Darling Passion
July 13, 2018
Inspirational Art
One of the last places we visited on my whirlwind trip through Europe was Sweden. It was actually very brief, only half a day as part of a train tour around the coast between Denmark and Sweden, but what a lovely country and what lovely people. This did not surprise me, as my idea of these people primarily comes from getting to know Sweden’s Eva Marie Tornstrom over these last few years. She is a darling and impassioned woman as most anyone could surmise from just seeing the emotional and openly honest work in her sculptures.
I have been watching Eva Marie’s work just bloom for the last several years. Her newest pieces have included some surprise elements, in particular, these zipper-back horses. The surface of the horses are richly textured and with matte colors and cane flowers, and then within the zipper framework, there is this contrast of crackled and shimmering gold. I can come up with several metaphors for what she’s done here but this work is created with so much room for your own personal connection, so I will leave it for you to fill in those blanks.
My favorite place to check in on Eva Marie is on her Instagram page where you can see the transformation of her work from one project to the next. But you can also get a closer look and more details about why she creates horses on her website.
Challenging Rings
August 1, 2016
Inspirational Art
Can you believe it’s August already? More than halfway through the year! How have you been doing with your New Year’s resolutions? I have 2 out of 3 down pretty good. But like me, many of us have not been able to keep up with polymer challenges and studio goals and have had to adjust them. That’s okay. The real purpose of a challenge is to keep at it and see what you can discover if you push yourself. Just this week, I have finally been able to keep a steady studio schedule (a couple of hours every other day which is a 100% better than what I had managed at any time the first half of the year!)
Then there are amazing people like Wendy Jorre de St Jorre who have done this kind of thing at least a couple of years in a row. That’s dedication. Last year she did bangles and this year she’s been doing rings, one each week. She takes her amazing canes used for necklaces and bracelets as well as various decor items and works them into beautiful bands. Although some of the original canes distorts quite a bit as it is wrapped around the small domed band, because she has such great color sense and keeps an eye on the balance of contrasts, the abstract (and even not so abstract) results are just gorgeous.
To see what she has accomplished aside from this beautiful ring here, hop over to see Wendy’s adventures on her Flickr photostream.
Inspirational Challenge of the Day: Take an application usually used in a different kind of jewelry or decor and create a ring. Or if you do create a lot of rings, create something unusual like a hat pin or an ear cuff.
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An Artist’s Tail
January 27, 2016
Inspirational Art
Before I get into my little thoughts about today’s intriguing piece, I wanted to put out a couple of thoughts for all of you who are attempting to do the challenges. I’ve had some questions and concerns about getting them done. First of all, you don’t need to do all the challenges presented to gain insight and benefit from them. The goal is to push yourself to look at your work differently, to explore, and to see what there is to discover. A regular challenge will certainly help you do this because you would have committed to a particular goal. But you do not have to do 3 a week. Some people have the time to do so but certainly not all of us. Maybe just one a week, choosing whichever challenges I post that appeal to you most. Or take one night or one day a month and choose a couple to explore. Make your goal reasonable for you and your schedule. I can already tell you that three a week is really taxing me. I am barely managing the sketch suggestions and I have yet to take photos so I can share, but I do plan on doing it. If you thought you’d try to do them all and can’t, readjust your goal to something manageable.
Also, remember that these challenges do not require that you finish a piece each time. Being able to finish is extremely important and that is where sharing on the Flickr page can be a motivator. But maybe you do one challenge a week and aim to have one completed piece to share come the end of the month. Do what works for you and, please, do not give yourself a hard time if you are not able to keep the goal you set. Readjust and just keep trying. Keep your personal end-goal in mind. Mine is to have more regular studio time and, although I haven’t completed anything yet, I have at least been at my work table a lot more than I had been. Those are small steps, but they’re important. As long as you are moving forward and not stalling or going backwards, those are accomplishments to be happy about.
Speaking of small things, do you see what small adjustments were probably made here to create this mermaid’s tail? I am guessing, from the look of Kim Detmers flowers petal canes, that these cane components started out floral but, somewhere along the way, they suggested fins to Kim. I chuckled at the form being just the tail of the mermaid. Did she shed this when granted a wish for human legs? Is this the mythical aquatic version of a rabbit’s foot worn for good luck? I don’t know but I liked the whimsy and the re-purposing of the canes, if that is what she did.
Kim is all about fancy and fantasy as you can see in her Etsy shop. And what is fantasy but re-envisioning our common world?
Inspirational Challenge of the Day: If you want to try a challenge today, how about taking a cane, a motif, a form, or some element that you regularly create with and try to imagine it as something else. A bead could be a dolls head with the addition of a body and a hat. A heart motif could be petals on a flower or cut in-half to become tear drops. I’m looking at my vine motif that I usually use vertically and I’m thinking I could set them horizontally to become stylized wind motifs. But that is just a first thought. Let’s see where I can go from there. How about you?
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Dots and Lines Juxtaposed
July 10, 2015
Inspirational Art
This Friday I’d like to leave you with a little something to try out this weekend. I still have a myriad of examples showing the combination of dots and lines, and we may just pull out a few more for next week, but for now, how about we just have some fun? France’s Marie-Charlotte Chaillon shares this versatile tutorial for juxtaposing dots and lines in a piece of jewelry, although it could easily be transferred to home decor or other decorative art. I like that the ‘dots’ here aren’t your basic option. The cane that will make the stacked dots is rather nice on its own for accents or mosaic work. It looks rather like an interesting twist on the pixellated retro cane. The white seems to be key as the gradation gives it a bit of an inner glow. Any color palette that appeals to you would do, but the graphic nature does show off bright contrasts quite nicely.
Marie-Charlotte is pretty generous with the cane-centric tutorials, so if that is where your creative meanderings are on right now, head over to her blog or her Pinterest board specifically dedicated to her tutorials and have yourself a blast!
Outside Inspiration: Ruffled Organics in Felt
June 26, 2015
Inspirational Art
When talking ruffles, most likely fabric comes to mind first as a source for outside inspiration, but do you think of felt as a particularly ruffled fiber? Instead of flouncy and fluffy, felted ruffles offer substance and a more solid and open canvas for dramatic textures and colors.
This scarf shows some of the potential of using felt to create undulating edges. Felt has been making a bit of a come back in the fashion world and felt crafters are coming out big and bold with it. I thought this work by Irena Rudman would intrigue polymer artists as the composition of the work looked immediately to me like wonderful inspiration for leaf-shaped beads or the facing ends of a curious cuff bracelet.
There is something kind of Melanie West about this scarf. I can also see a thin polymer component with a center of slices taken from stacked circular extrusion canes or mokume surrounded by ruffled Skinner blends or mica dusted polymer. It got my wheels turning. Is it intriguing you?
Irena is really big on the ruffles in her work, which you can see in her Etsy shop. If you are just dying of curiosity as to how she accomplished this or simply have a budding interest in felting (which can and has often been combined with polymer pieces), Irena has a number of tutorials for scarves and collars in her shop, as well.
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Translucent Clouds
May 29, 2015
Inspirational Art
First of all, I just realized this will be the last post of May. Really? This month is over? Wow … that went quick. Due to all the bedlam here, we’ve been just barely keeping up with the 3 blogs a week, and we have at least another week or so of chaos to get through. So, between that and all the notes from people who are liking the 3 days a week (“We have so much to read every day as it is …”), for now, we are going to keep this pace. Once we have the summer issue wrapped up next week, I’ll put together a survey (and some fun stuff to give away!) and give everyone who wants to offer their opinion, a chance to weigh in on the blog schedule.
In the meantime, my search for recent translucent clay work that uses the clay’s very particular characteristics in a new or surprising way was not as fruitful as I might have hoped. Have we gotten a bit tired of it? There are plenty of people using it to produce a wide variety of faux effects and mixing it with regular clays for better color and luminosity, but purely translucent for the sake of playing with its diaphanous quality seems to be the purview of just a handful of folks. However, in my search I ran across the pieces you see here. The first example I saw was the earrings you see in the upper left. I thought they were polymer, but then I got to the artist’s page and realized it had to be acrylic.
The artist is Jahyun Rita Baek, and this work is not new either, but something created when Rita was in art school in the United Kingdom. The series is called Cloud, which I believe is referring to the concept of light in both the illuminating quality and the perceived weight that are at play here. The work is beautifully simplistic and mesmerizing. Similar approaches with translucent polymer would be just as amazing, don’t you think?
So, this is the bit of inspiration I wanted to share with you today. Simple forms in floating and swirling designs could be created so easily with polymer. About the only thing this would take is knowing how to hold back and working clean–by which I mean clean clay and clean lines. If I could even get into my studio right now, I would go play for an hour just to relieve some stress. But parts of my office are in the way! So back to that.
Jump over to Rita’s website for more of her unusual work, not just in acrylic, but all kinds of materials from plastic to precious. And enjoy a beautiful spring weekend with a bit of creativity mixed in!
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Looking Through to Another Dimension
May 25, 2015
Inspirational Art
We haven’t visited the wonderful world of transluscents in awhile, and I have been curious to see what people have been doing lately. Strangely, there is not a lot of recently posted work. Anyone have anything new they’d like to share? I’ll keep searching, but I’m up for some striking new work to be landing in my mailbox, too. Hint, hint.
In the meantime, here is a beautiful piece by Brazil’s Beatriz Cominatto that she created a few years back. It’s not a complex concept, this scale-like layering of cane slices, but it does show off the particular advantage of working with translucents. Instead of considering just the surface of the clay, translucents allow you to focus on the content of the depth of the clay. The layering offers another dimension to the design when translucents are in play, which allows for such criss-cross patterning and other ways to create lines that work in multiple ways.
Beatrice created this in 2012, if the Flickr date is correct. She did a lot of exploring in many different techniques then, so although there is not a lot of translucent, she did some great sushi canes with the translucent clay along with other polymer work. You can explore more of Beatrice’s work on her Flickr page and her website.
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Spirited Patterns
April 16, 2015
Inspirational Art
A week of dramatic patterns would not be complete without a little Jon Anderson. You have likely seen at least a few of his larger, cane covered animals or maybe his bowls or even his guitars. But, have you seen his jewelry?
Jon’s fascination with canes is all about the pattern. The forms he covers are more of a canvas than the source of inspiration. Of course, animals and the spirit of them is where his finds a home for his patterns, but his canes come from what he has seen on his travels in other decorative artwork, as well as architecture and the decorative elements of buildings.
Jon has such an amazing eye for how to lay out the canes in a way that enhances the form. Also, his canes are so carefully created and reduced that he can bring them down to a size that can be applied onto forms as small as the pendants you see here. This means that many of us can afford to collect a few, even when our budgets are small.
Although Jon is American, he lives and creates in Bali with his wife who takes care of his promotions and PR. He also has an agent in the US who takes care of the sales and distribution of his work, so Jon gets to just focus on his art. Lucky, lucky guy.
You can read one of his only personal interviews in the Spring 2012 issue of The Polymer Arts and see more of his work on his website.
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Steady Focus
March 5, 2015
Inspirational Art
Here’s another thought on that whole adding variation to repetition thing. Just as repetition doesn’t have to mean consistent and dull, variation doesn’t have to mean anything chaotic or crazy. The idea of variation is to give us something more to look at, to mix it up a little, to put enough interesting differences into a piece to either make a big initial impact, keep us looking at it, or to evoke a complexity of an emotion. Or, really, just because we find beauty in variation.
But varied can also be part of a series of consistently repeated elements. Center-focused compositions are often considered basic and boring. I probably rallied against that idea in art school more than anything else. What was this aversion to center-focus or balance? Nature is based heavily on this concept, and some of our most beautiful inspirations come from that kind of thing.
These pieces by Ivy Niles are an excellent example of variation in repetition using a centered composition. She uses more than one cane to give the eye a variety of visual textures plus those moderately used crystals to add a sparkle to the brilliant blues. I think we are averaging about five canes per piece plus accents, which could look quite busy, but the centric and regular repetition reins it all in. Just beautiful.
Ivy is a master cane maker with some of the most beautiful and intricate designs. She sells her canes on Etsy and shows off more of her goodies on her website as well.
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There is just too much fun being had out there with extruded clay methods lately, so let’s take a look at a handful of what is being done and see if we can’t entice you into a bit of extruded play this week!
This first piece by Spain’s Maribel Benito looks to be using the very popular cane blocks build from extruded canes. It’s not that the canes or application here are so unusual, but the fun combination of various sized circles, those delicious candy colors, the gradation of the canes and the well-tended finish make for a really beautiful piece that is both playful and sophisticated. It’s just well done.
I thought I’d go for short chatter today after my long Saturday expose. Let’s just enjoy this beauty today while I go dig up more extruded fun. The best place to find more of Maribel’s work would be on her Facebook page and on her blog.
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Within the 2014 fall issue of The Polymer Arts, in our regular feature, “Color Spotlight” created by Maggie Maggio, we have the amazing work of Switzerland’s Sandra Traschel. The patterning and illusions she creates in polymer canes come in large part from the inspiration and even the templates of various quilters. Although this is covered in the article, Sandra (as well as Maggie and I), thought it would be great to actually see which artists inspired what pieces, so you could really see how the work of other art forms can so beautifully inspire polymer art.
This quilt is an example of color illusion, which Sandra explores at length in her jewelry pieces. You can see the translation to polymer in the pendants below. I would not have thought to use quilting templates for canes, but it’s obvious how beautifully they work out behind a skilled and patient hand.
So, if you have your Fall 2014 issue at hand, go ahead and open to the “Color Spotlight” article and click through to all these great quilters. Can you spot which quilter inspired which piece of Sandra’s jewelry just by looking at the websites? If you don’t have your issue in hand yet, you can just hop over to Sandra’s Flickr pages to make the comparisons. And, of course, spend some time in the galleries of these amazing quilters by clicking their names to link through to their websites.
1. Bracelet Convergence Pattern: inspired by a quilting template by Ricky Tims.
2. Bracelet Hollow Cubes: For this piece, I don’t know who was the original artist. I was inspired by the book: ABC 3-D Tumbling blocks and more by Marci Baker
3. Bracelet Triangle Illusion: Pattern inspired by a quilting template of Carol Bryer Fallert (quilt: illusion)
4. Necklace Diamond Illusion: Pattern inspired by Carol Bryer Fallert (quilt: illusion)
5. Pendant Autumn Flower: Pattern inspired by Jinny Beyer (quilt: Mayflowers pattern)
6. Pendant Op-Art checkerboard: Pattern inspired by Jinny Beyer (quilt: Da Vinci Pattern)
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Hopefully you’ve been having a fun week, but now for a fun weekend, right? How about something colorful and versatile to try in the studio?
These flower cup beads are created by starting with a rectangular, extruded cane then form a cup over a large ball stylus tool. I just like the stepping away from using circular extruded shapes for extruded canes. There is absolutely no reason not to make extruded canes with any shape you have available for your extruder. This long rectangular shape is particularly fun because of the striations you can make. You will see this in the bead on the first page of the tutorial that I am giving you. And why not reform the cane into long teardrops or flatten them out a little more and roll then into a rainbow jelly roll? Extrude a few and see what you can come up with!
On Poly Cat’s pages , you’ll find the Rectangular Rainbow Extruded Cane being used to create a bead, then there’s the flower cup bead steps you use the cane slices with as well. Pop the URLs for any of these links into Google translate if you want to read them in English, and your browser doesn’t automatically translate them for you. If I understand the translation correctly, the techniques she uses are inspired by others, and she has links and references to those sources so you have even more to check out if you like.
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Okay, so I don’t have another snail for you. I went back and looked at fun stuff that I had collected to share, and this certainly fills the bill. Plus, I just feel like a splash of colorful fun is needed today.
These are glass beads created by Australia’s Regis Teixera. This is all lampwork glass. There is a great mix of colors from bright and saturated to pastel and earth-tones, but I think the unlimited palette works primarily because the mix is only happening on half of each bead. The frosted translucent halves have color peeking in from underneath, but the space is a resting place between the very active and colorful sections of the other beads.
In any case, it’s beautiful fun and definitely a mix of color and visual texture we can consider translating to polymer. Just the frosted translucent versus colored half of the bead has me considering how to do something like that.
More color and fun beads are to be found on Regis’ Magma Beads site to help move your Friday along.
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Read More
Things have gone a little bonkers over here so apologies for the late posting and any errors here. Due to a family emergency and people being out of town, I do not have my back-up people to help keep my dyslexic errors in check. Hope you can put up with it for a day! But then these fantastic faux wavelite stones by Ilenia Moreni don’t need a lot of explanation. I had not even heard of wavelite until I saw these and now I’m fascinated by the rock. But honestly–and I hope Mother Nature doesn’t hear this–I think I like Ilenia’s version even better. The visual texture with those strong radial lines so strongly draw the eye. And what’s even more exciting … she has an inexpensive Faux Wavelite tutorial so you can make these yourself! How fun.
Ilenia does a lot of faux work and is quite adept at it. She has even made up a few of her own versions of nature’s creations which is why I was on her Flickr page last week and found these. She’s contributing to the article on pushing faux effects from being realistic to being something that looks like it could exist in nature but has never been seen before. Look for the “Pushing Faux” article in the Fall issue of The Polymer Arts coming out Aug 30th for ideas on how to push your natural faux effects to create beautiful new effects all your own.
You may recall Ilenia was featured in the gallery section of our Summer 2014 issue but she’s been working away and has a ton more fun stuff to drool over. Find more of her work on her Flickr pages and her website.
If you like this blog, support The Polymer Arts projects with a subscription or issue of The Polymer Arts magazine as well as supporting our advertising partners.
As I mentioned briefly last Friday, the name of a piece of art can really add or change the viewer’s perception of the work. It is a peek into the artist’s mind and gives a hint of (or knocks you over the head with) what the artist was aiming to convey. Some titles make obvious sense while others are surprising and make you look more closely at the work in order to try to figure out what the artist was seeing when they named it. This piece here is of the latter types. Desiree McCrorey named this intriguing little piece Diablo’s Cell Phone. Now where did that come from?
I definitely associated this piece with fire and so can see the devil association but I would not have thought cell phone if it weren’t for her naming of it. Now I see it in the elongated form and the ‘antenna’ coming up on the one side. And Diablo now makes me thing of the wire work as horns and the target cane slices down in the fiery lower portion as maybe lost souls in some eternal fire. The name just takes the necklaces from being a great visual piece to having all this depth and possible metaphor. And it’s rather humorous. Who would the devil be calling on his cell phone? His demon minions? I don’t know but it makes me like the piece even more.
If for some reason you aren’t familiar with Desiree’s work and her very generous sharing of techniques and ideas, go on over to her website and take a look around. Besides her wonderful pieces to drool over, there are tons of tutorials, tips and tricks on this website. Desiree’s tutorials and her website were instrumental to me as I advanced in my polymer work back in my early days with this medium. We are very lucky to have someone like her in our community!
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This past week I had to make an unplanned trip out to Los Angeles to help my family while my father dealt with some health issues. He is doing quite well now and I am feeling good about returning home. What might have been a rather stressed filled and scary week actually turned into something quite wonderful–I had some truly touching moments with both my parents, had a surprise clay day with my niece who came out and played with polymer with me for the first time and then fate lined it up so that I reconnected with two people out here I haven’t seen in 25 years, people who were very important to me back then and look to become very important to me again. What a fantastic and uplifting surprise those reunions were!
There is such a truly joyful beauty in the small, unexpected moments like those I had this past week, just as there are in those small, unexpected elements in what could have been a simple and quiet piece of art. It can take just one small thing to take something from being ‘nice’ to being remarkable. Take this pendant by Anna Fidecka. There would have been nothing wrong with just creating a nice silver bezel for the caned cabochon but that meandering silver cutting down through it adds movement as well as a stronger focal point. It’s a simple addition but it really makes the piece.
Anna hails from Poland where she works with precious metal clay, beads and polymer, mixing them or not as the muse dictates. More of her work can be found on her Flickr pages and her website.
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A lot of people cane. A lot of people cane well. But perfectly undistorted canes applied in such a way that you don’t think canes, but rather just “wow!”. These almost photo realistic sunflowers were created by French artist Magali Chauveau. Such skill and patience makes a huge difference in what this cane could have been had it been rushed. That and the meticulous finish on the beads brings this from a nicely designed bracelet up to a stunning piece of art jewelry.
And this isn’t the only thing she did so well with these flowers. She put her skill and eye for design into a whole line of pieces.
I had to share them all. But she has many more beautiful gems to share with you as well as tutorials on her blog and several books in print. To see more of her work, take a look at her Facebook page or view her books on Amazon.
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Barbara Fajardo spent some time back in 2008 playing with the pod shape. She placed canes or mokume slices over scrap clay and hand formed these lovely beads. She played with how they hung, both dangling downwards and being strung lengthwise, and with how the canes were laid. I thought these gave a nice sampling of her color work inspired by the New Mexico desert, a place of many odd pods, let me tell you.
It was hard picking an image from her collection of work on Flickr, so please do pop over to the page and get a glimpse of the necklaces she also makes, playing off the mirror effect of the folded layer look along with some other lovely cane covered pods.
