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Designs on the halter dress-tool belt combo

1/30/2014

The denim Dakota, from hedleyandbennett.com

Most people will admit that their everyday clothes are a sort of uniform. We need to keep it pretty simple because we're likely dressing in the dim of the still-dark morning when we'd rather spend those extra minutes sleeping.

My own uniform is basically a T-shirt, tights and boots under what I view as a Western-secular abaya — a wrap sweater, long hoodie or whatever else is lying around — and a raincoat. Just this side of 'not crazy' and pretty functional for weekdays at the studio.

It's taken some trial and error to figure out how to adapt this bike-friendly getup to a day of painting or carving or casting or sewing, climbing up and down ladders or working on the floor. I need a combo toolbelt and day dress, something I can switch out with the sweater-abaya thingy.

These designs take time. You need to walk a mile in a maker's apron to figure out how it needs to function. That's what former culinary school grad Ellen Bennett did. As a cook she saw the need that led to her own L.A.-based online business, Hedley and Bennett. I'm inspired, and denim is definitely the way to go. The tool pockets are essential but the backless style doesn't work over tights. I need me a work dress.

Back in the day, women had housework dresses, but they were a little too light duty. Sewing one up in denim would basically create a lab coat, and I hate to be encumbered by sleeves. I'm thinking more halter dress than coat.

Back to the drawing board. I need big front and side pocket-compartments for the brushes, Xacto knife, painting rags, latex gloves, hair clip, micro computer/stereo system and some sort of accommodation for earbuds to enable hands-free operation of said iPhone. I was following my instincts, obeying my gut, but this was all starting to sound a little familiar. I was conjuring up the maximum-convenience garment version of The Homer.

Like all enduring design, function trumps form, and it takes a lot of mulling to simplify that form. I separated the 'must haves' from the 'nice to haves' and finally settled on sewing up a durable grey denim wrap dress, for ease of movement, with right-side tool/communication pockets.

My beta version is now encrusted with more than a year's worth of paint and gesso so it's a good time to roll out Work Dress 2.0. I still like the wrap design but I can see the top section should pull over the head apron-style so I can use that upper front real-estate for slim pockets for the pointy tools that don't sit pretty in side pockets when I'm sitting. Oh yes, and it needs to be made out of old jeans, pockets and all.

I may be taking orders for the Work Dress by next year, or not taking any orders on what is appropriate daywear.

The beta version of the workers' wrap dress.

Earbuds buttonhole above the side back pocket: check.

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procraftination spikes when math hits

1/24/2014

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I was told there would be no math.

Turns out there’s nothing but math in making things, and all kinds of math in packaging it all up for clients and justifying it all to Revenue Canada.

I love to build stuff but I am not wired to readily tackle building an Excel spreadsheet, or at least I tend to steer clear of that sort of construction for fear of stirring the ugly, frustrated beast within. So instead of getting myself educated — knowledge is power yada yada — I go into serious procraftination mode. Need a project budget by Monday? Who wants a pair of knitted slippers!

Excel what now?
The only thing I excel in when faced with spreadsheets and cost projections is making busy-busy with the hands, anxiety being the main fuel source for my handwork. I might even chart my productivity during tax time, if I could only drag my eyes away from my latest DIY obsession.

‘But it’s so simple. You don’t even have to do math.’
Can’t talk; making household cleaner out of orange peels.

‘There are lots of marketing courses for artists.’
Orrrr… a jewelry-making course, to make tiny silver sculptures! Sign me up.

I am aware that there are marketing resources and income tax tips just for visual artists but my feeble research into online tutorials and tips is quickly sidetracked:

'Gridus' served up by a Moscow-based design studio. (artlebedev.com)

In my defence, it’s better not to try to grapple with the month-end reconciliation reports and annual income projections, because even I don’t have to do the math to know that the numbers are bad. What other kind of a business model has galleries demanding artists pay a submission fee (typically $35-50) just to send images of their work, then, if accepted, exhibit fees to show the work that the artists pay to ship to and from the gallery, with a commission to the gallery if the work is sold? That's before any travel expenses to actually attend the gallery opening. Any accountant would advise switching occupations.

You don't have to crunch those figures to understand that unless you've got a highly marketable 'product', this is no way to make a living.

The fact is, artists are easy-picking. We will do what we must for free, even paying to get it out there to be part of the dialogue. We may not make it as models in business, but at least we're making.

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Innovation can be a risky business

1/16/2014

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Coming up with new ideas is not without its hazards. The world-renowned Noma restaurant is a case in point. Chef-patron Rene Redzepi uses what grows in the area, innovating astounding food creations famously foraged from the local land and sea. Sometimes the magic works; sometimes it doesn't. He's even admitted to his own spontaneous bowel reactions to his experiments.

Mountains of Christmas lights headed for the grinder in Shijiao, China (Atlantic Magazine)

One outfit in the southern Chinese town of Shijiao has innovated a low-tech method for squeezing a livelihood out of the great bulk of broken Christmas lights. Making use of the empty shipping containers returning to the global export hub and North Americans' addiction to buying cheap throwaways, the strings are thrown into a grinder, then shovelled into a water bath that separates the heavier metal wire fragments from the plastic insulator bits. The metals are eventually separated into reusable copper and other metals, and the plastic is used in slipper soles. (Check out the fascinating video.)

Granted, there are problems, like the possibility of lead in the plastic that ends up cozying up to the soles of feet and the spewing pollution from copper processing.

That necessity to make a living is one mother of invention, a prime example of the hard birth of a global leader in innovation.

Baled copper. Carlyn Yandle photo

Considering the glut of stuff and our continued rampant consumerism, it's becoming unconscionable to me to use materials that are not either post-market or readily re-usable. That's easy to face down in the making of sculptural objects. I find inspiration through foraging in my own environment, where culturally-weighty artifacts from spider-webby doilies to crushed copper play with concept.

But I'm stymied when it comes to painting. I love the exploration but can't stand the materials. I rely on petroleum-based paints and resins, first-use softwood stretchers, brushes and canvasses. Acrylic paints allow me to do the layering I can't achieve in oils, creating that fine line between the handmade and digital.

Untitled, 2013, Distract series, acrylic on canvas, 24" x 30" on panel.

I feel it all coming to a head: Am I willing to lay down the paintbrush to reduce my own carbon footprint? Not quite.

But I am taking a few baby steps. I've been experimenting with composing larger paintings out of my painting studies, to incorporate the patterns of both the painted surface and the piecing, not unlike a quilt made up of well-chosen materials that have outlived their original purpose.

It may just be that necessity to reduce my consumption that pushes me into innovating in painting. Like other innovations, there will be failures and disasters. Somewhere in there is a new way to approach painting.

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A time-based dwelling-sculpture called home

1/10/2014

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Carlyn Yandle photo

This is clearly not a staged photo. Pretty much every rule of home decor is ignored here in this old East Van house. And that's why I love it.

Maybe it's the weather but I've just about had enough of the grey-washed matte-bland interiors that we are supposed to love to live in. Where is the love in all those glassy surfaces and matchy-matchy square furniture?

Various people and their various pets and their various collections have lived in this place for a century. The walls (and doors and kitchen cupboards and floors) do talk. They speak of the current long-time owner's love of old things, and his appreciation of the presumably impulsive work of his artist friend who painted the large Winnipeg Jets logo right smack dab in the middle of the original fir wood floor in the kitchen.

It's a home with an open-door policy. Drop by anytime. If it's late Sunday afternoon, you might be absorbed into dinner arrangements, which are kept loose; you never know who's going to show up. There are a lot of stories.

Carlyn Yandle photo

This door off the kitchen says something about the painter who did it (not to anyone's plans or specifications) and the owner-friend who digs it (and the painter).

To anyone else it can be enjoyed as an example of painting itself. It can take the viewer to Frank Stella and the school of minimalism that relied on the physical limits of spaces to define the abstracted field; in this case, the inset panelling on the original door to the basement. Its dynamically asymmetrical pattern also speaks to quilting and other fiber arts.

It's all part of a time-based dwelling-sculpture that is growing in layers over the decades, a living gallery of collaborative mark-making by those who have contributed to the social activity therein.

The only thing that's inappropriate at this old house is the kind of fetishistic order as seen in virtual tours of display suites in a city seized by its speculative real-estate boom. Those investment-unit surfaces have nothing to say besides 'new' and 'generic.'

This place gives new meaning to 'open house.'

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Of portraits and the patriarchy

1/3/2014

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When my brother showed me his inherited oil painting of a senior citizen, my first thought was: Yeesh. No wonder the young nudes endure.

They may not be remembered by history, like this unfamiliar subject, but they are pretty enough to pass down for generations of display.

It's not kind to speak ill of the dead, even if that dead man is the paternal grandfather we apparently met a few times as tykes, but he's not exactly a looker. Despite the fact that he is skillfully rendered by accomplished B.C. painter Robert Genn it's hard to know where the inherited painting should live. With no particular connection to the person — he is the divorced father of our divorced father — he's a deftly-done stranger hanging around my brother's house, a visual connection to our genetic past (and perhaps my brother's future).

If Vancouver had a portrait gallery, there may be some interest in acquiring the depiction of this man we never knew as Grandpa, but any value would only be attached to the painter, not the painted. Portrait galleries typically feature those subjects who have had an impact on society, those who have made a difference. I have gazed at crowds of those Important People in my one tour of the National Portrait Gallery in London, most of whom looked a lot like this guy. And I recall Beatrix Potter. And a smattering of pretties. Seething over the fact that there were few or no sisters on the wall I stomped out and headed to the nearest pub. Less than 25 per cent of the Important People in the National Portrait Gallery are women, but you won't spot that statistic on its official website. (It took some digging to mine that factoid.) Judging by the Gallery's own website it appears there is some serious back-peddling to the point where it is actually featuring female subjects.

So perhaps we should all be sighing with relief that there's no historical portrait display of Important People in our town because it would doubtless be a colonialist accumulation of all the second-rate royals and British government officials that are already remembered in a huge chunk of schools, streets and parks in these parts.

But portraiture is changing. The powerful, triumphant expressions of the dudes in charge are being challenged by the likes of Alastair Adams, who is enjoying a great amount of attention for his freshly unveiled, in-your-face portrait of former Labour Prime Minister Tony "Coalition of the Willing" Blair. The artist hands the judgment to the viewer.

However, he's still a dude among dudes who make up most of the minglers on the geo-political stage, remembered in oils by famous artists and hung in prestigious galleries and palatial spaces.

Portrait painters have a hand in remembering. Their own perspective of what is worthy of their efforts has played a part in the patriarchy. The deceased wife of the old man hanging at my brother's house was the accomplished former head librarian at UBC. People still ask me if I'm related to Anne Yandle, whose image will soon be forgotten to history.

Hello, nudes and old men.

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Designs on the halter dress-tool belt combo

procraftination spikes when math hits

Innovation can be a risky business

A time-based dwelling-sculpture called home

Of portraits and the patriarchy

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