Judy's Journal

I love this time of year, the colours and the gentle light
My husband makes piles of wood around our property
I've been working on this three-blanket-wide piece in my town studio, but I brought it home last month 
It was going so slowly there.  Now I work on in the evenings during our TV time.
The piece is inspired by the grandeur of the cambrian shield and the sliced-open immense rocks that line the northern highways that we drive through.  Time is made visible in those rock cuts.  
I'm covering the three blankets with a horizontal strata of plant-dyed fabrics, stitched with wool yarns.
The work is about touch and vulnerability and eternity. 

The reverse side is also beautiful I think.

Time is a material.   I add my loving pokes and pets and strokes and pulls and mends.  The fabric becomes energized, powerful.

"The clock indicates the moment - but what does eternity indicate? "  Walt Whitman

Egg, Rochelle  Rubinstein, block printed, painted and carved wood panel

I respond to this carved wood panel by Rochelle Rubenstein.   It reminds me of Paterson Ewen's work with routered plywood, cosmic imagery.
The rugged material, uneasy horizontals, and jaggedy marks tip me into some unnameable emotion.
Her marks are made by taking away material.  She subtracts.  This is opposite to stitch.  Stitch adds.

I saw Rochelle Rubenstein's piece  in  Momento Mori , the exhibition curated by Gareth Bate for the World of Threads festival from works that were fibre inspired, not fibre based.
Cohobate, Nicole Collins, wax, pigment, jute twine on canvas, on board

World of Threads also introduced me to the layered work of Nicole Collins.
She begins with a layer or two of wax and paint, which are then partially removed by scraping or melting, only to be reapplied slightly differently.
The show is up until November 25 at the gallery in Sheridan college of Art and Design, Oakville, Ontario..
I was inspired to research these two Toronto artists online.  A humbling exercise...there is so much..
 Holy Well , Rochelle Rubenstein
Humores, Nicole Collins, encaustic on canvas