"Cradleboard: 10 of Potholders(coins) in the Kitchen Tarot."
by Susan Shie Contact me
"Cradleboard: 10 of Potholders (coins) in the Kitchen Tarot."
©Susan Shie 2016. 60"h x 90"w. inventory #492. Peace Cozy #68.
Began 6-2-16. Finished 8-15-16. Many large detail images follow this long artist's statement.
Materials: White kona-like cotton from Test Fabrics, 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. Various commercial batiks and prints in backing/border, including some original Lunn Fabrics batiks.
Techniques: Whole cloth painting. Black line freehand drawing and color areas painted with Aztek double action airbrush, using black fabric paint. Small, black writing and drawing lines made with Silkpaint.com’s Airpen, using black fabric paint. Mostly machine sewn, with one row of hand stitching of perle cotton thread (on the border's outside edge.)
Statement:
I didn't know what all would show up in this painting when I started, but I selected the story of Buffy Sainte-Marie - singer, songwriter, social activist, and educator - and the wonderful foundations she created in the late 1960s and 1990s, which are still going on, especially the Cradleboard Teaching Project. Cradleboard, since 1996, has been pairing Native American and Mainstream schools, to study Native culture through a strict curriculum in the major academic subjects, run mostly via internet interaction between the two cultures - with the students themselves as the ones teaching and learning from each other, via Apple Computers' Face Time live video conferencing. You can learn about the Cradleboard Teaching Project online. Buffy Sainte-Marie created this and another education foundation for Native children, using money she began earning in the mid 1960s, from her own music and licensing her songs for others to sing. Donovan made her Universal Soldier a big it in 1967, and soon Buffy, who has three college degrees, including one in education, was off and running, using her money to help Native children.
Buffy Sainte-Marie herself was adopted as a baby and grew up in Massachusetts, raised by a white family, but found her Native Cree tribe in Saskatewan, Canada, when she was in her 20s. She also was a member of the Sesame Street cast for about 10 years, starting in the late 1970s. A born educator, Buffy has always used her music to teach us all about social injustice (starting with The Universal Soldier), and has written and sung many songs about all kinds of social and political issues, including Climate Change. At 75, she's writing and recording, touring, maintaining her foundations, and striving to improve life for us all. See her May 14, 2015 interview with Shad on Q Radio.
Read about Buffy Sainte-Marie's life in Wikipedia. The writing on this piece is about lots of things besides Buffy's life and educational projects, but she is the anchor for it all. It's full of everything from her story to stories of my daily life and family, with Hillary Clinton, Black Lives Matter, the Pulse Nightclub Massacre, the Cleveland Cavs winning the 2016 NBA Championship, and Mohammad Ali's life and death included, among other things.
Most of the many large art quilts I've made since early 1998 have two main themes. Each is about some particular subject I'm interested in, but also, each is one of the 78 "cards" in my massive art project: The Kitchen Tarot. Before starting to draw this Cradleboard piece, I randomly chose the Tarot card, the 10 of Coins. I started sketching for this project in my sketchbook on June 2, and by June 18, I had enough sketches done to feel like I knew what I wanted to draw in this big painting. On June 19 I was freehand drawing with my airbrush on a huge 60 x 90" piece of white cotton cloth pinned up on my airbrush wall. I always let myself peek at the final sketch I'd made, but I don't copy it. I see it as a suggestion for where my freehand work will take me on this much larger scale piece.
About the card itself: The 10 of Coins is the 10 of Potholders in my Kitchen Tarot deck. Monicka Sakki calls it the Family Tree. It signifies a very mature level of dealing with money and other things that involve our life skills and survival as a family, a tribe, a community, a society, a world. It involves tradition and wisely working together to problem solve for the good of the group, I tihnk the subjects I've written and drawn about here are all included in this high-vibration card of mature energy for improving our world, and all levels of interaction within that world.
The suits of Tarot are changed in my Kitchen Tarot deck as follows: Coins are Potholders; Cups are Pyrex Cups; Wands are Wooden Spoons; and Swords are Paring Knives. Each of the 56 Minor Arcana cards in a Tarot deck are in one of these four suits, while the 22 Major Arcana cards are each stories about life traits and situations on our life journey, and they are not in a particular suit.
So I had Buffy and the 10 of Potholders as my two main focus themes for this piece, so it was time to start working! I sketched from June 2 to the 18th. Then I cut a big piece of white cotton fabric, 60 x 90", pinned it to my work wall, and freehand drew with my airbrush and black fabric paint, then colored it in with my airbrush and colors of fabric paint, from June 19 to 23. Then I began writing on it with my airpen, with the piece lying flat on my main studio table, putting black fabric paint through my airpen. Here are topics I covered in my entries in this piece's writing:
6-23-16: Wrote the meaning of the tarot card, in the top left corner.
6-24: On Hillary's shirt, I wrote about the Democrats' sit-in in the House of Representatives, trying to get gun control bills to be voted on. Rep John Lewis led the sit-in on June 22 and 23. On my image of Mohammad Ali's body and butterfly wings, I told things about his life and legacy. He was born on 1-17-42 in Louisville, KY, and he died on 6-3-16, at age 74. He spent much of his later life as a strong social activist. Eva is here this week, and Gretchen will be here tonight. Huge surprise: The UK voted yesesterday to leave the EU. The Brexit!
6-25: The English Pound dropped a lot, right after the vote for Brexit. Jimmy's in Grayling, MI, and Eva's gone home, so I'm working hard on this piece, as my next online class, Lucky Drawing 113, begins tomorrow night. Writing about the Pulse Nightclub massacre in Orlando, FL, on the Rainbow Flag image in this piece. The Cleveland Cavaliers won the MBA on June 19, scoring 93-89 over the Golden State Warriors. Obama praised LeBron James and his teammates, back in Dec, 2014, for wearing "I Can't Breathe" t-shirts during warm-ups, to protest the police murder of Eric Garner on Staten Island.
6-26: Jimmy comes home from Michigan tomorrow night. The California Primary Election was June 7, when Hillary Clinton won enough delegates to become our Democratic candidate for President. History / Herstory! After all the elections, Hillary ended up with 2,220 delegates and 591 superdelegates. Bernie Sanders (whom I'd vloted for here in Ohio) got 1,831 delegates and 48 superdelegates. You need a total of 2,383 delegates to become the Dems' candidate. Hillary won them fair and square, just like Obama did in 2008, when Hillary finally dropped out of the race. This time Bernie kept going though, and he stuck it out til the convention, getting Hillary to accept some of his much more left wing ideas into the Dems' convention platform. Some of his supporters were angry, wouldn't let go, or threatened to vote for a third party candidate. Let us pray!
On Hillary's face here, I wrote things about her, like how she met MLK when she was 14; she was a NY Senator during the 9-11-01 attack on the World Trade Center, and still fights for help for the First Responders there, who still need aid and treatment. She visited a record 112 countries during her time as Secretary of State, flying 956,733 miles for that job. Her father was a small businessman, who printed fabrics for drapes. Bill proposed marriage 2x to her, before she accepted. She wrote to NASA about becoming an astronaut, and got a letter back, saying they didn't take women for that job. She and Bill got married in the livingroom of their house in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and she wore a street dress she found the night before the wedding. She won a Grammy in 1996 for Best Spoken Word Album, reading her own book "It Takes a Village." While Bill was governor of AR, she was named in 1988 and 1991, as one of the top 100 most influencial US lawyers, by the National Law Journal. On the Tree of LIfe in this piece, I wrote about Bill and Hill having always attended different churches from each other. Then I wrote about the Flying Spaghetti Monster and how that religion (Pastafarianism) is really a protest against teaching Creationism in the schools.
6-27: Yesterday was the reopening of the much wider and fancier Panama Canal, which was being redone since 2006. It can now handle 2x its old capacity, but its rival, the Suez Canal has no locks and can handle any size of ship. The Monkees have put out their first new album since frontman Davy Jones died on 2-29-12. It's called "Good Times," and I only heard about it, because Mike sent me a link to a new song on it, "You Bring the Summer." Today the Supreme Court voted 5-3 to strike down Texas's laws from 2013, that have almost ended women's rights to get abortion anywhere in that state. The Court also upheld a law to not let domestic abuse offenders buy guns ever again. I elaborated on these SCOTUS decisions behind myself on the painting and between me and Eva, and under Buffy. I guess I had a lot to say on this subject.
4-28: I wrote Buffy S-M's bio on her long body. She was born on 2-20-41 in Qj'Appelle Valley, Saskatchewan, CA. On my dog Libby I wrote that lots of people have been walking with her and me. I wrote about the June 19 Kissing Chain in Europe, to support the UK, asking them to stay in the EU. It didn't work, but there were a lot of kisses from Rome to Berlin, to Paris, to London, with iPads bridging the distance between the cities. It was also to send sympathy to the UK over the murder of the MP Jo Cox, who was stabbed and shot to death on June 16 by a Neo Nazi in England. Cox had pushed hard to get the UK to take in more Syrian refugees and was in favor of staying in the EU. On June 24, the UK voted 53 to 48% to leave the EU. The Kissing Chain: "A vote to Remain (in the EU) is a vote for love, tolerance, and unity in our diversity." Sounds like my writing, so I did a lot about this record breaking kissing chain of thousands of demonstrators.
6-30: Our 26th wedding anniversary! We got together with Laura and Rudy. They had just sold their building on Liberty St in Wooster. The Jupiter probe, Juno, is sending back pix and sounds of the huge planet's northern lights style electrical storms.
7-1: Turkey's Istanbul airport was attacked as a protest of Turkey siding with the US in fighting ISOL. 47 died, including 3 attackers. Bill Clinton visited Attn Gen Loretta Lynch on her plane parked at the Phoenix airport on June 27, muddying the waters on whether Hillary was getting favors from Lynch and the Dept of Justice's investigation of her part in the attack on our consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and of her Secretary of State email issues. Bill really tries to help, I guess, and he was a great President!
7-3: Garrison Keillor retired officially from A Prairie Home Companion last night, July 2, 2016. The first PHC radio show was July 6, 1974, 42 years ago. Keillor's Aug 7 birthday will make him 74. Mandolin master Chris Thile will become the new host of PHC this Fall, and he's only 35 years old. He's been playing music snice he was 5, and first appeared on this show when he was 15.
7-4: I wrote on the Rainbow Flag here, the story of the massacre on June 12 in Orlando at the Pulse nightclub, where it was Latin Night at this LGBT gathering place. 49 were killed and another 53 injured by Omar Mateen, who was killed by police. Most of the victims were Latinos. Elie Wiesel (9-30-28 to 7-2-16) died at 87 two days ago. He was a Romanian-born American Jewish writer, professor, activist, 1986 Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor. He wrote 57 books. His first book "Night" in 1960, is about his time in Nazi concentration camps. He helped create the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. I plan to read his first book and more, very soon.
7-6: It's our friend Rudy's birthday Jimmy's brother Gary's birthday was July 5. We went to our kids' place in Lakewood and had supper with them. I wrote about going up there, on Gretchen's mermaid body. After supper we all went to Lakewood Park, where Jimmy and I got to see the wonderful new Solstice Steps for the first time. You sit on this massive steps construction and watch the Sun go down over Lake Erie. I wrote on Eva's mermaid self about her going into sixth grade this Fall. Yesterday a black man named Alton Sterling was killed in Baton Rouge by 2 police, in front of a lot of witnesses, and it was also caught on cell video, which is how many murders of blacks are now documented. Alton Sterling was selling CDs outside a convenience store. In 2015, 1,152 people were killed by our own police. 30% of the victims were black, compared to our population being only 13% black. In 97% of these killings, there were no charges on the police. Today Eva and I are sewing. We're altering her new Adidas shirt, but this summer, this is the only sewing project we've done together, compared to the last 3 summers, when we did a lot of sewing in my studio. She has learned a lot, and I hope it will help her sew in her adult life, when and if she wants to sew.
7-7: Yesterday another black man was killed by police. Philando Castile, 32, was murdered during a routine traffic stop, as his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, held her cell phone up and live-streamed for 10.5 minutes, with Philando bleeding to death in his car seat, while the policeman held his gun over the limp body of the dying man. Millions of us watched this agonizing live record of his death. His girlfriend's 4-year-old daughter sat in the back seat of the car. No help was offered to anyone. The girlfriend was put into handcuffs, while they drove to the jail. She had offered no resistance.
7-9: Yesterday Micah Xavier Johnson murdered 5 police, and wounded 7 more and 2 civilians, in Dallas, during a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest of the murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile this week. The police killed Johnson with some kind of robotic bomb, in a parking lot near the protest. In Missouri, Tennessee, and Texas, other black men shot at police, too. Students in my online class are independently choosing to make drawings about the sadness and shock of this week's violence between blacks and police. I wrote about all of these events on the large Cradleboard on the right side of my painting, where I'd intended to write about Buffy Sainte-Marie's projects.
7-10: I'm doing research to choose the black poeple killed by police over the years, to draw their faces on the 10 potholders on the tree trunk in my painting. All this time I hadn't had a clue for what would be on those potholders, those rainbow circles. Now this tree feels to me like the Strange Fruit tree that Billie Holiday sang about, about the lynching of blacks for so long in this country. That song, "Strange Fruit" was written by Abel Meeropol, a NYC Jewish man. Billie sang it in 1939, and it was a very radical statement then, and it would still be, now.
7-11: On the face of the dark skinned boy on the Cradleboard, I wrote the lyrics to the song "Get Together," which was first sung by the Kingston Trio in 1964. "Love is but the song we sing. Fear's the way we die" is the first line of the song.
7-15: Yesterday, on Bastille Day in Nice, France, there was another mass murder. A guy in a huge, heavy truck stormed through a crowd enjoying the fireworks celebration, running down everyone in his path, and killed 84, wounding 202, with 50 of them left on life support. I wrote about this in the Sun face in the top right corner of this piece, in the rays. We're all in more and more shock anymore. Yesterday Supreme Court Justice Ruth Ginsburg apologized for derogatory remarks she'd made about Republican candidate for President, Donald Trump. Terry Gross is interviewing Brittainy Howard of the Alabama Shakes right now. I love that band and her! I'm reading the book "The Notorious RBG" 2015, by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik. I've also been on a big quest to switch cell phone providers, to Credo Mobile. I did it yesterday, and the new iPhones come Monday, the 18th. Theresa May is the new Prime Minister in the UK, as of July 13. David Cameron resigned and it seems like nobody else wanted the job, which will include having to figure out how to withdraw from the EU and all the complexities thereof. May is a Libra and is 59 now. And today, if you haven't had enough, a military coup took over in Turkey. Oh, and on July 3, over 300 were killed by a truck bomb in Baghdad, Iraq. The loss of Fallujah by ISOL was the reason for this mass killing. Sometimes you just plain hate hearing the news.
7-16: The coup in Turkey was defeated pretty fast by President Erdogan, who's been in power for 14 years. Yesterday Trump announced that Mike Pence, governor of Indiana, is his running mate. He's a 57 year old Tea Party guy. I hope Hillary picks Julian Castro as her running mate, but who knows? He's the Secretary of HUD and was the mayor of San Antonio, and he's 41. I finally wrote more about Buffy Sainte-Marie on the top of the big Cradleboard today. I'm going to heatset this painting again now, and start working on making the backing fabrics panel, to make this painting into a quilt.
7-26: making the backing panel.
7-28 and 29: I'm pinning the layers of backing, batting, and painting all together now. Still listening to Hillary Clinton's "Hard Choices" book, about her 4 years as Secretary of State, published in 2014. Started sewing this big piece, around the border, where it meets the painting. That's how I do all my quilts' construction anymore, for many years. I just have double-dipped straight pins at the border edge, but in the body of the quilt sandwich, where I'll next sew rows of quilting in loose and intuitive grids, getting the rows closer and closer together, I use boomerang safety pins to hold the layers together until I have enough sewing to take the pins out.
8-6: The machine quilting of the body of this big 60 x 90" piece, and the hand sewing around the really long border are now done. I usually do the hand sewing of that edge at night, when we finally go upstairs and turn on the television and watch some MSNBC or Colbert. Now I'm writing on the border, which gives me a lot more room to write about things. The Olympics began last night, and there's a cool 10-person Refugee Team of people from Syria, the Congo, South Sudan, and Ethiopia. The Green Party is having its convention in Houston, with their candidate being Jill Stein. I'm afraid she'll take votes away from Hillary, especially the angry Bernie supporters who haven't decided to help Hillary beat Trump. Jimmy's working all day today, to fix my bathroom sink. On the bottom of the quilt border, I wrote about the Republican Convention, June 18 to 21. It was so weird. Trump sounded like Hitler, giving his acceptance speech, promising over and over to make Germany, I mean America, great again, after listing all the terrible situations our country is in now. He's a real piece!
8-7: Artist Spencer Tunick created a living art installation for the Republican Convention in Cleveland on July 16, across from the Convention center, in an open lot: of 100 nude women, each holding up a huge round mirror, reflecting women's energy back to the convention. Sadly this piece was done on the Saturday morning, two days before the convention began, but it happened and was well documented - only it was ignored by local Cleveland news, for some odd reason. I found out about it because one of my students, Theresa D. Polley-Shellcroft made a drawing about it. Luckily, Tunick posted a video and some nice panoramic views of the women, who proudly showed their bodies of all colors, shapes, and sizes. See the video. On the right side of the border of this piece, I wrote about a drawing I'd made this week, about the black women who ran the Democratic Convention this year: US Rep-OH, Marcia Fudge, Rev Leah Daughtry, and News Commentator Donna Brazile were in charge of the convention, and Mayor of Baltimore, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake gavelled the convention to order. This convention was held in Philadelphia, July 25-28. In my drawing on paper, about these women, I drew the civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer looking down on them, giving the convention her blessing. She fought all her life for voting rights for black people in the United States.
8-9 and 10: I used my airpen to add some final details to this painting, including adding some third and fourth eyes to some of the portraits, where there was room for these extra, spiritual eyes! I drew some roses on some cheeks, especially on Gretchen, Eva, and me. I wrote the last line of the song "The Universal Soldier" on Buffy S-M's guitar, along with a little bit of info about that biggest hit of hers, that launched her into fame. I sewed the casings for the back of the piece. I used a big fat acrylic paint marker to make the label on the back of the piece, right on the backing fabrics themselves. I chose to put Peace Cozy #68 on my daughter Gretchen, as a gift to her. I always wait until the whole piece is pretty much done, to figure out where the Peace Cozy (a small square of cloth with a hollow-letter Peace Symbol drawn on it) goes on the new piece. It has to go somewhere meaningful, where some Peace will come in handy.
8-15: The day I finished this piece. I wrote in the bottom right corner of the painting, where I'd left a little room for final thoughts. It was Libby, our dog's sixth birthday! Yursa Mardini, an 18 year old Syrian swimmer, on the Olympics Refugee Team, is there in Rio de Janeiro, competing in Swimming. Last August-September, she and her sister Sarah took 25 days to get to Berlin from their bombed-out home in Damascus, Syria (this is the 5th year of the tragic Syrian Civil War.) When the small boat they and 18 others were on, was only a half hour into crossing the Aegean Sea from Turkey, the boat motor died, and the very overloaded boat began taking on water. Yursa, Sarah, and two men jumped into the cold sea water and swam, pushing the dinghy for 3.5 hours, to the island of Lesbos off the coast of Greece. From Greece, they mostly walked to Berlin, to a refugee camp, where their father, a professional swimming coach, was able to get them into a swimming club. Yursa was noticed by a coach, who started training her for the 2020 Olynpics in Tokyo. Then they heard about the search for athletes for the new Refugee Team for this year's Olympics in Rio, and Yursa qualified. She is there now! My last comment on this piece was about a poll finding that Donald Trump is very, very unpopular with Millennials, who are now 16 to 36 years old. Many of them had become interested in politics by the very left wing Sen. Bernie Sanders, but were having a hard time embracing the more centrist Hillary Clinton. Apparently, most now realize that if they don't vote, or if they vote for a third party candidate, they will only be helping Trump gain votes for the Presidency. Most are now in Hillary's camp. Whew!! And Hillary had to go more left of center, in order to bring all us Bernie supporters into her camp.
I forgot to ever say that all through making this piece, Cradleboard, every time I turned around, I was doing another heat setting, with one gigantic heat set at the end. You need to wear a serious respirator and run an exhaust fan, when you heat set fabric paints. And I do!! Or you can heat set outside, upwind from the stuff coming out from under your iron. Even if you can't smell any fumes at all when you heat set, you still need to wear a respirator, if you're inside, as who knows what crud is coming off that paint, when it goes from being wash-out-able to being permanent. And of course, I wear a respirator when I do my airbrush painting!
8-16: I did a big photoshoot and edited pix all the next day.
8-17 to 20: I worked on this statement and put it up, with many detail photos, here on my website. In the back of my head, I'm trying to decide what to do next: whether to try to finish a small Kitchen Tarot piece I painted this April in Florida, at Focus on Fiber Florida Style, at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, or to start a new, larger KT piece from scratch! So we'll see in the next few days, because I know now that I'm happiest when I always have a Kitchen Tarot art quilt going on, in my studio no matter how busy I am with other things, like my online drawing class, or a Turtle Art Camp here at my house, or a class I'm teaching somewhere else.
You can view my album about this piece in progress, on Facebook, And there'll soon be another album there, of it as a finished piece.
Many thanks for actually reading all this way! There are a lot of detail shots below here, so keep scrolling down!
If you want to take a Lucky Drawing online class with me, please look on my Susan Shie Turtle Moon Studios facebook page. I teach 4-week sessions with 2 week breaks in between them. Most of my students consider my class to be like taking a yoga class: You just keep going with the group.
If you are interested in studying with me in person, please check out my Turtle Art Camps, which I teach here at my home and studios, as well as my online drawing classes, my private art lessons in my home, and the classes that I teach around the US and sometimes in other countries, as all are listed on the main page of my website, Turtle Moon Studios
If you want to have me come teach at your place, phone or text me at 330-317-2167. I love to "teach out."
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 Turtle Art Camp page, to show what's going on at this biosphere-like art experience. The emphasis in this adult students' art camp is on drawing and painting, whether you choose to work on cloth or paper, or both, or even on stretched canvas. And you don't even have to try my airpen and airbrush, or my sewing techniques, if you don't want to. You can draw and paint all week! If you want to study my personal painting and quilting processes, which I've taught consistently here, I have a full lesson plan for the week. So you can go by that plan or do more of your own thing, with my guidance. 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. See my 2016 TAC schedule on the main page ot Turtle Moon, along with a link to my current online Lucky Drawing class enrollment info.
Many thanks, Lucky / Susan, in Wooster, Ohio. 8-20-16. Now please enjoy all the detail images of this piece, below:
Turtle Moon Studios: Outsider Art
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Susan Shie
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