Interview with Artist Lisa Call - The New Zealand Quilt Show Podcast

Lisa Call is a talented textile artist, teacher, life coach and businesswoman.  Born in Arizona in the United States and spending much of her recent life in Denver, Colorado, Lisa then packed up her belongings and moved to New Zealand in 2015 for a new adventure.

Lisa, a former software engineer, is a self-taught artist whose work has been exhibited and published widely and resides in public and private collections around the world.  Lisa’s award-winning textile paintings are abstract, using her rich hand dyed fabrics and intense machine stitching to create bold geometric works.  She cites her love of colour, repetition and pattern; geological forms and human-made structures such as fences and stone walls as her inspiration sources for her work.

Lisa will be teaching one of the five-day master classes at the NZ National Quilting Symposium in October 2017, the topic being ‘Working in a Series’. 

Structures #118 by Lisa Call

Lisa and I talk about how she took the leap from paid employment to being a full time artist and what that means in terms of making work, selling work and spending time in the studio.

We learn how Lisa came to be living in New Zealand and how that has impacted her art.  Lisa also gives us an insight into how the textile art scene differs between NZ and the US.

Lisa's textile paintings from her 2016 100 Days Project 

We discuss what coaching is, why Lisa became a coach and how she uses coaching skills to teach students to be artists rather than teaching them how to make art.

Lisa is next exhibiting her work at the 100 Days show at Tutere Gallery in Waikanae opening September 1st 2017.  This will be Lisa's 100 black and white textile paintings incorporating her explorations in mark making that she has been making for her 2017 100 Days Project.  

Lisa's first 50 textile paintings from her 2017 100 Days Project

Lisa's favourite studio tool is her Purple Thang.

And her favourite sounds to create to is Brandi Carlile and a little bit of Gin Wigmore.

The conversation with Lisa was in-depth and profound, she was incredibly generous with her knowledge and time.  I could have listened to her for at least another hour!  So grab a cup of tea and settle down and learn more about Lisa Call, Artist.

Here's where you can find out more about Lisa:

http://lisacall.com

http://www.makebigart.com

https://www.facebook.com/LisaCallFineArt/

https://www.instagram.com/lisacallfineart/

Thank you to everyone who supports this podcast and helps me tell the stories of our quiltmakers, artists and professionals.  If you would like to support me, head over to iTunes and leave a five star review, pop over to my podbean hosting site and leave a donation, or consider advertising your business by sponsoring an episode.  Email me at theslightlymadquiltlady@gmail.com  Cheers!

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For the love of books

I thought I'd share a few of the books that are gracing my bedside table at the moment.  

I've been searching for ways to capture light in my art and when I opened this book at my library I had to take it home.  Louis Comfort Tiffany - Masterpieces of Art, by Susie Hodge, describes the life and work of Louis Tiffany and then has pages and pages of images of his beautiful works in mainly stained glass.

I knew about Tiffany glass and lamps of course, but to see a whole collection of them in one book was eye-opening and inspiring.  If I can do just a little of what he does I'll be happy.

Te Hao Nui - The Great Catch.  Edited by Fiona McKergow and Kerry Taylor with photography by Michael Hall.   This is an intriguing book about the museum collection at Te Manawa, Palmerston North.  There are some delightful objects that have a history you'd never guess at.

And this pendant is just so beautiful.

This book was another in my search for light in my own work.  Light and Landscape, the New Zealand photographs of Andris Apse.  It is just glorious, page after page of wonderful photographs - sigh.  

Do you use books like these for inspiration?  

AMP Scholarship

So you know I want to study Art next year and I'm travelling down the road of applying at the moment.  Well, to help me get there, I've applied for an AMP Scholarship.  They are pretty amazing scholarships and I'd be extremely lucky to get one, but you don't get if you don't ask, right?

One of the scholarships is a people's choice award, which means voting.  You know what's coming next now don't you?!

Please click on this link and vote for me.  You might have to search for me.  My full name is Charlotte Scott.  I realise that it's hooked up through Facebook and you might have to register to vote - if you don't want to do that I understand.

But if you feel the urge, please do.  And share it with your friends and family and all your quilting buddies.  Go on - wouldn't it be neat for a quilter to be nationally recognised like that?

Fabric dyeing a colour transition and big news

These are what I've been doing in my spare time recently - my play time!  I've been wanting to try this for a while and even just doing two has taught me lots.

These were all fat quarterish sized squares of plain white fabric.  I soaked them in a soda ash solution then wrung them out and crammed them into small plastic pottles and poured just enough dye over them to be able to squeeze it through.  It's called low-water immersion dyeing and gives quite a mottled effect.

I thought I'd show you a page from my dye workbook.  It's where I keep notes of all my techniques and recipes and samples so if I want to replicate something again, I have a record of how I went about it.  I think it's really pretty looking!  However the purple and green remind me a little of my eyes....

Oh yes, the bump got better but the eyes got worse.  Kinda scary looking!  (No laughing, Cat!)  I had to go to work today and lots of explaining had to be done!  I told one friend my botox went wrong ;)

Now, on to my impending changes that I hinted at.  Two major happenings - I am applying to study Art next year.  I'm comparing a couple of different courses that I'm interested in, but I'm definitely applying and I'm really excited!

The other thing is that we are trying to buy a new house.  Except that it doesn't really qualify as a house, I reckon it's a dump.  Hubby is desperately trying to make me see it's good points.  That's part of the driveway in the pic above.  There is no way you could get down it without a four-wheel drive and I wouldn't be brave enough to drive it even then.  The pic is of the good part, the other parts I was holding on too tight!  The couple of good things about it is that it's closer to town and it's water-front with a jetty.  Can you tell I'm not as enthused about it as Hubby?  I guess I can see the potential, it's not every day that waterfront property comes along in such bad nick that we could afford it.  But the amount of work to whip it into shape is daunting!  Wish me luck!

Art on Sunday

I followed on from last weeks success with sketching for the kids and introduced them to my water-soluble coloured pencils and pastels.

It gave me at least half and hour of peaceful piecing in my studio.  They drew monsters - a squid for my girl and an evil starfish monster for the lad.  They found the transformation of colour and the blending magical when they applied the water.

In fact, I might have to pick up those pencils later and have a go myself!