguiling Pandora and the evils in the jar combined. My drawing is a reminder that even though it seems grim there is still hope at the bottom of the jar.

War

2010-06-13T16:42:00.004-06:00

I am ten feet from the end, thus concluding the drawing phase of Black Gold Tapestry. Throughout the last year it has been challenging to choose stories that could be illustrated and define a moment in oil’s rise to primacy. As a continuous piece of drawing, 220 feet in length, I think it conveys the epic story that has unfolded, the telescoping of events, and the sense of time speeding up that all of us feel in the western world in the 21^st century.

This week I made a brief reference to World War II. In the war scene there are the allied soldiers and the Germans.

The German soldiers are not conveyed as nazi villains. The soldiers, on both sides, were pawns in the power struggle for dominance over resources. There are many photographs now on the Internet from the two great wars and it is clear that the propaganda machine worked 24/7 on both sides of the fence making enemies where there should have been none. We are living in a time where the same machine is supplying us with prejudice, vindictiveness, suspicion, fear and dissent against the Middle East. Oil is at the heart of the matter.

I also portrayed M. King Hubbert, the geoscientist, who worked for Shell Oil. He defined Peak Oil theory which today far fewer people are willing to argue is theory. In the mid 50s, when western world prosperity was ramping up, he predicted that USA oil production would peak in the early seventies and then fall off. In the seventies he predicted world production would peak before the end of the century. He was right on both counts. We have run out of easy to get at cheap oil.

A while ago I was jamming with my husband Brad on the subject. I said something to the effect that of all the people on this earth who seems to be equipped with the ability to corral genius and bring a team of people together to make truly astounding technology Steve Jobs is. So why doesn’t he do the something for clean air and renewable energy?

This week Brad sent me this cartoon. Obviously what I’m thinking is part of the collective unconscious. We’re all thinking the same thing Steve. Could you please get on the job, because time is a-wasting.

Rocket Man

2010-06-05T15:00:00.002-06:00

This week there was nothing in the mailbox to let me know whether there will be funding to take this project to the next step. The grant proposal went out in early February. It’s June now. On Wednesday I was so agitated about not knowing I found it hard to concentrate, which only increased my agitation. I wasn’t sure where the drawing was going and worrying about funding allowed me an excuse to avoid the issue. However once I brought myself up short – pointing out that no one else was going to draw it – well I got down to work.

Juggling the making of art with the business of art is complicated by the time it takes to do both. Applying for grants is one of the few ways to raise funding. Send out the forms, dot the i’s and cross the t’s, send a prayer to the heavens and off it goes to a place where it competes with other equally fantastic proposals. It’s a crapshoot. So I thought I should look for private funding. It may be a lunatic idea, in this era of economic downturn, but waiting for a new grant deadline, when they are all months away seems equally crazy.

I wrote up a proposal but discovered it needs to look way more exciting visually. Now one would think a filmmaker/artist who studied commercial art would know this. Clearly I’ve written way too many film proposals where it’s all paperwork and budgets. I need more razzledazzle for the proposal.

That’s on my to do list.

Add Razzle Dazzle.

Adding razzle dazzle is very time consuming.

Isn’t a drawing two city blocks in length enough razzle dazzle?

Do I note resistance?

Sometimes in order to get a job done, you do what you have to do and seek advice that will motivate. So I’m reading Marshall Goldsmith’s “Mojo – How to Get It, how to Keep It, How to get it back If you Lose it”. He’s a business world Guru.

I’ve got my Mojo scorecard printed out and I’m tackling resistance as I write this down.

Tales of Scheherazade

2010-05-30T10:59:00.003-06:00

During the same Paris Exposition where Rudolph Diesel displayed his peanut oil fueled engine, one Muzaffar al-Din Shah Qajar, the Shah of Persia, traipsed through the displays, falling in love with Edison’s moving pictures. He commanded his personal photographer to buy the necessary film cameras and development equipment to make films so that “God willing he can make some there (Persia) and show them to our servants.”

History books describe Qajar as a ne’er do well pleasure loving spendthrift. Persia faced one financial crisis after another thanks to him. Each time Muzzafar al-Din Shah Qajar visited Europe he borrowed money from people like Czar Nicholas II of Russia to pay for his lavish travelling expenses. So while he was in Paris for the exposition he had the Persian Commissioner General discreetly ask around whether or not there might be a rich buyer for the now defunct Reuter’s oil concession.

Qajar’s father granted the original concession to Baron De Reuter, the British newspaper magnate. The deal was a direct infusion of cash into the coffers of the Shah and in return Reuter received the right to mine minerals as well as to construct railways and establish a bank in Persia. The Persians and their Russian friends didn’t like it, not much came of it and the deal was called off. It was replaced by a second concession to Reuter’s son that was limited to oil exploration and banking. Drilling was unsuccessful and this concession was also cancelled.

So in 1900 the Shah was between concessions and wanted another to provide him with a line of credit to the good life. He needed someone to pick up the tab. Enter William Knox D’Arcy.

His name has not gone down in the history books in the same way that Winston Churchill has, yet he also played an influential role in usurping the oil rights of the debt-ridden Persia for Britain.

D’Arcy’s father, a solicitor had had to move to Australia in shame after becoming bankrupt. As a young man D’Arcy studied law and then was savvy enough to invest in an Australian gold mine where he made his first fortune. He was in his thirties when he became as rich as Bill Gates is today.

Dusting the Australian soil off his top hat he moved to England with his wife, Elena Birkbeck, and flaunted his wealth, purchased two large mansions and a substantial chunk of Grosvenor Square. He was a lavish host and threw wild parties in London where entertainment was supplied by the legendary Enrico Caruso and Nellie Melba. He also is noted for commissioning the Holy Grail Tapestries from Arts and Crafts founder William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones.

The timing was perfect for the deal Persia was offering. William Knox D’Arcy was bored out of his gourd. He missed the excitement of the hunt for gold. While he was in Paris at the famous 1900 exposition, drowning his ennui, he was approached with a deal every other City of London investor had rejected.

He read the findings of Jacques de Morgan a French archaeologist who in the 1880s wrote about his observation of oil seeps during his Persian expeditions.

With little more than the knowledge that the combustion engine was the future, and the belief in the serendipity that Morgan was the name of the gold mine company where he’d made his first fortune, D’Arcy agreed to send geologists to Persia.

After the geologists found a 500-mile long oil field, in 1901 D’Arcy sent his agent Alfred Marriott to Tehran who negotiated a deal to exploit natural gas, petroleum and asphalt for a period of sixty years. Twenty thousand pounds were paid directly to the Shah for his approval to the agreement. The Persian Government received 20,000 shares and sixteen percent of the net profits.

Drilling permission had to be obtained from the Bakhtiari khans in whose territory all the oil deposits lay, which is a whole other story of palm greasing and political machinations. It took seven years before oil was struck. D’Arcy by that time had drained most of his own capital and had had to seek funding from the British Admiralty and Burmah Oil. Thus the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was founded. Today the company is known as British Petroleum, the same company trying to staunch its leaky oil well in another beleaguered part of the world, Louisiana.

Flight of Fancy

2010-05-24T15:41:00.006-06:00

Today is Victoria Day in Canada. Queen Victoria died in 1901, the same year Orville and Wilbur Wright wrestled with the problem of how to loft their glider into the air for sustained flight. Their longest flight that year was 389 feet.

Wilbur wrote, "When we left Kitty Hawk at the end of 1901, we doubted that we would ever resume our experiments. Although we had broken the record for distance in gliding, and although Mr. Chanute, who was present at that time, assured us that our results were better than had ever before been attained, yet when we looked at the time and money which we had expended, and considered the progress made and the distance yet to go, we considered our experiments a failure. At this time I made the prediction that men would sometime fly, but that it would not be within our lifetime."

But the two of them got over the disappointment and in 1902 went back to their drawing boards and changed the glider – a thinner airfoil, longer and narrower wings, and they added a fixed vertical rudder to the rear. In its final form their airplane became the world’s first fully controllable aircraft. The brothers performed more than 700 successful flights with the glider.

Finally in 1903, with a light motor specially built and mounted on the wings, Orville and Wilbur took their airplane to Kitty Hawk Dunes and managed to loft it in the air by pushing it down a track made of 2 x 4 planks. It became airborne, and with the help of the engine and the wind, it flew for 852 feet.

The lesson learned here, which bears repeating, is once one is committed to a project and much labour has been spent, the grip it has on one’s psyche is near impossible to escape. When a problem seems so close to being solved even if one has said out loud. “I’m done,” the sub-conscious says “oh no you’re not.” It goes to work and whispers some inspirational resolution and then it’s off to the races again.

The other story that caught my fancy is Rudolph Diesel, the man who gave us the diesel engine. He patented it in 1897 and a working model showcased at the world’s fair in Paris in 1900. It was superior to the combustion engine as it utilized less fuel and ran on peanut oil not petroleum.

Mr. Diesel said, “The use of vegetable oils for engine fuels may seem insignificant today. But such oils may become in course of time as important as petroleum and the coal tar products of the present time.”

Rudolph Diesel

Diesel’s story ends with a conspiracy tale. In 1913 he boarded a ship heading to London. He was about to sign a contract with the British Navy. This was the year before war broke out between England and Germany. After dinner he retired to his room, asking to be called at 6:15 am the next morning. He was never seen alive again. His body was found ten days later and his son identified his personal effects.

Some argue that Diesel had a nervous disposition and was given to depression and had committed suicide because his engine had put him in debt. However it does seem curious that a man who had worked so hard and so long and sacrificed so much would decide to end it all just when he was about to reap the rewards of his labour.

Others argue he was murdered because his engine would make petroleum-based fuel obsolete. It is true that after his death, the Diesel engine was re-engineered to run on petroleum fuel. The last theory is the German government had him murdered for sharing his ideas with England.

We will never know the truth but my mind is conjuring Reilly Ace of Spies played by the winsome Sam Neill.

For Bond fans, Reilly was the inspiration for Ian Flemming's double agent.

Sidney Reilly
In the ensuing decades the diesel engine was relegated to other tasks while the combustion engine burned gas and hogged the spotlight on the highways. However today Europeans have embraced the diesel engine for the very reasons Mr Diesel predicted.

Feet of Clay

2010-05-14T15:41:00.007-06:00

It is never easy to be confident that what is being created is worthwhile. Some days it’s so strong that sense that what is being done is exactly right. Other days there are misgivings. And so part of what I do is keep an eye on other creators. What do they do to keep themselves going? How do they keep the juices flowing?

Back in 1993 I read several books on creativity that helped me focus after a number of years where I spun my wheels and did things in fits and starts. One of the books was “The Creative Spirit” that was the companion to the PBS television series. The book was compiled by Daniel Goleman, Paul Kaufman and Michael Ray. Here are some quotes.

“Creative people are committed to risk. The creative person always walks two steps into the darkness. Eveybody can see what’s in the light. They can imitate it, they can underscore it, they can modify it, they can reshape it. But the real heroes delve in the darkness of the unknown.”

- Benny Golson

“I always compare any idea to a golden wire. It’s really gorgeous, a lovely thing, but also a bit fragile. You come trotting in with this idea and it’s a YES… and ‘yes” means contribute, help me – I need help to get the strength to survive. And then when we come up with what a NO looks like - it’s a monolithic, ugly thing. It’s made of cement. Some people have made their entire reputation - become presidents of motion picture companies – by saying no! It’s one of the most horrible words in the English language. This no can destroy an idea, because you have this fragile little yes trying to survive. Anybody can drop that monstrous No on the yes before it even has a chance for life.”

-Chuck Jones

The other book that was hugely influential was "The Artist’s Way". It recommends Artist pages and going on Artist dates. Artist pages is writing every day in a journal. It provides a forum to try ideas out – dust off old dreams and meander through one’s own thoughts. Keeping up the journal builds persistence. Nobody who is creative continues creating unless they are persistent. Persistence is a muscle that needs to be exercised in order for it to work at optimum level. Of course there’s no point in building persistence if there’s no creative fire. An artist date is a form of play where one pursues interests and goes on adventures to feed the flame of innovation. Black Gold Tapestry, began with an artist’s date.

Something else that is part of my creative tool kit that I’ve done since the mid eighties is run. Of course walking is just as good. Both help the mind to unwind and let the unconscious do its work solving problems. Running and walking are as easy as stepping outside the house. They are like food. They sustain on a physical and mental level.

This week I focused on the oil fields in Baku and how the Nobel Brothers, Ludwig and Robert, inaugurated the building of pipelines and built the first oil tankers.

We need a moment of silence to think about this.

Alfred Nobel, the youngest brother, wasn’t involved in the day-to-day oil operation, although he had shares. Instead he invented dynamite. Another moment of silence is needed. They all became rich as Midas. Three brothers inadvertently perpetrated a Pandora’s box of future destruction.

And in restitution Alfred endowed nine million dollars to be awarded to people whose creative work most benefits humanity. He died the same year Henry Ford introduced his Quadricycle.

I’d like to point out that there was an abundance of creativity in the 19^th century. And so much of it was possible because coal and then oil provided energy and raw material. If we could tap into a life-sustaining energy – that was not destructive - where would we be? Would we be brimming with excitement for the future? Of course the fear of destruction and diminishing reserves has sparked a new kind of drive and creativity in this generation. Maybe the threat of doomsday does have its place in providing hope for us after all.

Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves

2010-05-09T17:02:00.005-06:00

The past two weeks I have been taking care of the business side of Black Gold Tapestry. As I’ve said before in order for this project to carry on there has to be finances to do the work. Otherwise all this effort and work is for not. So I met with the Nickle Arts Museum and the Glenbow Museum with the intent to secure a letter stating they would show the work when it is completed. And then armed with letters from these two institutes I can pursue more financing.

On a snowy May morning I trekked across the university grounds, with two rolls of drawings wrapped in a black garbage bag, and the embroidered samples in a large zip lock bag. I only mention these details of schlepping work on a bad weather day as they illustrate the unglamorous pedestrian elements of what art making is really about.

Showing work to a stranger is an emotional seesaw. I unfurled the rolls of paper and sixty feet of drawing cascaded across a worktable, twelve feet in length, and over its edges. And I talked - spilling my story – explaining the approach used, the journey of discovery for the past year and a half, the research and development, the perimeters that were set and the required elements.

With some trepidation I showed the two samples of embroidery. Why do I worry? Because Michelle Hardy, curator of Decorative Arts for the Nickle, sees a lot of textile arts. She has seen the best. Would my work stand up to scrutiny? Could she squint her eyes and blur the space between the two side-by-side pieces and imagine how the work would look when it really is a continuous piece?

Michelle looked, listened and commented. She called in a colleague to see the work. We discussed how it could be hung, and what the new Nickle Gallery site is going to be like. She asked if I would be willing to give a talk on the work I’m doing. The meeting lasted almost three hours and she agreed to write a letter.

The next day’s journey to the Glenbow I parked the car in a downtown spot and paid ten dollars for the privilege. Ten dollars. I only mention this detail to emphasize the things I sacrifice for my art. My allergy to spending money parking usually means I park on the North side of the river and hoof it to downtown and then take the train through the downtown corridor because its free. But I didn’t want to worry about getting wet and looking like a drowned rat when I met the Glenbow representative. So I forked over the money.

The meeting was shorter, but the outcome was the same. Lorain Lounsberry, senior curator of Cultural History agreed to write a letter.

Back in my workspace I was able to move forward with the drawing once again. And the story I illustrated is about Bertha Benz, a woman of adventure and loyalty.

Before she married Karl Benz she invested her dowry in his company, trusting that he would succeed in making an internal combustion engine car, which he did, but was apparently too busy to get the word out. Bertha took matters into her own capable hands. No matter how great something is – whether it’s an invention or a film or a work of art - champions are needed.

On August 5, 1888 Bertha did something that had never been done before. She left the house with two teenage sons in tow, didn’t tell her husband where she was going, and proceeded to drive from Mannheim to Pforzheim in one of Benz’s Patent Motorwagen to visit her mother. The trip was around 60 miles long. No one had ever driven so far, for so long, in a car before.

Along the way there was plenty of mishaps. When she ran out of fuel Bertha bought more from a pharmacy. When the chain for rotating the wheels broke, a blacksmith provided the mending. Her hairpins came in handy to clean a fuel line and her garter provided insulation for a wire. Once she arrived in Pforzheim Bertha telegraphed her husband to let him know of her successful journey. The next day she returned and the newspapers of the day covered the awe-inspiring story.

It seems clear that Bertha spent time with Karl in the workshop, as she knew exactly what to do when the vehicle broke down. Upon return she provided Karl with much insight into its workings and suggested adding a much-needed additional gear for climbing hills. He listened. Bertha demonstrated that the automobile could be useful to the general public, and the publicity boosted business for Karl’s motorwagen. Thanks to Bertha and her resourceful and adventurous nature Benz is still a recognized name in the car industry today.

Just Another Oil Spill

2010-05-02T10:17:00.003-06:00

It always seem so righteous at the start

When there’s so much laughter

When there’s so much spark

When there’s so much sweetness in the dark.

"Car On A Hill" - Joni Mitchell

My soul belongs to the dealer

He keeps my mind as well

I play the part of the leecher

No one cares for me.

"Signed D.C." Arthur Lee Love

Throughout the nineteenth century the story of oil was one of discovery and the excitement of creation. Lots of spark. And although the twentieth century continued producing remarkable discoveries and inventions directly attributable to oil, there is forever afterwards a creeping darkness and shadow side. Our situation makes me think of Pinocchio, the gullible puppet, who visits Pleasure Island and is lured into a life of hedonism and barely escapes turning into a jackass.

Unfortunately none of the American government had Jiminy Cricket sitting on their shoulders when they voted against a bill to demand a safety valve on oil rigs. On the other hand there’s no purpose in pointing our fingers at the greed of oil companies. We want all the conveniences of the modern world and not one of us would have it otherwise. Even the Amish have become divided with one group driving cars and the other holding onto their horse and buggies. All of them use propane for cooking and kerosene for light.

No matter how green our aspirations oil is wherever we look.

Pooled Oil from the Exxon Valdez

Steampunk

2010-04-25T11:41:00.004-06:00

When I was old enough to hold a pencil, the first thing I tried to draw was people. My mother had a knack for drawing profiles – and perhaps that’s where I got the inspiration. I can pinpoint a few other places where I was inspired to draw the human form and then later animals, and eventually became proficient at both. But I was never inspired to draw machines. When I was attending ACAD studying commercial art, we were supposed to produce smooth, slick, highly rendered airbrushed illustrations of those monumental technological advances – cars, airplanes, trains and motorcycles.

It was manly guy stuff, both the airbrush and the subject matter. I didn’t feel a connection to either the superficial gloss that airbrush gave to the drawings or the machines I was rendering. My instructor pointed out that I spelled Yamaha – YAMAMA. Shortly thereafter he told me I should transfer into the painting department, as I wasn’t cut out for commercial art.

Because I disliked the messenger so much I refused to take his advice, which in retrospect would have been a better decision. But I was stubborn and was bound and determined to prove to him that he was wrong and prove to my dad that I could make a living as an artist.

I lasted eighteen months as a commercial artist and became a filmmaker instead.

In working on this project I have been challenged to draw machines once again. Isn’t that the way life is – all the things we try to avoid like eating our vegetables and monthly bookkeeping turn around and bite us in the butt. Damn those confounded dizzying arrays of geometric shapes. And nineteenth century machines are even more complex than today’s machinery to draw because every steam valve, gear and bolt in the engine is exposed and not encased in a plastic shell. The inspiration for the steampunk movement is fabulous to look at and hell to draw. God help me when I have to embroider them.

Did I mention that I’m stubborn?

This week I had to draw lots of machines - the early steam-driven engines

the first electric powered vehicle

and the first combustion engine.

And I got into architecture too. What did housing look like in Paris where the first steam-powered vehicles drove down the street?

What did houses look like in Germany when Daimler introduced the first motorcycle powered by a gas powered combustion engine?

I also thought that perhaps Daimler might have worn coveralls, as he was one of the first grease monkeys and it was important to protect one’s clothes as most people had modest wardrobes. I did my research and found that the first coveralls were devised in the late 18^th century. And so he and his fellow mechanic are wearing coveralls over their suits as they tinker and fill the vehicle with gas. The year is 1885.

That Thing Called Chemistry

2010-04-18T14:01:00.004-06:00

Here’s the thing about the story of oil. It intersected and was dominated by the story of coal back in the nineteenth century. And so I had to wrap my mind around what to do with this – because there were stories I wanted to tell that began as coal stories and then moved over into the arena of oil.

One story is Mauve.

The word mauve describes a pale soft purple once associated with mourning clothes and elderly women. It has a reputation for being a dull colour. But back in the day mauve was a vibrant violet and was a headline story, all because of nineteen-year old William Perkin.

Perkin’s father would have liked his son to enter into industry where the big money was, but young William was an amateur artist with a love of chemistry. He became the youngest student to come under the tutelage of Dr. August Hoffman at the age of fifteen.

Chemistry in the first half of the nineteenth century had little connection to industry. It was historically related to alchemy and apothecary shops. William had set himself the task to make synthetic quinine. He was experimenting with coal tar – a waste product of coal being converted to kerosene that was usually disposed of in streams and rivers.

Perkin said “I was endeavouring to convert an artificial base into the natural alkaloid quinine, but my experiment, instead of yielding the colourless quinine, gave a reddish powder, with a desire to understand this particular result, a different base of more simple construction was selected, viz. aniline, and in this case obtained a perfectly black product. This was purified and dried, and when digested with spirits of wine gave the mauve dye.”

Hoffman was not impressed by his student’s work initially, but Perkin was thrilled by the colour and set out to see if it could have a useful application. He called the new colour Mauveine, estimating that the textile dyers in Britain would be open to a dye that sounded French. He was right. Perkin also convinced his father that the new dye if made in quantity could have industrial application and his father underwrote the small factory with his savings.

Queen Victoria, following the fashionable French empress Eugenie, wore a gown dyed with the new mauve to her daughter Victoria’s wedding in 1858 and Mauve madness set in throughout Britain. Perkin became a millionaire and inspired others to new research with industrial application – spawning the pharmaceutical and plastics industries. Simon Garfield has written a thorough and fascinating account of William Perkin in his book Mauve.

The response to the new dyes was two-fold. The haute monde adored the aniline dye and all the other novel colours that followed. William Morris and the Arts & Crafts movement eschewed the new synthetic colours and embraced natural dyes. Thomas Wardle, a silk importer, dyer and printer was a friend and collaborator of William Morris. His wife, Elizabeth Wardle, established the Leek Embroidery Society in 1879. Morris employed the society to embroider works for his company. The society went on to make a full-scale copy of the Bayeux Tapestry now on display at the Museum of Reading. The only change made to the imagery was to excise unmentionable body parts. Perhaps they were afraid the prudish Queen Victoria might say, “ We are not amused.”

Decisions

2010-04-10T10:24:00.005-06:00

Now that I’ve reached and surpassed that momentous point – half way there – it is coming home to roost that there is only 90 feet left to tell the rest of the story and I’ve only completed the section where Edwin Drake hired out his services to lawyer George H. Bissell on land Bissell had leased and there Drake employed salt drilling techniques to strike oil. And thus began the rush for oil and oil claims.

History now telescopes. For the first half of the tapestry cartoon, possible events to depict were few and hard to find – oil was not the focus of history. Now the second half of the Victorian era, right up to the present, is inundated by oil.

So I’m forced to make editorial decisions about what gets in and what has to be left on the cutting room floor. Much as I wanted to include Canadian James Miller Williams, a Hamilton businessman and carriage-maker as the first to strike oil I dropped the story. Because Edwin Drake’s find a year later, 1859, in Pennsylvania, was what got the boom rolling.

Unfortunately Williams didn’t manage to strike a good pocket. His drill wasn’t steam powered like Edwin and he didn’t have the Seneca Oil Company backing him. He’s become a footnote. So he did not make it into the drawing.

I had to concede that the real oil boom took off from Drake’s find. But Drake didn’t own the land – Bissell did. In fact Drake’s bad health forced him out of the game and he did not own the patent on the drilling apparatus. He was broke and broken only three years later. The townspeople of Titusville, who had benefited from his discovery, petitioned the state of Pennsylvania for a pension to be provided and generously rewarded Drake with an annual stipend of $1500, which it paid out for his and his widow’s lifetime. Meanwhile Bissell reaped the rewards of Drake’s hard work and became a wealthy man, he returned to New York City in 1863 and became President of the Peruvian Petroleum Co.

One of the interesting footnotes that I was able to get in is about Kerosene, that first product that ignited the lust for oil. Electricity and Thomas Edison’s invention of the light bulb ended demand for kerosene lamps, but present day employs kerosene as jet fuel. So I sketched in a fuel truck with a big old hose snaking up to the jet where a man fills up the tank.

Here’s the other story I drew. Charles Lockhart, a canny Scotsman living in America, who had been trading in oil skimmed from salt brine, took a gallon of Kier’s finest kerosene oil to Britain to prove oil kerosene was superior to that of coal - superior and cheaper.

International trade began immediately. Lockhart ditched Kier and set up his own refinery and went on to join Rockefeller in Standard Oil – a company that was eventually exposed by Ida Tarbell, America’s first great woman journalist, for all sorts of shenanigans. He died with a fortune of more than $220 million – equivalent to about $5 billion today.

I was in Victoria last week and used the vacation from drawing to catch up with my bosom buddy Diane Shaskin and her main man Mark Craft and their dance of joy boy Alexandre. Lucy and I enjoyed glorious meals made in their wonderful kitchen and wandering the Chinese cemetery and watching the crazy winds drive ten-foot waves up in Oak Bay. Throughout the four days we discussed dreams and schemes and all that stuff called life. When I came back the settling back into work was again one of those weeks of adjustments and interruptions. Yet I did ten more feet.

More Than Halfway There

2010-03-28T16:23:00.005-06:00

This week I passed the half way mark. It’s fun saying those words but there are ten weeks and 100 feet to go and other than the dinosaurs I don’t know what will go up on the page. Still it’s been a trip and it’s easier looking back at what I’ve done than thinking about the four remaining untouched rolls.

Here are words I live by "It takes a lifetime to find out what you are capable of doing and some of it will surprise you."

These are three things I absolutely was sure of when I was twenty. I was never never never going to have children. I hated all things cowboy and western. And oil had to be the most boring thing in the world

Now I have a beautiful daughter. The things that terrified me about motherhood - the pain of labour, the loss of ambition, bratty kids - were swept away by the profundity of the experience.

Working in the film industry was the road that led me to change my mind about cowboys and the western world. The first film I worked on had hundreds of horses and nearly that many cowboys helping out. After seeing a horse get down on the ground and roll in the dust, its four hooves pawing the air ecstatically, like a happy dog, and observing the cool guys and gals handling horses with a deft sureness, my blinkers were lifted. Later I met an editor, Emma Barry. She spent four summers as a backcountry cook for the cowboys. Her experiences became the backbone of the film project we’ve co-written “Real Western”. During the research period I even spent three days on a horse, facing yet another one of my fears.

One of the reasons I started Black Gold Tapestry was to get over feeling daunted by big complex machinery. When I was little we used to go to the Western Development Museum in Saskatoon. In the back of the ill-lit cavernous building were the old combines, tractors and thrashers. I felt infinitesimal looking up at the giant machines with their huge metal wheels three times bigger than me. They were like prehistoric dinosaurs in green and red paint, ready to crush me.

Much later I worked on a project filming at the Motherwell Homestead, near the Qu’Appelle Valley. There they had some of that farm machinery that scared the bejesus out of me. It was up and running. Noisy. Puking clouds of black smoke. I climbed up on top of the thing. It was different than expected -it was exhilarating.

What repelled me about oil were the unethical issues that dog the pursuit of oil profits. In the early nineties I got a different look at the oil industry. We were making a safety video showing the proper procedures for adding and taking away the pipe that link up the shaft for the drill bit. Doing this work requires skill, physical strength, timing, confidence and bravery. I was mesmerized by the choreography of the whole thing. The world of drilling for oil opened up for me. Yes there was the ick-factor of exploitation, but there was also the ingenuity and problem solving which I love. So the underlying theme of Black Gold Tapestry, is ingenuity and exploitation go hand in hand for good and bad, in everything we do.

This week I came across the story of Samuel Kier. He came from a family of entrepreneurs. Living in Pennsylvania, his family drilled for salt brine and hit oil. Sound familiar? Initially he dumped the stuff in the canals.

When it kept catching on fire the townfolk took umbrage and demanded him to cease and desist. He got the notion to borrow or buy a whiskey still from a friend of his, a pharmacist, and with some help began to experiment with distilling oil. First he was making a snake oil medicine, supposedly to cure his consumptive wife, and then later, it was distilled into kerosene. Oil based kerosene. So his one-barrel whiskey still became the first oil refinery in North America.

Labour

2010-03-21T10:30:00.005-06:00

The Industrial Revolution was when the whole world turned upside down, sped up and became all about work. Work. Work. Work. It began with textiles, the first area to become industrialized. Although James Hargreaves invented the first machine that improved upon the spinning wheel, it was Richard Arkwright who “invented” the first powered spinning frame.

History sources gloss over the fact he hired people to invent it. Arkwright, like the true businessman that he was, profited and took credit from the work of others and received a knighthood to boot.

Like many a good Dickensian businessmen, he had a big heart. He refused to hire children under six years of age or people over forty to work in his textile mill. Two thirds of the over twelve hundred people who worked in his mill were children. During the Industrial Revolution many children working in the factories were not paid at all, because after all they were being fed and clothed. Not very much and not well – but still enough to keep them alive, most of the time. The average lifespan for factory workers and coal miners was twenty-nine. One can see why Arkwright didn’t hire labourers over 40 – if they were not already dead they soon would be.

What the Industrial Revolution needed to keep going, was power for the machinery, light to keep the factories lit so people could get through the 13-20 hour work day, and oil to lubricate the machinery so they could keep running, running, running.

Fishermen had a whale of a time for the first eighty years of the Industrial Revolution. They could not catch enough whales to keep the factories lit and the machines lubricated. This highly profitable enterprise was knocked out of the arena by a Canadian physician -Abraham Gesner. A man who loved rocks, Gesner provided geological surveys within the maritime area. He tinkered around in his apothecary pharmacy, distilling coal in a retort, producing a thin clear flammable fluid that made excellent lamp fuel. He called it Kerosene.

The success of the product drove up demand for it. His company expanded to New York and became the North American Kerosene Light Company. The continued demand was met by the discovery that petroleum made kerosene too and was more easily produced. Kerosene became the light from which the Industrial Revolution kept illuminated and could lubricate machinery as well. It saved a few whales in the process.

Into the Breach Once More

2010-03-14T09:15:00.004-06:00

"The fewer men, the greater share of honour.

God’s will! I pray thee, wish not one man more."

-Henry V, William Shakespeare

Laura Pope, a friend of mine says, “Nothing worth doing is easy.”

Inevitably, at some point along route of a long project that is tough and challenging, there’s sure to be a breakdown in courage. Even though I have plenty of energy and am one of those people who takes pride in her never-say-die gungho-ness and just maybe could take a prize for optimism in the face of dire reality, I found myself wishing that I could shift this load off onto another’s shoulders. It’s not that I doubt the purpose of the work, it’s that I felt as if I were in the middle of a dead calm in the vast ocean of this thing called a five-year project. A dead calm is a nautical term for when there is no wind.

My dead calm lasted more than a week and felt pretty dire, because as I near the half way mark of finishing the 220 foot cartoon, I’m all too aware that I don’t have a lot of money and have no guarantees there will be any more money. On top of which my taxes need to get done and paid, I still have film projects to do and they don’t have resources either.

It’s takes mental gymnastics to get over these hurdles.

However there is nobody but me to pull me up by my bootstraps and give the “Into the breach once more” speech.

“But when the blast of war blows in our hearts,

Then imitate the action of the tiger;

Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood

Disguise fair nature with hard-Favour’d rage."

So I’m thinking about Kenneth Branagh, as a young and handsome Henry the V, who rouses his army to forget the odds that the Brits are outnumbered 5 to 1:

O do not wish one more:

Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,

That he which hath no stomach to this fight,

Let him depart: His passport shall be made,

And crowns for convoy put into his purse:

We would not die in that man’s company

That fears his fellowship to die with us.

And he goes on to tell the men that they must glory in the fewness of numbers and the odds:

He that outlives this day and comes safe home,

Will stand a tip-toe when this day is named.

Lone adventurers, who have great courage and curiosity, such as Lawrence of Arabia and Sir Richard Burton, came across plenty of obstacles and carried on somehow. Hitting a dead calm is merely part of the journey.

The most recent drawings completed have been about the first weapon of mass destruction, Greek Fire, conceived in 7th century Byzantium, made from a secret recipe that included petroleum – it was fired out of flame throwers, that could be mounted on a ship or from a hand model version for foot soldiers. The marvel of it was that it could burn on water. It could not be put out by water. It was the scourge of the seas and frightened grown men out of their wits.

Next I forged ahead and skipped back and forth over centuries like a rock skimming on water. Bing bing bing. They included 10th century Persia, 15th century Italy, and then 18th century Scotland and Britain, the whole section dedicated to the birth of what we now call geology.

Ibn Sina, from Persia, was the equal of Leonardo Da Vinci. He was endlessly curious and observant and is said to have completed works on philosophy, medicine, theology, geometry, astronomy and was the father of geological study.

It is believed Leonardo Da Vinci was influenced by Ibn Sina, and furthered the idea that sedimentary layers proved the mountains had once been covered by an ancient ocean that receded leaving fossil shells. Finally in the 18^th century the study of geology took off in popularity and a new father of geology was crowned, James Hutton, a Scottish physician, who spent a lot of time out of doors on his farm and noticed all over again what Ibn Sina and Leonardo Da Vinci had noted long before. Finally the rest of the world was ready to pay attention.

Upstairs by a Chinese Lamp

2010-03-03T21:07:00.003-07:00

China. A country of brilliant people. Why didn’t schools teach about the wonders of China when I was a student back in the last century? Almost every invention known to mankind can thank the Chinese for getting the ball rolling.

This week I continue to pay homage to the contribution the Chinese made exploiting the uses of oil and petroleum. Chinese alchemists, like their European counterparts, were purportedly looking for transcendence and immortality. Through their search they developed methods of distillation and were thus able to further their understanding of the properties of petroleum. Eventually this would lead them to harness its explosive and flammable nature in weapons of war and mass destruction. I suppose, blowing people to kingdom come could be construed as a form of transcendence of this mortal coil...

The Chinese cleverly used natural gas to cook with, keep warm and light their way. Lamps were made of animal hide or clay. I found a very useful photographic reference showing the different kind of ovens/stoves used in the first millennium AD. The section about cooking and light was a perfect spot to depict women as contributors, where the women are in charge.

What never ceases to amaze me is how often I long long long to be finished. The end of June and the end of the 220 feet cannot come soon enough. Drawing and composition are much harder than writing. There are only so many ways you can place words. Okay there are a lot of ways that the syntax can be arranged, but imagining what one will say is much easier than imagining what one will draw. There is something alchemical about how a drawing finds its way on to the page. One pen mark can suggest so much or ruin the whole thing. There are constant decisions, but no time to ponder it because there is a quota to be met.

What I Learned From Films

2010-02-21T16:43:00.004-07:00

I’m listening to the movie soundtrack for “Nine” in the background – a movie that came and went before I could see it. Never mind that the film received excoriating reviews, it had a sublime trailer – the kind that if I were a younger woman would have made me think, “Wow, I wanna make pictures.”

The film is based on Federico Fellini’s masterpiece “8 ½”. The protagonist is a movie director who does not know what his next movie is about. What a lovely dilemma to be caught in. The man has the money but not a clear idea of what to do with it.

I’ve written, produced and directed five film shorts and one feature film. A short is under thirty minutes while a feature is over seventy. Over the past five years I’ve been developing a couple of feature length scripts. One has received more development funding than most projects in Canada ever get. If development is purgatory then finding production funding is hell. The average feature film in Canada is made for under $3 million dollars, mine was a bargain for just under $700,000. I had a real job at the time (with pay) and so didn't mind that I received $21,000 for four years work. After all it was a labour of love. I wrote an article Dancing With Murphy's Law for Alberta Views magazine about the crushing experience of making my first feature film only to have the distributor go out of business just as the film was being released.

That’s why I thought, “Why not make a gigantic 220 foot tapestry? The pay is about the same. The grief can’t be anymore than juggling the headaches of production hell and at the end of the day I think I’ll be able to whip up some interest because no one else is doing anything like this.”

There are a few things I have learned from taking a film from gestation and completion and that is to not dismiss your own ideas and not to bog down under the bigness of what has been taken on.

Years ago I was recovering from a sinus infection. Housebound too long I went for a walk. Up on the bluffs overlooking Elbow Park a sense of euphoria filled me. Spring. Sunshine. And then what I can only describe as a voice (but I didn’t hear anything) seemed to well up from inside my gut. It said. “believe” and “think small”.

Those two ideas have stuck with me. Shortly afterwards I made my first short film. It was difficult to do, but it was not too difficult or too big, because I listened to that message of small and do-able. Whenever I wondered what I’d brought upon myself - that voice resonated and rumbled and I pushed on. So my advice to all who want to pursue a dream is to obey your ideas and break everything into small do-able chunks. A 220 foot embroidered tapestry is do-able – one foot at a time.

This week the tapestry segued into a story about how the Chinese invented the drill to dig deep and bring up brine water and recover the salt from it through evaporation. At some point, unwittingly, they hit natural gas and then cleverly built pipelines from bamboo and harnessed its energy and burned it for fuel to evaporate the water.

Ten more feet of drawing came out of my pen, a considerable mental challenge as I have been away from drawing for three weeks as I had to work on a script, and get in a proposal to the Alberta Foundation for the Arts applying for funding to pay for the next stage of this project. After embroidering a two-foot sample the tips of two fingers were calloused from thousands of tiny needle holes poked into them. After an eight-hour embroidery sessions the light came on and I figured out how not to poke my finger. Oh the joys of technical difficulties, but nothing like making a film.

Stitch and Gather

2010-02-09T14:35:00.007-07:00

Since 2008 a group of friends who go way back and some newer acquaintances gather monthly to discuss and show and tell all our varied interests that are connected to the broad field of textiles - embroidery, lace, batik, knitting, tapestry, brocade, old things, new things, made things, and of course fashion, museum shows and movies that connect to this endlessly fascinating subject.

Most of us make things, some regularly, some not as regularly. All of us are interested in textile history, technology and the skills involved and so the sharing is over the moon with a group of women who are funny, brilliant, resourceful, and curious, curious, curious. Three studied fashion, three of us taught at a fashion college here in Calgary, two are established artists, two currently teach at the Art College, one of them teaches history of art and her PhD just happens to be on the Bayeux Tapestry. Another did her masters degree in online communities and grew up across the street from me and was my first friend.

I presented the sixty feet of tapestry drawing I’ve finished. That sounds a bit much but it was a speedy presentation and enthusiastically received. My daughter, Lucy, got on one end of the roll and we just unfurled it – like a movie reel. Need I say it can be daunting to show something not completed? However my friends can be depended on to give an honest and thoughtful response. They understand what it takes to nurture ideas to completion and so provided me with plenty of things to consider and confirmation that what I’m trying to do with the work is coming through and worth doing.

Criticism is something that all artists who want to present their work must face. There are the critics that write for the papers and magazines. Their job is to discuss the work while entertaining the reader – sometimes at the artist’s expense. Too often they haven’t got any practical experience in the field. The really valuable feedback comes from peers who create. They can go under the hood and show you where it needs to be tinkered with to get maximum mileage. They’ve got a wealth of experience to draw from. Peers are definitely the ones to go to when the work is new and fresh and young and needs to be nurtured.

My daughter baked for the event. Nigella Lawson is her hero and from the enthusiastic response to this beautiful chocolate honey cake with marzipan bees it’s easy to understand why she adores the domestic goddess. Food, friends, family and fabric are a formula for fabulous fun.

This week I continue to embroider the sample for the grant application. I love the Italian wool silk blend yarn, Impressions by Caron, purchased at a shop called Needleworks on Kensington Road. It’s a fraction more expensive than the other brand, The Thread Gatherer, yet so lovely to work with – almost no tangles. When I’m finished off it will go to be photographed by another one of my Stitch and Gather pals who is a graphic artist and set up to photograph artwork.

Leaving the Valley of the Kings

2010-01-25T10:15:00.003-07:00

So far I have reduced hundreds of thousands of years of earth and her inmates’ history to sixty feet of paper. But time is a continuum right? We only perceive the differences when we bring the far ends closer together.

The essence of the Egyptians’ history is how they buried their dead. Over the past five days I traversed across the length of the paper drawing images depicting the rituals of preparing the dead for burial in ancient Egypt. There are discrepancies between sources as to whether or not bitumen was used in mummification. A source from the twenties declared that it was not so. Then I located an article written in 2002 that announced that after chemical testing it was found that up to 30 percent of the materials found on the mummies was bitumen. Another article said this was because the resins Egyptians had originally used became scarce. By Cleopatra’s lifetime Egyptians stopped mummifying their dead, probably because Rome had made Egypt a province under its far-reaching control.

Virtually all information regarding these mysterious people is based on the drawings, paintings and sculptures found in the Valley of the Kings. An extraordinary amount of Egyptian energy and time was focused on building pyramids, tombs, art displayed in the tombs, and vast sculptures and temples adorning the outside of the tombs in the necropolis. All of this magnificence was done in the name of putting the dead to rest. The most grand of these procedures was done for the ruling Pharoahs, but even the less grand were wrapped in strips of linen and treated with resin and bitumen, placed in inner and outer coffins. The powerful had golden cases. The less powerful were conducted to the Land of the Dead in boxes illustrated with hand-painted hieroglyphic stories and prayers for the deceased. Animal companions accompanied the dead into the afterlife. Ibises, dogs, apes gazelles, the odd hippopotamus, cats and even mice were wrapped in strips of intricately overlapping linen bandages.

In the border of the cartoon I depicted Mark Twain’s story that he heard and passed on. Egypt in the 19th century burned mummies in steam locomotives because wood was scarce. The pitch saturated mummies burned beautifully according to the story. Opinion today is this is a tall tale. And I say perhaps not. After all necessity is the mother of invention.

Today I’m going to the memorial service of Bruce Leitl. He was an accomplished composer who everyone in Calgary knew if they were in the film and television business. I met him in the early nineties when he was new on the scene. He was a charming and astute businessman and artist. His star rose and he became a golden boy in the firmament of Calgary talent. He died unexpectedly and too young. The last time I bumped into him, he was newly married and had an infant daughter. Life was good and full of promise.

After drawing the jackal headed god of the dead Anubis and the priests wrapping the body for the tapestry, I decided to put a female musician at the end of the sequence for all the music that connects and resonates between fellow travelers on this planet Earth.

God is in the details

2010-01-17T10:05:00.005-07:00

This week the tapestry drawing zigzagged into a story about how bitumen was gathered and transported in ancient history. This story will eventually dovetail with preserving the dead, through mummification, in Egypt.

One of the sources for Egyptian bitumen was from the Dead Sea. It bubbled up to the surface of the water and enterprising workers would paddle a boat through the sticky stuff and tow it to shore where it would be dried on mats and then be transported in either pottery, skins or as a solid cake. Donkeys were the transportation pack animals of choice as they were strong, able to bear very heavy loads, and required less food than a camel or horse.

So my tapestry begins with men on boats gathering bitumen on the Dead Sea and then it follows a donkey train, carrying pots of the stuff, which is then beset upon by bandits. Banditry was a constant threat on trade routes and historically they were a cutthroat lot.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am exceptionally queasy about blood and horror. I doubt that my drawings will have the same effect on viewers inured to the visceral ultraviolence that films depict, but the aftereffect of drawing the scenes made me feel vulnerable – something I hate.

In the margin I depicted a scene of the Dead Sea today. Now it is a place people go to heal their psoriasis and arthritis and various other skin and joint ailments. Spas were built along the shoreline, but over the last decade the sea has been disappearing. People used to be able to walk out of the hotel and get into the water. Now they drive over a kilometer to get to it. Water from the mountains that used to feed into the sea has been diverted for crops and drinking water. According to scientists the water is good for skin ailments because of the bitumen content of the water.

I’m getting ready to embroider a section to see how the elements hang together. Only when it is stitched will it come alive with the sensory elements of colour and texture. So this weekend I am going to choose a section to work on and begin stitching. There is more to this proposition than just the sheer joy of adding more work to my load. Grant application due dates are pending and a piece of embroidery should make an impressive addition to the line drawings so the jury can really understand what I’m doing. Although I don’t receive every grant I apply for, being thorough increases my chances of success.

Ozymandius

2010-01-10T08:50:00.004-07:00

Ozymandius

I met a traveller from an antique land

 Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

 Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, 

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown 

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command 

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read 

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, 

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed. 

And on the pedestal these words appear:

 "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

 Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" 

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay 

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare 

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

- Percy Bysshe Shelley

On A Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below

In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,

Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws

The only shadow that the Desert knows:

“I am great OZYMANDIAS,” said the stone,

“The King of Kings; this mighty City shows

“The wonders of my hand.” The City’s gone,

Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose

The site of this forgotten Babylon,

We wonder, and some Hunter may express

Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness

Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,

He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess

What powerful but unrecorded race

Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

- Horace Smith

This week I struggled to get back into the pacing required to get the requisite ten feet completed. After enjoying three weeks of travel and Christmas revelry it was time to stop resting on my laurels - “Yup got thirty feet done” - and return to work.

Monday came and went and I never picked up a pencil. Lucy was off from school for one more day, so I had an out. Come Tuesday the way was paved for me to be flustered when I was confronted with thirty feet of virgin paper - a very big expanse of white paper indeed – and very few concrete ideas to fill it with. On top of which I mislaid my inking pen and my most important metal ruler. After a fifteen-minute search I took myself in hand and said, “Improvise darling”. I dug up a metal square and a pen cartridge and proceeded but my brain was in disarray.

That niggling perfectionist monkey brain kept saying, “I hate this. I want my regular pen and my perfect eighteen inch metal ruler with each inch divided into thirtyseconds.”

If I had had some ideas about where I was going with the drawing, the ruler and pen probably would not have become an issue. But just like nature hates a vacuum, when I’m all out of ideas I can find all sorts of things to blame and fixate upon.

After one more trip upstairs I found the ruler under the couch in my office where I’d left it and provided a shift in perspective. Even though there was no lucky pen I began drawing. Just like writing and typing the first words, after the first mark was made I somehow got through that day. Was the drawing brilliant? No. Does it illustrate the story? Sure it does. And the momentum continued through to the end of the week and there is another 10 feet completed. My favourite part was drawing the dead and dying bodies scattered in the margin. Carnage and ruin. What does that say about me? Well the figure drawing had a fluidity that my foot soldiers in their phalanxes did not.

Historians claim the Bayeux Tapestry was completed in a relatively short period of time. So I was imagining a scenario where the overseeing artist had to meet the impatient patron's deadline. In the tense moment the artist made the same choices I did. “Make that line up of foot soldiers, holding the shields, longer. And take this drawing of ten men and flip it over and make ten more soldiers. Change their faces and helmets and there’s another eighteen inches finished.”

I started off this entry with two poems by two friends, Horace Smith and Percy Bysse Shelley The poems came out in the same journal a month apart. Originally they were both called Ozymandius. But Horace chose to re-title his. There’s a modern feel to his poem in its barbed humour, which is different from Percy’s romantic tone.

While I was drawing and researching the Mesopotamians I had to do a fair amount of searching to find out what soldiers of Babylon, under King Nebechadnezzar II, would have worn. There are plenty of splendid sculptured reliefs of Persian royalty with their palace attendants and courtiers – the equivalent of movie stars and Vanity Fair’s top 100 most powerful people with their posses, but there’s not a lot of information on foot soldiers. I made an executive decision that the average Persian soldier did not coif his hair in elaborate curls and ringlets or wear intricately woven fabric and gold jewelry. I found a few examples of plain clothing and simple weapons and shields and worked from there.

Through the process of playing costume designer for the scene I pondered the ancient trappings of the rich and powerful and thought how in the past, long before films were projected onto big wide screens with dolby surround sound there were huge, massive sculptural reliefs that must have produced the same awe that we feel when we look at a face in a ten foot close-up. And of course I then thought about the poem Ozymandius, which I studied in school and looked it up on the Internet and found the bonus poem by Horace Smith.

According to James Kunstler in the very near future there won’t be any technology as we know it, because there won’t be any fossil fuel. He says technology is only possible because of oil and when oil is gone our marvels of technology will be gone too. On one hand it is hard to imagine, but history has shown ancient civilizations that harnessed the flow of water through dams, paved roads, built cisterns, plumbing and conduits for running water and built pyramids, temples, the coliseum, Montezuma's palace, Aztec temples, and the Mesopotamian ziggurats disappeared, not for unfathomable reasons, but because the climate changed and famine ensued after crops failed and land eroded. A very good book about the connection between civilization and food is Six Thousand Years of Bread: It's Holy and Unholy history. by H.E. Jacob.

If perchance there are people still on this planet in 2000 years, what will they make of a film print or a DVD or a Blue ray disc? The knowledge within them and the purpose of them will have entirely disappeared and with it knowledge of our culture.

“What powerful but unrecorded race  once dwelt in that annihilated place?”

One down seven to go

2009-12-12T16:41:00.003-07:00

After completing the first roll of the Black Gold Tapestry ahead of schedule by a day, I was surprised by how quickly the pressure to finish was replaced with the weird feeling of time on my hands. My monkey brain jumped around wondering what to do with myself. Even though there were many options to choose from – writing this blog, photographing the last ten feet of the roll, working on one of three ongoing writing projects, vacuuming, washing floors, cleaning the fridge, wrapping presents, getting packed for a pre-Christmas trip to New York – I could not bring myself to do any of them. I needed to get out and reward myself for a job well done. So because it was snowing again I walked to the Starbucks closest to my house where I had an overpriced gingerbread latte and enjoyed the smell of the coffee and people watching.

So here’s what I learned from the first roll. Something I’ve been fighting with is what do I say to those who will look at the tapestry and question the validity or the truth or the choices of story I tell. Every historical source says something slightly different. And whether I’m looking at stories from the ancient past or something as recent as the Gulf war, history is being rewritten as we speak. Just like the Bayeux Tapestry’s portrayal of the events leading up to and including the battle of Hastings, the story I am telling is biased, filled with my interests, my conjecture, my idiosyncratic intertwining of storylines. Ultimately the tapestry is meant to be a work of art and craftsmanship and the images I’ve put together signify a jumping off point for discussion.

Winds of Change

2009-12-06T19:19:00.005-07:00

With the wind and swirling snow pummeling the houses and trees outside, I’m thankful my workspace is at home. Though I have been housebound I have journeyed far from here over the past week via the Internet investigating the earliest uses of oil. Here’s what I found that ended up in the tapestry.

Neanderthals glued spearheads to wooden shafts with bitumen and marsh dwelling Mesopotamians fashioned bricks made of reed, mud and bitumen. Neanderthals were a humanoid being, but researchers say we do not share any DNA with them, so they are not one of the four to six original ancestors that scientists think we descended from. Only for a brief time did their light shine leaving behind an artifact that shows the most ancient use of oil that has been found to date.

I also did not know there are ecologically sensitive marshlands in Iraq, that still exist, where the Mesopotamians grew their fantastic civilization beginning with mud-packed bricks with bitumen (asphalt) stirred in to make them waterproof and strong. A few thousand years later Mesopotamians were producing great architectural works made of brick that were the foundation of western architecture. Other ancient civilizations borrowed ideas from these geniuses of muck to build their own amazing buildings.

This week I completed the 23rd foot of drawing and am beginning to get a sense of how it will look. I began with three maps of the world showing the changes in continental formation from Triassic to Jurassic then Cretaceous.

Then there is the story of the dinosaurs disappearing due to the changes scientists say caused the great extinction.

And then I illustrated the first use of oil by the Neanderthals and Mesopotamians. For me there is a sense of an epic unfolding. Maybe it's just the result of how much drawing I can unroll in front of me.

I do want to include this incredible photo taken in 1974 of the marshland communities in Iraq. It’s like a cross of Venetian waterways and a hobbit village made of reed and mud. The people lived like that for thousands of years until nearly two decades ago.

According to the accompanying article Suddam Hussain had the marshes drained after a 1991 Shia uprising. Communities like the one in this photograph must have been wiped out when the Marshlands were drained to assert government control over anti-regime rebels. There is an effort to rehabilitate the marshlands but it is by no means complete.

Getting in the Swing

2009-11-30T15:25:00.002-07:00

I feel trepidation every morning, wondering how it will all go. There is always a topographical fear that how it went last week is not an indication of success in the future. But what I have learned from journal writing and keeping a daily sketch diary, and conceiving and completing many a project is that first steps lead to action. Writing that first word or making that first mark unlocks the door. So I start by ruling in the two and a half foot section I will draw for the day and trace in the sketches that have already been drawn, and inevitably new material, in this case new drawings, flow out from there. Choreographer Twyla Tharp says we need rituals to get us started. Film director Woody Allen says eighty percent of success is just showing up.