Category: Painting

From break to breakthrough

1/21/2026

Making space for the creative process, at home or away

The following is a public service announcement for all those cowering from the liquid gunmetal-grey skies on this bone-chilling coast: Crank up the Vitamin D. We need 800-1000 IUs per day so pop a supplement or a teaspoon of cod liver oil, or eat wild salmon (600-1000 per 100 g or 3.5 oz.) regularly. Do it for your bones and teeth. For vegans it’s a bit trickier but here’s a fun fact: mushrooms, the only produce that contains Vitamin D, can generate a goodly dose when they’ve been exposed to sun or sunlamps — just like peoples — so feast on some UV-ray-enhanced mushrooms. Lecture over.

When other mushrooms are threatening to colonize the dark corners of my mind and between my toes, when the skies are as grey and shapeless as my sweatpants, I see these as signs that it’s time to let my skin generate some Vitamin D. I joined the throng of half of all Canadians taking winter breaks this year, with the largest percentage (30%) descending on Mexico and the Caribbean. Puerto Vallarta, just a five-hour flight south on this same west coast of North America, is lousy with Canuckleheads this year.

I am not doing my country proud with my weak attempts to converse with the locals. Asking questions in that lovely romance language leads to answers I can’t understand so I tend to stick with agreement statements like Aquí hay mucho pollos asados. (“There are many roasted chickens here”). This is maybe why (or because) I spend most of the hot, sunny hours in the rental apartment pursuing my digital-nomad dream of making stuff and writing about it wherever I go.

It never works out as planned though I pack with the best intentions. My carry-on contains the usual bag of tricks: white linen cloth; a colourful selection of embroidery floss and hoop; two sashiko sewing needles (they always get through security screening); small containers of red, white, yellow and blue acrylic fluid; two thin paintbrushes; sketchbook and assorted black brush-pens.

A supplies kit for a mobile studio: paints, brushes, pens, linen, hoop in a dedicated toiletries bag. (Carlyn Yandle)

Once I’m settled in the rental unit I set up my art supplies. I feel sort of obliged to artistically-render the luscious plants and birds, beaches and sunsets out there but I’m not really into it even if they do turn out which they rarely do. My overwrought sketches of philodendron leaves look like a waste pile of vein-y heart organs. I’m baffled at how to depict the papery folds of bougainvillia blossoms even when I try copying some online examples by other artists. The whole exercise is as onerous as Grade 6 map-colouring which also left me bad-tempered and bored. In the end, as it often happens, the paintbrush rag is more interesting than my tortured attempts.

The paintbrush rag holds more interest than the painting. (Carlyn Yandle)

It’s a wadded-up piece of two-ply paper towel from a roll I found under the sink but the paint has diffused in a way that reminds me of the surf or the jungly mountains above the Old Town so when it’s dry I smooth it out and pull apart the two bound layers into two translucent mirror images. I know these would be even more translucent if they were brushed onto a wood panel with acrylic medium and coated with a waxy finish.

I rummage around the kitchen and locate a glass baking dish and fill it with water to soak another half sheet from the paper-towel roll then lay each soaked sheet out on a glass shelf I removed from the refrigerator — this is the danger of renting your holiday home to artists — then drop or brush on different diluted mixed colours, adding some patterns here and there with the water-based brush pens. Soon I am as absorbed in this material exploration as the paint blooming in the soaked fibres. I set each swatch out on more paper towels to dry and when I run out of all horizontal surfaces I string them up like laundry lines across the open window frames and between chairs, laying down even more paper on the floor to catch the drips.

Experiments with different paint applications on paper towel.

There are no photos of that creative process here. I normally make a point of posting photo-documentation but on the outside chance that the condo owner might see their vacation unit turned into a chaotic printmaking factory, that image is left up to the imagination.

A collection of tissue swatches for future consideration (Carlyn Yandle)

Now back home in this fresh, green coastal city on the foggy edge of a temperate rainforest my brain is still humming with ideas for collaging those test tissues as backgrounds for sketches of patterns captured in morning and evening walks through the streets of the Old Town.

Patterns from the streets of Puerto Vallarta’s Old Town, Mexico (Carlyn Yandle)

That stack of painted papers holds the creative energy for a new artwork series: the best souvenir of any travels.

Originally posted on Substack, Jan. 11, 2026

When more is more

11/5/2025

I’ve learned to live with a head full of bees but these days it’s all about wasps.

So. Many. Wasps. Wasps that retreated indoors last week after the pest-control guy shot up the kitchen fan vent with a killer powder. Wasps that just wouldn’t stay away even after two pest-control guys came back to deal with the discovery of an impressive-sized nest metastasizing inside the wall. I spent most of the week whacking at wasps and sucking them up in the hand-held vacuum cleaner. Whacking and sucking, whacking and sucking.
It’s not the sight of a single curled-up carcass that gives me the willies; it’s the sheer volume of them. A ladybug on my forearm might prompt that little rhyme, Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home / Your house is on fire, your children are burned… Wait, what is that all about? My point is, if a cloud of ladybugs landed on my arm I would be screaming like Tippi Hedren in The Birds. Hitchcock knew all about the power of numbers to turn bird-friendly movie-goers into ornithophobes.

Poster art from the 1963 Hitchcock classic, “The Birds.”

A large mass of harmless insects doesn’t even need to touch me to get my skin crawling, like the summer when I watched my mother slap at a few flying ants on the window with her fly-swatter while behind her a black mass of hatchlings oozed out of a wood ceiling beam and swarmed the room. Even writing about that overabundance gives me the heebie-jeebies.
Large accumulations of a single object — animate or inanimate — cranks up the visual volume. Canadian artist-photographer Edward Burtynsky introduced viewers to the extreme-scale reality of global trade in Manufactured Landscapes from the first scene of some sewers bent over their machines in the Hongqingting Shoe Factory, Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, China. There is no commentary as the camera slow-pans down the length of what emerges as a stadium-sized building full of several hundred workers, allowing us to fully grasp the enormity of this production. (And that was 20 years ago.)

Edward Burtynsky’s large-format photograph, Manufacturing #17, Deda Chicken Processing Plant, Dehui City, Jilin Province, China, 2005 via Public Delivery (https://publicdelivery.org/edward-burtynsky-china/)

But the power of increased scale, accumulation of objects and repetition of patterns isn’t always in service for horror; how or when to use that power comes into question whenever I’m developing new work. Is more more here? Or does repeating the unit or method dilute its essence, reducing the overall work to an underwhelming pattern? More importantly, is my interest in pumping up the volume in art just hoarding?

An accumulation of matchbooks is just a collection.

“Matchy Matchy”, an atypical presentation of an accumulation of matchbooks (left) and a three-hour painting-sketch of that collection (right). (Carlyn Yandle)

A benign single ‘log cabin’ hand-stitched quilt block.

The growth potential of “Hearth” (2020), hand-stitched log-cabin quilt blocks of different sizes, is limitless. (Carlyn Yandle)

When more is more: A large scale painting of an overabundance of layered squares aims to overwhelm in “PopUp: Triptych,” 2010, acrylic on panel, 96”Wx48”H

These are the busy-busy bees’ questions that mostly come at night when the wasps have gone to sleep, resting up to torment me another day.

Taking it Outside

5/1/2025

Escaping the dark world of scrolling the socials

“Take it outside” was a standard parenting directive back in the 1900s, shouted at the kids when pro-wrestling or trying to extricate a running shoe from the dog’s lock-jaw or whining for no reason. Taking it outside is harder to do if you live in an apartment tower but there’s no alternative if you’re a teenager hoping for a social life.

My old high school was surrounded by condo towers and mid-rise apartment buildings that are now being razed for higher towers. Hanging out indoors was not an option for many of my friends who lived in one-bedrooms with a single parent. Instead, we migrated from one friend’s building to another, buzzing intercoms to meet them in their lobbies and then go harass some other friend on shift at the Shoppers Drug Mart or hover in front of the fish-and-chips place to try to get the cute server to notice us. We mingled outside at the mini parks and the beach until we were old enough to get inside the clubs.

The club life is a dim memory but I am still compelled to take it outside. When the pandemic lockdown hit, I switched from working in an art studio to hand-stitching a large project on my porch. As the weather improved, I brought any old small thing to stitch to the neighbourhood park, two metres apart from others. That evolved into an improvisational mobile, outdoorsy art practice that begins with a piece of found linen, usually an old stained tablecloth that nobody wants.

Before heading outside I set the linen in the hoop then do a little table work, diluting paint with water and dropping it on the linen to watch the pigments spread through the taut fibres. Sometimes I sprinkle on more water or more undiluted pigment to saturate the colour or increase the bleed, or throw on some salt or soil or a slop of my coffee and observe those effects. I let that dry. I repeat all this in different sections of the linen, maybe including some of the tablecloth design or stitching, then decide which section could use some embroidery embellishments. I cut out that one preferred area, then choose a palette of embroidery floss. My mobile art practice is ready to go wherever I go.

Embroidery-painting essentials: one 8-inch hoop with ongoing linen project, small primary-colour paint set of liquid acrylics, a mechanical pencil, one small paint brush, fold-up scissors, a bag of a embroidery floss and two embroidery needles. (This art go-bag has passed airport security many times.)

Taking it outside the studio has become my way of working when travelling or during these months of long daylight hours. It is my summer work: some are working, some are not (har-har). No matter; it’s all just practice — practice in learning embroidery stitches (heather and blanket, french knot, woven rose), traditional sashiko patterns, and the personal and social histories of found linens. It is in learning mindfulness, by breaking the habit of scrolling through the socials or fixating on iPhone games and engaging with the world.

Inside is for the wintery work of queen-sized quilts and hooked rugs. For the next six months the art studio is simply a storage facility for the large-scale stretched painting canvases, fibre-art hangings, and the clutter of tubes of paint, rags and brushes. This is the season for shedding all that bulk, reducing this art practice to fit into a toiletries bag that lives in the daypack that I take on bike rides all over the city. I pull it out in ferry-passenger lounges, on long bus rides, at park picnics.

An evolving mobile, outdoorsy art practice confined by materials and method.

Inside is where all the screens are, the source of the unfathomable, dark news of the dismantling of democracy and political extortion. Outside is where all the social and political action is. That includes the global Mend in Public Day last Saturday, April 26, a Fashion Revolution creative action to resist the cycle of excess, through repair and reuse. This year in Vancouver, that was at the Main Street and East 21st Avenue plaza and Granville Island.

The future is fungal

1/18/2025

Mushrooms and more for troubled times

When you spend a good portion of your winter cowering from the cold and the rain, it’s hard to fathom the fiery desert winds that are obliterating entire neighbourhoods just a three-hour flight south. In the near-real-time images and video only chimneys, mangled metal and concrete driveways hint at what used to be.

But then you notice the vestiges of palm trees, bougainvillea vines, laurel hedges, tufts of sisal and succulents. Before the last tendrils of smoke dissipate and the insurance battles begin, these plants hold the promise that buds and leaves will sprout and new colonizer species will emerge, boosted by an ashy soil. They are a reminder that whether it’s our perilous planet or our own contorting guts, flora heals.

This front line in ground recovery is below the surface, a mycelium network of fungal lace that can erupt in reproductive spores, most noticeably after wildfire as a bright orange carpet of tiny caplets.

Mapping entanglements: Crocheted cotton, acrylic on panel, 12”x12” (Carlyn Yandle)

Mycelium is all the rage these days, embraced for its regenerative properties. I may be a little disturbed by the tiny fungal ecosystem flourishing in a dark corner of my damp art studio, and mushrooms on my tongue may feel like phlegm balls, but I get excited at the news that mycelium is being explored to fight cancer cells and alleviate physical and psychological trauma.

The earth-sustaining potential of mycelium is unlimited: just one bus-ride away from my studio, at UBC’s Biogenic Architecture Lab, bricks and other building materials are being made from edible fungi like oyster-mushroom mycelium; the late actor Luke Perry’s final wish was to be wrapped up in mycelium embedded in a Mushroom Death Suit for his green burial. (And he was.)

Mapping entanglements II: acrylic on panel, 12”x12” (Carlyn Yandle)

Mycelium spores, unlike seeds, are resilient to toxic compounds, high temperatures, drought and radiation — food for thought as footage of those Los Angeles homes, typically composed of and containing a wide array of synthetic polymers, go up in poisonous, cancer-causing smoke.

Spore: Acrylic and mercerized cotton thread on found linen, 12”x 9” (Carlyn Yandle)

I see mycelium as a pattern for social regeneration after natural and unnatural disaster and scorched-earth policies. Its spreading network of tendrils mirrors our innate need to connect with one another, finding and nurturing our common ground despite divisive forces. Those thickening entanglements bring comfort and joy because we are pack animals. It is in our human nature to come together; we can see it right there in the aftermath of LA fires.

We may be on shaky ground but I can feel the rumblings as we emerge/erupt/bloom, mycelium-like, when the conditions call for fresh energy. Bloop! Bloop!

Time to find focus

1/4/2025

Depicting a distracted mind might not be helping

Disrupting the grid, upending predictable patterns. Acrylic on canvas, sewing pins, 24” x 24” (Carlyn Yandle)

If the person I share the bed with is to be believed, this morning (as of this writing) I announced in my sleep: “I’m sorry we’re going to martial law again.”

I have only a dim notion of what martial law entails. I’m also not sure if this ‘sorry’ is in the Canadian sense, as in “Sorry bus full” on the rush-hour B-Line that really means “Suck it up, buttercup.” Or is it regret that martial law is again here? In any event, I’m impressed that my id (if you’re a Freud follower) even has a notion of the word ‘sorry.’

I assumed this bit of sleep babble was a call to end this seasonal distraction or maybe our collective distractive state in general. I admit I am worried about my own eroding focus exacerbated by the commercially- and politically-corrupted internet. And I’m not alone; half of US adults are getting their newsbits on TikTok, part of the bombardment of unrelated snippets of (mis)information from maybe humans but increasingly AI.

Thoughts of doom-scrolling, pop-up ad windows, investment-building booms, Amazon fulfilment centres and faceless Cloud storage mega-facilities. Acrylic on canvas, 34” x 27” (Carlyn Yandle)

Over the years I have developed a near-obsessive way of working to evoke a seductive, unsettling visual field, somewhere between pretty and pretty distracting. This laborious process immerses the body in the subject while opening up time and space for the mind to consider some questions like: Are American reporters putting themselves in danger by exposing white supremacy groups? Is it safe to be trans in a small US town? Will women run the risk of more hate and harassment as the top trending phrases, “Your body, my choice” and “Get back to the kitchen” spread online? Is Canada the next alt-right nation? I’m concerned that as long as we’re preoccupied by our next Amazon orders to be fulfilled, or wasting hours killing foes in Call of Duty or dreaming of a career as an influencer, we’re not seeing some harsh political realities coming soon to a White House near you.

I wish I could be content to paint pastoral scenes or voluptuous florals that people would actually want hanging on their walls but this is where I’m at. I lose myself in this work of painting acrylic skins, slicing them into razor-sharp edges and right angles, then positioning them, layer after layer with tweezers and brayers, building and negating grids until my eyes start to cross and my back seizes up. And as the old song goes, I still haven't found what I'm looking for.

I’m starting to think that my martial-law proclamation is directed at my own obsessiveness and toward good orderly direction. We’re all going to need that kind of focus in 2025.

From mind-numbing to mindful

9/30/2024

Dropping out is easy. This art practice is about tuning in

Flat on my back in the chair last week, the dentist had just plunged the second needle into my eroded molar area and her assistant was now affixing the rubber dam. This is when my go-to flight response kicked in: I'm not really here! I'm not really here! I'm not really here!

Full disassociation is appropriate when two dental professionals are bearing down on you with drill and suction tube and you are required to relax your gag reflex. But checking out of reality to avoid the pain of the Divided States of America’s Presidential election campaign is not the answer.

In this Disinformation Industrial Complex age it’s tempting to drop out and go on a bed-date with the vape pen to binge Love Is Blind. But we need to stay engaged — yes, even Canadians. We need to tune in to reliable sources of news,* turn on our own brains and hearts so we can discern the rational from the irrational and the hopeful from the hateful. And when the time comes (in any public election), we need to turn to voting our own conscience and not what others expect from us.

The trick is to do it all without risking mental instability, starting with the premise that we are not all going to Hell in a handcart. We need to believe in ourselves as part of the greater good. Adding to ‘believing’ is the need for time away from the too-many screens. True, a growing number of US adults (58 per cent) say they prefer to get their news on their digital devices but we can choose which news sources and the conditions for absorbing it.
This is how I approach any artwork: through belief and time. I believe that a large-scale or complex project can and will emerge through small, individual actions. I give myself the gift of time to focus on one stitch, one paint layer, one quilt-block, one knot, one row. Or, for the purpose of this weekly writing, one sentence at a time.
The following meandering, improvisational stitching-painting hybrid (linen on wood stretcher) was started this past spring, growing in complexity over the summer:

Cotton floss, monoprint on paper, 10” x 14”I’m not sure if what I’m making these days reflects what I’m listening to, or if I’ve devised this improvisational way of working to allow my brain to fully concentrate on the information. I do know that this voyage of discovery is a symbiotic relationship, a positive-feedback loop that drives me to continue developing this emerging work in the studio while reaching a deeper understanding of the world beyond.
In another example, this recent exploration into redwork embroidery could have been influenced by tuning into news features on Vancouver’s global investment-induced construction boom, housing shortage, “renovictions” and homelessness.

Cotton floss, monoprint on paper, 10” x 14”

At the time of this publishing there are 42 days of increasingly outrageous tactics before a new US president is elected. However we get there, a resting heart rate is required to see fear-mongering for what it is: just a desperate power grab.
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*For those looking online in Canada for news that means looking elsewhere besides Facebook and Instagram, since parent company Meta chose to block their users from quality and local news instead of paying those news sources. (Google is exempt from the Online News Act after it agreed to pay Canadian news publishers $100 million a year.)

Awkward family moment informs art-making aesthetic

7/14/2024

When I first started out as a suburban-newspaper reporter I had a single original artwork tacked to the wall in my basement suite. It was a life-sized acrylic-on-paper, a nude holding her maybe-pregnant belly against a landscape of spewing factories and techni-coloured streams.

I watched this gaunt, world-weary figure emerge in watery brushstrokes from the hand of the newspaper photographer's girlfriend. This is how she worked, in their basement suite, pulling yardage from a large roll of cheap paper, painting straight from her head and heart, with no plan to keep or show or sell her paintings. She saw that this one resonated with me too — what twenty-something in a committed relationship doesn’t have this weighing on her mind? So she gave it to me.

Hanging it felt like supporting an ally, even if it was only hanging in my dark, featureless space that nobody would see besides the boyfriend on weekends. Then one day some of his family made the trip for a visit. They complimented my hanging flower baskets, my thrifty decor. I didn’t hear until much later that the painting had become a topic of conversation among various relatives, a bit of a joke about that subject and, by extension in my mind, this girlfriend.

I had none of the inner fortitude to see this painting or my choices as acceptable and eventually I rolled it up and hid it in a closet. I married into that family within three years. The boxed wedding dress joined the poster tube containing the offending painting for two more moves until I finally ditched the artwork at the Sally Ann. The dress is another story.

Detail from 'Unbridled,' the artist's handmade silk wedding dress embroidered with significant events. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

'I Dissent,' aesthetic design with a political position marking the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Acrylic on panel, 2020 (Carlyn Yandle)

But I did keep something from that painting: some lessons that have informed an aesthetic that I carry to this day but might not even recognize until after each artwork is completed, or is at least on its trajectory.

The first is the power of attraction. Not to be confused with the pseudoscientific Law of Attraction, this is a drive to create aesthetically-pleasing, familiar domestic objects and fields that upon closer inspection have something else to say besides cozy or pretty. An early example of one of my pretty/pretty disturbing objects is Clutch (2007). Hundreds of sewing pins were pierced into a thrifted clutch purse in a colourful beaded pattern covering the entire surface. The clasp opens to reveal an impenetrable thicket of steely pointy ends.

Another valuable lesson is context, or time and place. Gallery-goers may prepare themselves to be confronted by artwork but I don’t wish that on houseguests. There are none of those Live-Love-Laugh type directives or IKEA Eiffel Towers and tulips on the walls at home, but what is there is selected to engage, not repel. Home is a place to feel safe. The studio is a place to not play it safe, but it’s still a covert operation, playing on that first impression of domestic objects that reveal cracks in the beauty of the everyday.

I’ve also learned that my creative energy comes from joy, not pain. I have no urge to make when I barely have enough hope for the day to put on pants. Heavy realities may be the driving force but the work develops from a position of hope for comfort and social connection, a hunger for nourishment of new ideas and new materials to explore. The joy is in learning while doing, imagining new collective futures.

What first appears as a frilly white textile barely conceals the chaotic armature of conduit casing, hazard tape, metal pipes, and other construction-site debris behind layers of discarded Tyvek building wrap. (Nate Yandle photos)

Finally, my position is not fixed. In my mind I have that 1985 photo portrait of Lily Tomlin in a black T-shirt with white lettering that screams EVOLVE OR DIE. And look at her now. My sensibilities are always shifting and I am growing more at peace with the idea that what other people say about me is none of my business. When an artist friend turned 50 on an artists’ retreat the rest of us toasted her in a welcome to the I Don’t Give a Shit Club. When you’re part of that club you stop second-guessing every decision and tending to other people’s feelings first.

This is how I recently became the owner of Fuckwit. I was attracted by the sweet rosebud fabric appliqued in tiny blanket stitches precise as Letraset on a lacy linen. I like the artist's choice of font and word. It’s an overt, uncomplicated work that hangs near the front door, visible before guests would even have their coat off. If people get offended, blame the artist, not me. I just like the beauty in that crack.

Original artwork by Kathryn Lissack (@kathrynlissack)

Circular thinking can be a flow state too

6/2/2024

I opened up my studio yesterday to the public to get some general feedback on a new series of paintings. Because even though I’m compelled to keep working on it and even though I’m enjoying a growing proficiency in this mash-up of stitching and painting I’m having trouble articulating why — or if — they’re not just pretty faces. Mostly I've been answering their questions with questions of my own.

“Why” has always been the trouble. Also aggravating: Why ask why?
This is the reason I’ve named this growing collection of paintings that all basically follow my own set of rules of engagement Circular Thinking. The connotation is negative but hear me out.

Asking ourselves existential questions while we create is infuriating (Shut the hell up, Inner Critic) but it’s also part of a process that can guide us to where we want to land. I would like to be settled with the obvious reason that it’s my route into flow, or actual, real fun. (The “so fun” episode of the We Can Do Hard Things podcast here was recommended to me by my sister.) And they do get me there: into the flow of playing with colours and opacities, of focusing on one stitch at a time, watching how each layer of paint or stitching changes perception.

But I can’t settle with just what’s in it for me. Making is my way of connecting with the world. Much of my work is collaborative, so those involved naturally have a stake in the final projects. Often that’s in the gathering of abject materials, or the actual simple hand-working methods that bring folks together. So it’s easy to see the ‘why’ in these crafted objects and fields; beyond their own resonance they stand as an archive of the social interaction, an artifact of the engagement with materials.

The Circular Thinking series has none of that. Each painting is a singular, intimate effort. It does not reveal any agency embedded in unwanted/useless materials and objects. So in the making, despite the flow part, I feel a whisper of guilt and shame that many women of a certain age might also hear when not doing for others: selfish, self-indulgent, self-absorbed.

There is definitely something in the ‘self’ there that is the driving force in these improvisational, unpredictable and unsettling paintings: self-care. I ache for solid, reliable ground in these perilous times so I start with a grid, like the criss-cross of rebar that sets the concrete footings in every new tower crowding the Vancouver skyline, or a typical nine-patch quilt block. Nine eight-inch-diameter circles in a 24" x 24" "block" anchor to that grid and then I’m off, free of all straight lines, off-setting those circles by half in paint, offsetting again with more layers of colour in paint or thread until I arrive at an attractive/distractive done-ness. It is an improvisational process of revealing and concealing (repeat!) petal-like sections of circles, creating unsettling, kaleidoscopic fields. It is the kind of all-consuming process that reduces hours to minutes, that absorbs all attention, a safe space away from the visual onslaught of social media, yet reflective of our ‘everything is awesome’ screen-field of vision.

It might be easier to eat this elephant one bite at a time by knocking down specific why-questions:

Why paint?
Colour-play. Especially important in this watery corner of the world. It can also act as a dye/stain.

Why canvas?
It’s fabric, with so much possibility for exploring its essential characteristics.

Why the wood stretcher?
Another fibre product that is a natural with fabric. It's basically a quilt frame or embroidery hoop for painters. Building stretchers and stretching the canvas is an investment in the project ahead (a trick I learned from my father @dennisyandle).

Why the stitching?
I like to needle at the hierarchy of painting over craft processes. Each stitch feels like I’m sticking it to convention. Stitching into painting offers the digestible label of “expanded painting practice.”

Why all the quilt references?
The geometry of quilt designs is fascinating, mesmerizing. I have little aptitude but a lot of respect for the beauty of mathematics. The tactility of that geometry connects to present and past makers of objects that exist as art pieces or as items of comfort, utility and gifts, an expression of love. This is a less-digestible "expanded quilting practice": improvisational, mixed-media works with none of that cushy filling.

$Picture$

The geometry of circular quilt designs remains a beautiful, captivating mystery.

Why this scale?
24" x 24” is my standard sample-block size. I dream of an exhibit of all my sample blocks blanketing white-cube gallery walls.

Why two-dimensional?
Closer inspection reveals the third dimension, in the stitching. Also, the aforementioned sample-block dream show is a three-dimensional, immersive space of pattern and colour chaos. (I want to go to there.)

Circular Thinking is both the name of this latest series of grid paintings and shorthand for how I approach every new project: play, think, write, share, think, research, share, write, repeat.

Through this writing part of that feedback loop I can see I just might stop torturing myself with the existential Why and get back into that flow.

@carlynyandle

Gritty beauty seen in foundations of this pretty city

2/28/2017

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It feels like the Internet has killed the fun of taking snapshots of beautiful cities and people. So many times over the last four months in Mexico I've raised my camera (phone) to capture an impressive bronze sculpture or some baroque church facade then thought: This is pointless. A Google-image search with a few key words (Guanajuato, musicians, Don Quixote, Pipila) would produce hundreds of better-quality stock photos. We're saturated in instagrammable images. I miss those old pocket travel photo albums.

This might explain all the selfie sticks threatening to take your eye out in the crowded plazas on any given night here; putting yourself in the picture with all the famous stuff behind will guarantee a unique photo.

So I have very little in terms of a photographic record for my time here. Every view of the strolling musicians in the plazas, or the teenage girls decked in ballgowns for their quinceanera (debut) parties, the food vendors, the street singers dressed in Renaissance-style hose and puffed velvet jackets are already done. So done.

Then last week I finally started to see that the one signature-Guanajuato element that I've been captivated by is actually a worthy photo subject: the retaining walls that barely seem to be holding back the jumble of colourful, cubic houses clinging to the surrounding hills.

There's a compelling visual story in those layers of peeling paint on crumbling plaster on adobe bricks stacked on crudely cut limestone foundations. The traces of human activity in one section of wall speaks to the human habitation in this city that has its roots in the 1500s. It's quite a study in social history and handwork, an unplanned, almost invisible beauty, especially to a tourist whose port town of Vancouver has been replaced by a gleaming, pristine city of glass.

I'm seeing them as found abstracts, images of unintentional collages and mixed-media works by generations of people who work with their hands.

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Big painting shift at little house on the prairie

9/19/2016

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Day 12 painting: Embroidered details in a scene of a newly "thrashed" hay field.

I've just returned from a month in the big country of southwest Saskatchewan: big skies, big farming operations, big empty days that were all too much at the start of my artist residency at the Wallace Stegner House.

Suddenly agoraphobic, I pulled down all the blinds and paced around that lovely century-old house, wondering what on earth possessed me to throw myself into this imposing patchwork landscape. I am not a landscape painter; that's my dad's bag.

Plus I came by plane and an eight-hour car ride, so even if I did want to paint, I didn't have my usual large stretched canvases and totes of paints. I did bring a few of my usual travel essentials: embroidery hoops, needles and floss — and an old bed sheet. I knew there was just a couple of stores in town, and none would be selling art supplies so I packed a tiny travel set of liquid acrylics, a few brushes and a pad of mixed-media cardstock.

My sketchy plan involved, well, sketching with my father, who has spent some of every summer in this tiny town of Eastend ever since he filled the Stegner House with his landscape paintings 15 years ago.

We were quite a pair: me, not at all comfortable with the whole plein-air tradition, and him, increasingly unfamiliar with his life's work of painting that involved biking into the country to sketch then returning to his basement to paint in the heat of the day. (Actually we were mostly a trio, his wife acting as facilitator for whatever this was, supplying us with water bottles, sunhats, sketch pads and willow charcoal, and generally getting us on the road.)

We circled around this vague idea of mine as we circled around this dead-quiet, struggling little town every morning. But the awkwardness turned to anguish back at my studio as I undertook the tedious pursuit of finding some interest — or even the point — in painting puffy clouds and dun-coloured hills.

A week later and out of sheer frustration at my lack of landscape-painting prowess, I resorted to dropping diluted paint on a taut scrap of bedsheet in an embroidery hoop just to watch it bleed. I threw the first painted scrap away and did another, with a little more intention, then threw that away too. Within a couple of hours I figured out the right water-to-paint ratio to create a slightly controlled bloom with each stroke. A lot of other distracted behaviour (baking apple crisps, walking by the river, venting via text to my artist friends) meant that each additional stroke was added to a dried layer and by the end of the afternoon, a landscape was emerging on a miniature stretched canvas. That one I didn't throw out. But it was still a little hazy. That's when I thought about using my stash of embroidery floss for final line work.

I sat in the cool of the front screened porch that evening and embroidered some more information onto the painting. It was a clumsy first effort but soon I was enjoying the daily practice of biking in the morning with my father, painting something inspired by the ride in the afternoon, then embroidering some details in the evening, inviting others to join me for stitching sessions on the front porch.

I did this every day until I had 12 little paintings, each a progression from the last. I saw them as blocks for a future quilt, which led to a well-attended culminating exhibit, "Scenes from a Quilted Landscape."

But now I'm viewing them as something beyond a quilt and beyond the horizon. I'm calling them Points of Interest: something to build on and build with.

As with all creative pursuits, forcing solutions is futile. My original idea of coaxing my father back into his painting studio by getting him to share some of his process with me was a non-starter. These days he finds everyday joy in the moment, whether that is spotting a hawk while biking the backroads, playing a languid rendition of The Girl from Ipanema on piano in the hot afternoons, or watching the town's many cats on the prowl from the front porch of the Stegner House while his wife and I embroidered the summer evenings away.

I'm not sure if he knew it but he passed on to me the most valuable lesson for painting a scene: You have to actually see it.