Lowell Quilt Festival

If you enjoy pattern, color, and art, come to the Lowell Quilt Festival.

My studio mate Gwen Stith has curated a remarkable show, Fabrication of Imagination, at the ALL gallery, 246 Market Street, opposite the National Park Visitor Center in the Market Mills.Take a car or the train. In under an hour you'll be in Lowell.

Once there, you can walk or ride the free jitney to several venues, including Quiltscapes at the Whistler Gallery, A Sense of Balance at the Boot Cotton Mills, and What Followed Me Home at the American Textile History Museum.

Meet the artists at the ALL Gallery and at the Whistler on Saturday, August 8, from 2-4.

Downtown Lowell is beautiful, walkable, full of history. Stop in at VanGough's Gear for art supplies. Take a canal or trolley tour. Grab a bite at one of the many cafes. Come home with new ideas. Buy art. Spend a day in Lowell.

Next commission

While the weather continues cool, I got back up to my studio (finally) and worked on the wedding commission.It's working name is Deep Water but that doesn't get to the sense of reflection, stillness, and shelter the image has for me. Suggestions?

I will stitch it down tomorrow and "frame" it in fabric. Here are swatches trying out for the edges:

supporting local artists

Yesterday, on one of the most beautiful days New England had to offer, my husband and I drove to the Fuller Craft Museum to hear Chungie Lee speak about her work. Her installation, My Cup Overflows, is breathtaking. Huge in scale, intimate in feeling. Her lecture covered her own installations as well as student work from classes she'd taught. Head-spinning, to contemplate that focus and creativitiy.

I am back in the saddle after a hiatus. The flu in the summer - what a combination. Last week my mom fell and broke her hip. She lives seven hours from me, so I have been trying to help from a distance. Very frustrating.

Friday my husband and I will see Don White at the Amazing Things Art Center in Framingham .If you don't know who he is, click on here for his song, "Be Sixteen with Me." He is a poet. He's also very funny. He'll share the stage with the Christine Lavin. Laughter, feeling, and money spent on other artists. A perfect date.

Radiance

It is a glorious New England morning. The light amazes. This is the view from my back porch. The windows are my little studio.

"If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day."
— E.B. White

I will head up to the studio (almost impenetrable again, with backlog and backwash from 3 weeks away.) Put on my hard hat and dig the place out.
I have been reading about Jennifer Bartlett, who I have admired ever since I stumbled on her book "In The Garden." Her work, abstract to realistic, was supported by grids and repetition. And energy, and nerve. Of her decision to work on pre-manufactured square enamel plates: "I was looking for a way to get work done without the burden of having to do anything good...I thought that if I could just eliminate everything I hated doing, like stretching canvas, then I'd be able to work a lot more."

Sun and Tall Ships in Boston

The sun returned, after nearly a month gone. We spent Saturday walking the harbor walk and admiring the Tall Ships:
Everyone seemed stunned. The weather was as startlingly beautiful as the views:
We walked back through Haymarket where we bought quantities of fruit and veggies for a few dollars. Only in Boston I think can you walk from the harbor, past an in-ground swimming pool (complete with lawn and deck chairs) for the super rich, to an open air market where vendors still hawk produce as if it were the 1800s.

There and back again

I traveled by train last week to Chicago.
Tiny private "roomette" - you better like your traveling companion. Cars filled with people, all shapes, sizes, ages. Tiny babies, Amish farmers, Asian-Americans, dark-skinned women in batiks, even an Amish toddler.

The country rolled past. Fields, rain, swollen rivers, cities. We read, talked, read some more. I loved it. Slow travel. We forget what it's like to look, to watch, to just be for a while. The trip took about 24 hours, door-to-door.

Coming back, I had a cold and took the plane. No romance there. I sketched a man waiting.
Since then I've been sleeping under my cat, sketching, and getting well - a vacation of sorts, if you look at it the right way.

Meet the artist

detail of Brain Storm model 2008-9

Nadya Volicer transforms industry castoffs into art. If you live near the Decordova Museum you can come watch her install her piece, "Brainstorm" now until July 15.