"Annie Leonard: 7 of Pyrex Cups in the Kitchen Tarot."
by Susan Shie Contact me
"Annie Leonard: 7 of Pyrex Cups in the Kitchen Tarot."
©Susan Shie 2014. 59"h x 81.5"w. inventory #472. Peace Cozy #62.
Began 3-8-14. Finished 6-18-14. There are lots of detail images of this piece, after my long artist's statement here.
Materials: White kona cotton, airbrush paint, fabric paint, Aurifil cotton machine thread, Artfabrik variegated hand dyed perle cotton embroidery thread, one Green Temple Buddha Boy bead. Nature-fil bamboo and organic cotton batting.
Techniques: Whole cloth painting. Black line drawing and color areas painted with Aztek double action airbrush. Small, black writing and drawing lines made with Silkpaint.com’s Airpen and black fabric paint. Small amount of colored writing made with fabric markers. Crazy grid machine quilting, and one row of hand stitching with perle cotton thread (on the border edge.)
Statement: On March 8 I randomly chose what Cups card I would work with next and drew the 7 of Cups, which for me is Pyrex Cups, being in my Kitchen Tarot. The Sakki-Sakki Tarot labels this card as Venus in Scorpio, which is some intense love and devotion, and can also be intense research for the love of the subject. After choosing this card, I had a lot of other obligations that kept me away from starting this next large piece. I taught two Turtle Art Camps at my home and taught at Focus on Fiber Florida Style, then made my "For Love of Libby" piece, which is also in this 2014 Gallery.
Then on May 6, the White House released some big report on Climate Change, and I decided this piece should deal with that, somehow. The next day I got to wondering what Annie Leonard, my eco-hero, was up to lately. Did she have a new video online in her Story of Stuff project? What I found was that on May 6, the day before, Greenpeace USA had announced that Annie Leonard will be its next director. That did it! Instantly I knew my piece would finally tell Annie's story!
A year earlier I had proposed making a large piece about Annie Leonard for the art quilt project Earth Stories, organized by SAQA (Studio Art Quilt Associates.) Then it turned out that someone else had also proposed Annie as her subject, so I bowed out. I instead decided to make a piece about women in Greenpeace, but I couldn't find much at all and changed my mind again. I made my piece "Muddy Fork Farm," about Monica Bongue's sustainable, organic farm here in Wooster. But I knew somedoay I'd make a piece about Annie Leonard!
So this is it. This is the perfect time for it.
5-7-14: I found out about Annie being chosen to lead Greenpeace USA. I made a bunch of sketches of her hanging clothes on a clothesline, because I'd been outside, hanging up my laundry and hit the thought: Annie hangs her clothes out, too. I bet she has to move to Washington DC now, being the head of Greenpeace USA. But I bet she has a clothesline there, too. I had read her big and wonderful book "The Story of Stuff," and I knew she lives in a little community of 6 or so houses in Berkeley, and that they share the lawn mower (probably a nice old fashioned reel mower), and other gizmos and chores, etc, like a nice commune with separate houses. She'll get that going in DC, too! Or will they let her live where she does now and just travel. Hmmm. Gad, it sounds like I'm stalking her. I'm just so amazed by her and her lifestyle though. I can't stalk her. I can't drive! :)
5-8: My mother's birthday. Marie Snyder Shie would be 97 today. She used her clothesline as much as she could. She was a real model for living gently on the Earth. Read Silent Spring when it came out and got into Ruth Stout's organic gardening. Read all the books the hippies were reading, and she and my brother Jimmy and I went earthy right away. I loved Mom's old wringer washer, which she still used sometimes.
5-9 to 11: I painted my piece. I never stick entirely to the sketches, preferring to ad lib as I draw and paint with my airbrush. I decided to change one of the dresses to the fancy one Eva and I had just made for her. Big sewing lessons over her Spring Break after Easter. Sweetheart neckline! Easy to spot it on the left side of this piece. I put plain green pants on the line behind the dresses. Those pants are for the men in Greenpeace. They can sit back a little now. The dresses include a water in the desert dress, Eva's dress, a dolphin dress, a 7 of Cups dress (that Annie's hanging up) and a peace symbols dress.
5-13: Started airpen writing with black fabric paint. I talked about how the 7 of Cups is often seen as a card about confusion, but that here it's the confusion of how on Earth to heal Climate Change! Annie's clear love of the planet is the Venus in Scorpio that the Sakki-Sakki tarot deck talks about. Intense passion for research and for saving the planet. There's nothing more intense than Scorpio and nothing more loving than Venus. I also wrote some words from Bob Marley's song "One Love, One World," that was playing on my stereo right then. That's for Annie, for her new job coming up! I wrote some facts from the Story of Stuff video on the first dress on the left, the water dress, and wrote that I gave my dog Libby a bath today. I wrote about the terrible winter we just had, the polar vortices, and how the plants are all late, and the farmers aren't getting their crops in, due to the soggy ground. On Annie's dress I wrote some bio info about her, from Wikipedia, etc, and how she got her MA at Cornell in 2013, 25 years after she left there to start working for the environment. On Eva's dress I wrote all about that project and how that nine year old is really good at holding her focus now, and how she's really starting to get good at sewing!
5-14: Today is the Scorpio Full Moon at 23º Scorpio. Kristi called it the Flower Moon. I made a list of all of Annie Leonard's short movies, which you can find on hte Story of Stuff website. On the 7 of Cups dress I wrote about Annie's Story of Bottled Water video: some facts from that movie and some of my own thoughts on that whole bad scene. We had tornado sirens here today, for the second time in three days!
5-15: Rain, tornado watches, missed walks with Libby due to rain. No planting. I found an article from Elle magazine about Annie and wrote a lot of it into the background of this painting, trying like crazy to make it easy for a reader to follow my writing from one negative space to another. I never know if anyone will read any or much of my pieces, but I have to work it out, as though someone would want to read the whole thing. That was a really good, and really long article! I transcribed a lot of it, too!
5-17: I wrote about my dear friend Luanne Moffett and my adventure in 1989, going to East Liverpool, Ohio, for the Greenpeace workshops on how to stop the proposed giant incinerators from going into cities all over our country. We loved that trip and learned so much. We met Lois Gibbs of Love Canal, where they'd built a housing development over a toxic landfill. I wonder if Annie Leonard was there, too. After we fought down the incinerators, the big corporations put them in developing countries, and that's what Annie went and investigated for almost 10 years for Greenpeace. That's how she got so involved in what making and disposing of stuff in the world has done to our planet and us.
I took a break from working on this piece from May 18 to 26, to teach a Turtle Art Camp here at my home. Love these art biosphere intensives!
5-26: I wrote about it being birthdays for my friends Carolyn and Nancy Robinson and Duane Hart, and it being Jimmy's half birthday, too. It's been two weeks now, since I fell while walking Libby on Mother's Day. Using arnica gel is helping my really sore right arm a lot, but I think this will take a long while to heal. Yesterday Jimmy tilled the Rainbow Garden, and I started planting seeds. Finally dry enough to start, and here it is, late May! I wrote about the history of the Mason-Dixon Line, built in the 1760s, after hearing Mark Knoffler and James Taylor, singing "Sailing to Philadelphia," a song I love. Hurray for Wikipedia! This and the Missouri Compromise Line of 1820 both separated free and slave states. Libby will be four years old on August 15, and is starting to settle down more. How we love our dog! Yesterday Jimmy hung the clothes on the line for me, since my arm is really sore. Then he attached a nice wire hanger device to my clothespin bag, so I can use it much more easily now. On the bottom of Eva's dress I wrote about Ricky Nelson's "Garden Party" song and how it's a credo I hold for how I make art. We dubbed her dress her Garden Party dress.
5-27: I quoted from Greenpeace's statement about why they hired Annie to be their upcoming director, writing along the top of my piece, where I'd written the "7 of Cups" title lettering.
5-28: Maya Angelou died today at 86. I wrote about her on the Peace Dress on the clothesline. I started reading her autobiographies today.
5-30: We bought our tomato plants two days ago, at Yoder's, an Amish greenhouse southeast of Apple Creek, and we took Libby along, so she could enjoy the horses. We planted 10 tomato plants last night and gave the rest to our neighbor Nancy. At the greenhouse we bought worm castings, and online I found out they're the best organic fertilizer you can find. Earthworm poo, and it can't burn your plants, so you can't overdo it. When you open the first bag, you find out it feels just like good woods dirt, humus. We put some in with each tomato plant and plan to use it on the whole garden, once the seeds come up and grow a bit. Jimmy and I had breakfast with my friend Carolyn today. She's going to Vietnam in June, to Hanoi. The girl gets around on her journalism assignments! In August she's moving to Pullman, WA, to teach at the Edward R Murrow School of Journalism. I bought some new fabric prints for the back of this piece and started to piece it today.
5-31 to 6-5: Doing all the sewing of turning this huge painting into an art quilt. I read several of Maya Angelou's books over this intensive sewing session!
6-5: I sewed Peace Cozy #62 onto this piece. Can you find it? It's on the Sun's left cheek, sending peace to our star, so she can beam it down to Earth. We need it! Every time I make a piece, I won't let myself think of where the Peace Cozy will go, until all the painting, writing,and sewing are done. Then I started writing on the border of the piece. Yesterday, June 4, was the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre in Beijing. Today I watched the video of Tank Man, the thin young man who walked out into the street, the day after thousands of protesters for democarcy were killed there by the military, and stopped a column of 17 huge tanks for about five minutes, then disappeared into the crowd. I'm sure I never saw this video back when it all happened. I saw the stills, but not THIS! This is the most bravery I've ever seen! Then I found a blog by two sisters called "The China Girls," who grew up in the US, were born here after Tiananmen Square. They had found film rolls their uncle had owned, of pix he'd taken at the protests, and they posted them this year. I had forgotten how wonderful the statue, the Goddess of Democracy, was. The protesters built her starting on May 13, 1999, and the tanks tore her down in the end, during their attacks on the students. She was 30' tall, and they based her on our Statue of Liberty. Jimmy heard on the radio that if you google "Tiananmen Square Massacre" in China, you won't find anything. They've scrubbed it all out, so there are millions of Chinese people who've never heard of this crime. They have never seen even the still of Tank Man or of the students' Goddess of Democracy. Where have all the flowers gone?
6-15: I took off the week to have Eva here again and do another intense sewing project with her: four small clutch bags for us and her mom and other grandmother. This time she did some quilting on the bags and helped sew in the zippers, among other tasks we shared. Olivia, E's cousin, came for a day and we helped her start her bag, too, and she'll work on it here later this Summer. This was her first time to actually run the sewing machine at all. Eva helped me teach Olivia. I am so proud! Gretchen came down Friday night and spent the night, and we had a little barbecue with her and Eva and Jimmy's mom and brother Gary. Then yesterday everyone left, as G and E went home to Lakewood and Jimmy went to Grayling, Michigan, for his 11 day trip of the year, for the Bamboo Rodmakers gathering, and the thing they used to call the Trout Bums Picnic. He and his pal Doug camp out and take floats in Doug's drift boat, besides having lots of adventures with fly fishermen who come from all over the world. Jimmy loves this adventure! On Annie's raised left arm I wrote that I'd been putting newspapers and straw on the walking rows in our Rainbow Garden, since Jimmy left. I wrote "No more US war in Iraq, please!", because news is coming up about ISIS, a super conservative Syrian and Iraqi military group, taking over city after city in Iraq. The Repubs want to blame Obama for getting us out of Iraq too soon. I wish we'd put the money and effort into heaing the Earth, not trying to keep control over oil rich countries. I am a pacifist, and I've never thought the Iraqis wanted us there anyhow. I wrote this kind of thoughts on Annie's face and right arm. I said "War is STILL not healthy for children or other living things." Casey Kasem died today at 82 in Gig Harbor, WA. Born April 27, 1932 in Detroit, of Lebonese parents who'd moved to Detroit before he was born. He had the Top 40 popular music countdown for many decades and did many voices for annimations, being Shaggy in Scooby-Doo. I hadn't known that part! He also gave a lot of money to charities. I sewed my Green Temple Buddha Boy bead to the bottom right corner of my piece today.
6-16: I'm finishing up this piece. Wrote about missing Jimmy, who's up in Michigan June 14-24, and that I'm reading the book The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd. I've seen the movie twice, but had never read the book before. It's so good ... and now I'm gonna watch the movie again, before Jimmy gets home!
6-18: I added some more tiny details to this piece today, before I did my photo shoot, so I'll have to do one more heat set. (I head set with a hot, dry iron after each stage, and many times, while doing all that writing with fabric paint going through my airpen. I wear a respirator and have an exhaust fan going, too. Artists have to protect ourselves from toxins, which all paints are; all art supplies are!) I drew some of my peace roses on bare spots: Annie's feet, my copyright, etc. And I wrote on the Sun's face that we need to clean up the Earth now, so we can still be here to enjoy her and the Sun. I drew peace symbols in other bare spots... Then it was time to do the big photoshoot on June 19.
6-20: And today is the Summer Solstice, though it's technically at 6:51 EDT tomorrow, the 21st. I want to get this gallery entry up yet tonight, because I love the Solstices and Equinoxes so much! Longest day of the year, with the Sun going down at 9:01 PM here in Wooster, Ohio tonight, and coming up at 5:55 AM tomorrow.
If you're on Facebook, you can see an album of this piece in progress on my Susan Shie Turtle Moon Studios page. It includes pix of my sketches, the airbrush painting project, etc. And you can see an album there on this finished piece, too. I have lots of albums of works in progress and finished on that page.
If you are interested in studying with me, please check out my Turtle Art Camps and classes that I'm teaching "out," listed on the main page of this site.
Read all about my Turtle Art Camp - how it works for your weeklong artmaking experience here in Wooster, Ohio, and see the changes I've made to the agenda. I have many large photos on the page, to show what's going on at this biosphere-like art experience. The emphasis in this adult students' art camp is on painting, so you can draw and paint all week on paper or canvas, instead of drawing and painting on cloth, if you like, and you don't even have to try my airpen and airbrush, or my sewing techniques, if you don't want to. I want my art camp to help you become more open to letting your art flow out, in whatever medium you want it to be in. I have even had students over the years who are mainly writers, not visual artists. I started my Turtle Art Camps in 1994 and they're going strong.
Many thanks, Susan, Lucky
Susan Shie, Wooster, Ohio June 20, 2014. Happy Summer Solstice tonight!
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