"The Way You Do Anything…

… is the way you do everything”

I’ve heard this attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, but several minutes of googling finds no attributions at all – another urban legend?

I’m taking a quilting class from Heather Thomas – really, an Advanced Design class where our medium is contemporary art quilting. One major aspect of this class is working in a series, and I’ve chosen Gabrielle Roth’s Five Rhythms (flow, staccato, chaos, lyrical, stillness) as the theme of my series. I’ve done some noodling and doodling about flow, staccato and stillness, in turn. I experimented with some fabric painting – not really satisfied. I notice that I get stuck in this thinking about, possibilities stage because I’m afraid that what I implement either won’t live up to my vision, or won’t be successful in communicating the essence of the rhythm.

I thought twice about enrolling for this class as the start date was in the midst of all that was going on with my Mom, and don’t I have enough on my plate? Now I realize that this is the perfect class and now is the perfect time (of course!) because what working in a series is about is not necessarily conceptualizing and implementing five quilts that perfectly evoke each of the five rhythms, but committing to trying something that evokes flow or staccato or stillness, and then stepping back and assessing what works, what doesn’t work, what I would do differently, and then doing it again. So, this series of five rhythms quilts could have fifteen or twenty quilts. It’s about the journey of my development as an artist.

Likewise, the authentic body project is about this ongoing assessment of what does an authentic body mean to me, and what evokes that? What’s working and what’s not working?