Susan Shie

Diary Paintings for Art Quilts

Course Description
In this class, we’ll explore hand brush painting and line drawing with markers and airpen, on white cotton fabric, to create diary paintings for quilting. Your paintings will be about the size of a fat quarter, 18” x 22”, give or take a little, and you should have one finished painting per class day, with some of them “crazy grid” quilted during class.

We’ll draw freehand on Kona cotton with black permanent fine tip markers, then brush paint in the colors, and finally use the markers again, as well as airpen (if you want to use it) to write freehand on the surface, creating a verbal texture over the images in the story. You’ll be drawing like you did as a child, in relaxed wonder over your abilities, and writing off the top of your head, just like when you write a letter. No planning ahead. This spontaneity is what makes naïve art and children’s art so appealing to the viewer and so happiness-making for the artist.

During the class, I’ll demonstrate how I work with an airpen, and then I’ll do one-on-one instructions with each student and the airpen. (You don’t have to try it at all, but those who do may love the airpen!) In a fairly small group class, you’ll be able to use the airpen a lot, once you get the basics. I’ll have two airpens going at once in the class, and I’ll teach you how to load and clean it out, if you think you’ll buy one for yourself later from Silk Paint or Dharma. Don’t buy one ahead of time, since you’ll really want to see if it’s something you want to own.

I’ll also show you how to make my unique self-bordered quilt sandwich and then do crazy grid quilting, so you can start quilting this way, which is different. It’s very simple and certainly not what you’re in this class to really learn, as you’ll pick up the method very fast. You already know how to do this easy kind of sewing, but you haven’t tried something this easy for making quilts yet, because you probably don’t know how to let go and make art with gleeful abandon! Not YET!

The real purpose of my classes is to bring out your freer inner self, and to get your creativity really flowing out again. I try my best to get you to ignore rules and just let the ideas come out in a smooth stream of consciousness. As a group we’ll create a list of possible themes for our works, and then vote in one theme each day of class. You don’t have to do the theme if you don’t want to. But whatever you do, you’ll be giving show and tell presentations of your work in class, so that we all know what else is going on around us during the class.

I don’t need for your work to look like mine. I want you to be able to really get the idea that it’s healthy to get away from our social mores and let ‘er rip sometimes, especially in making art! You’ll learn a lot and have a good time, too! There’s much less stress when you’re not judging your work so much, and in that state, you’re helping your body to heal.

Artist's Biography
Born 9-28-50. Wooster, OH. B.A. in Painting. The College of Wooster. Wooster, OH. 1981. Phi Beta Kappa. M.F.A. in Painting. The School of Art. Kent State University. Kent, OH. 1986. Working professionally since 1986 as a studio artist and teacher.

Artist's Statement
I grew up drawing, painting, writing, sewing, sculpting clay, knitting, and crocheting. I was always very off beat and liked it that way, and my parents encouraged me to do the artmaking I loved so much, even though neither of them chose art as their career. I have done personal diary art since I was a child. I went to The College of Wooster, where the stretched canvas paintings I’d made since junior high days morphed into unstretched and sewn paintings, out of my choice to express my feminist politics. The Art Department at Wooster was a hot spot for feminist artists at that time, in the late 70s and early 80s. I got a Master of Fine Arts degree in painting, but I was sewing what I called Diary Quilt Paintings by the time I was doing my graduate thesis at Kent State School of Art in 1985-86, and never took either a college class in surface design or a workshop in quilting. I was in painting and enjoyed being the one who sewed on unstretched paintings. If I had been in surface design, I probably would have had to do something else way out. I was the rebel and loved it.

After grad school I quit entering and organizing student shows and went professional. I was going to give my self-employed artist career a ten year plan, and then decide if maybe I should be teaching at a university instead of being a private artist. But I got into teaching art quilt workshops, and then got my husband Jimmy to teach with me, and we taught all over the place and at our home studios for eleven years. He also collaborated on the art quilts with me for a while, until his own work as a leather artist pulled him away from both teaching with me and adding leather things to my quilts.

By 2005 I was working on my current style: no more hand sewing and beading. Where beads and obsessive stitching had been the hallmark of my work, now it was a very tiny, rhythmic flow of much more writing than ever before in my work – now all over the surface. Still the same narrative, domestic imagery in my work, but now much more writing, and no beading over the painted imagery. I had started using an airpen in 2003, which was the biggest cause of the change. I don’t have to hand embroider over my airpen painted crispy little lines! Now I’m doing all machine sewn work in 2008. I can make much larger pieces in much shorter time periods. There is the same feel to the old and new work, in terms of recognizing it all as mine, but you can certainly tell these bodies of work apart.

Jimmy works on his leather art fly fishing cases full time, but I am back to teaching at our home – Turtle Art Camps, which I started in 1994 (www.turtlemoon.com), and teaching around the country. This year I received Professional Quilter Magazine’s “Teacher of the Year” award. My work was always diary oriented, but now includes a lot of current events and political commentary. I’ve always been a peacenik, an environmentalist, and an astrologer/tarot person, and my Kitchen Tarot project, now ten years old, is finally at the end of the 22 Major cards, ready to launch into the 56 Minor cards! I think all my work is Time Capsule-esque, with its very timely writing and imagery. I like that. I think I can work in the ways I’m using now for a long time to come, without getting bored.