Epiphanies of the past week…

Dear Creative Adventurers,

This week I was listening to Antrese Wood podcast The Savvy Painter: Exploring the Language of Paining, with Maggie Siner. (November 15, 2018) Maggie Siner talked about every stroke of the brush expresses how the artist feels. So if you are bored your brush work expresses this. I have often wondered if hand writing might express people feelings. Never had I considered brush work, thus entire bodies of work expressing an artist’s feelings. Leading one to wonder if a picture a collector finds appealing is actually the energy the artist expressed not just with the images they show, but the brush strokes. A point to contemplate. Have you run across such materials? Books? Classes? Experiences with your own work? I am going to revisit this subject in later posts when I have found more information on this topic.

Sincerely,

Emily Froemel

www.edgeatmirage.com

Weekend Pursuits…

Dear Creative Adventurers,

This weekend was really about unplugging. Napping and getting household stuff out of the way so we can have Thanksgiving next Saturday. I worked a bit on my latest kitchen towel. I have officially reached boredom with this project. I have five more centimeters that are just going to have to be finished one line at a time…

We have a huge tree in our garden. The poor thing has never had a prune. As my mother has a story of me making a Japanese maple a bonsai. I am a bit leery of trying out pruning. There is also the factor that I do not know the pruning rules for living in snow. So I have spoken to gardeners. As soon as they learn that little tree looms over our two story house they run the other direction. The one thing that is very clear is it must be done in fall and we must find a gardener in May. So our tree goes unpruned one more year. We have been putting off raking leaves. This weekend it was a must do. So far the fall winds have not picked up. I told Andi it has to happen this weekend or our neighbors will hate us as our leaves will blow into their raked gardens. Eight bags later we are pretty much done.

This morning we woke up to this…

I don’t think we will be having fall winds just winter ones…

Sincerely,

Emily Froemel

www.edgeatmirage.com

In the Studio…

Dear Creative Adventurers,

Here is what is happening in the studio. I am enjoying putting washes down and seeing where the color goes. Then making shapes into objects. Some of them do not have enough color on them, like the water lilies. Some of them have too much paint on them the orange flower painting. I am trying to un-paint light places into them. There is every possibility I am trying to save a picture that may not work. I feel something with this one. The end result may mean a dead picture. I am counting whatever I learn from playing with the colors there is material for the following pictures.

My husband does not enjoy the flower experiment. He prefers the single objects that pop. Flowers are a challenge for me. I like to fill my brush and put lots of color on the paper. Flowers require a delicate process of more water than paint. Sometimes I hit the balance sometimes like the orange flowers I commit too quickly. This feels like a skill I need to master to go on to the next step… What is the next step? Therein lies the magic, I will know when I pass into the mist make a happy mistake and then I will be off on that adventure.

The most important part about this process is practicing so I can make those mistakes which teach me the next process. Some days I take two steps forwards, others three steps back. The part I have had to learn is getting over my perfectionism and embracing the mistakes. Can you relate? Please share…

Sincerely,

Emily Froemel

www.edgeatmirage.com

Epiphanies of the past week…

Dear Creative Adventurers,

Last week I ran a challenge to sketch something small and fast every day. I did do it once…sigh… The good news is I based the sketch on a painting I am working on. We were always drilled on sketching what we would commit to paint. In my attempt at putting spontaneity back into my painting practice I threw this idea out. I feel like this painting is going places…something was definitely missing. I was amazed while sketching I realized I was missing a dragon fly. So cool a practice pays off so spectacularly. So from here on out when I get hung up on a painting I will try this again… Underneath is the fast sketch of my painting:

Sincerely,

Emily Froemel

www.edgeatmirage.com

Weekend Pursuits…

Dear Creative Adventurers,

The last week things went topsy turvey with family and the excitement of the election. I contemplated writing all my posts on the weekend. Then I decided rest recover and begin on Monday. On Monday I was away from my computer I wrote myself a post as an e-mail.  The e-mail never arrived…

So Tuesday I re-write and update the one for today…

This last weekend I finished Louis’ hat. Yeah! Unfortunately the sizing came out big. Today I tried boiling the hat to see if alpaca will shrink to size. At present waiting for the hat to dry…

When we moved here I searched high and low for a cool post box. Finally I landed on these charming mosaic posts made in Australia. I sat down with my father in law who designed the inside like a bird house. I brought his birdhouse home and tiled the post box. Every year a few tiles pull up due to weather. So this weekend I spent time gluing tiles down and preparing the house to be winterized. This year three layers of lacquer to see if the house will winter more gracefully…

Pictures need adding...

 Sincerely,

Emily Froemel

www.edgeatmirage.com

Thoughts from the studio…

Dear Creative Adventurers,

Years ago I was reading through some artists blogs. They were counting their strokes as a marker of a good painting. I tried to wrap my head around how this might be equal to a good painting. When I looked at their pictures I could feel their toil of counting all those strokes. I found them to be flat. As if they were painting by number and measured strokes. I wanted to ask if they held a counter in their hand as they stroked their canvas? Did they just count for 30 seconds and multiply by the time they painted?

Today I was painting water lilies from memory. I got so excited as I began the shadowing process of the lily pads as they sunk into the water. Water for me is hard. So much fun when the water colors lend a hand and spread out in the right directions. I had this aha moment. I think this is what the artists were trying to express by counting their strokes. There is this moment in every painting where you put a stroke down and the picture pops! Before this moment the picture is paper and shadowy colors. After the objects in the picture have become dimensional. Most of the time I know which of the objects in the painting will pop. Sometimes a stroke changes how the objects will be seen. This stroke is what I paint for.

So if I were to count my paint strokes I would most likely tell you how many to this stroke and how many after. I have decidedly struck this out of my repertoire. Counting my strokes seems counter intuitive to being creative.

Emily Froemel

edgeatmirage.com

Weekend Pursuits…

Dear Creative Adventurers,

This weekend I tried to get a hat finished for my son. Alas about half way through. Last winters hat was always a tad large and the beanie was falling apart. So this year I found a pattern that I thought might prove a bit challenging. Turns out if one can knit and purl in patterns of five the pattern is fairly easy to follow. Here is the free pattern…https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/christians-hat. Below are my efforts…

Emily Froemel

edgeatmirage.com

Challenges…

Dear Creative Adventurers,´

I thought on Fridays I could stop review and begin a challenge for next week spanning from Monday through Friday. I will start with a small challenge of five minutes each day minimum working on a piece. I will post progress here, Instagram and Face Book. Hashtag #edgeatmirage1wkchallenge#

Emily Frömel
edgeatmirage.com

Studio Organization

Dear Creative Adventurers,

I live outside of Munich in a little house with my family of four. I have my own studio space for the first time here in this house. Well mostly I can call the space mine. My children tend to come in and out if they have projects. I was noticing my work was not flowing as fast as I hoped. I began observing my habits. As my space is mostly mine and on occasions others come through I had pictures stacked in safe out of the way places from falling water color glasses. I often could not find a picture that I had begun. Months later it would shift up in my pile or show up in my travel bag. This simply could not continue as such. So I headed down to the intrepid Swedish designer shop, IKEA. Picked up these short shelves designed to display pictures on the wall. I hung them high so I could see them, work on larger pieces underneath and they are for the most part out of harms way…

Emily Froemel
edgeatmirage.com

Happy Halloween!

Dear Creative Adventurers,

Today my creative pursuits got diverted by face painting…

Emily Froemel

edgeatmirage.com

How do you share your art around you?

Blog 30.10.2018

Dear Creative Adventurers,

Do you enjoy experiencing art with others? I do.

I went to a concert at my daughter’s new lovely school. She performed on the xylophone. This school puts special value on performing so they made sure all the children who were in her class performed. Early intervention on stage fright, I think. I was part of a small parental audience. Behind me sat another American family. Their four year old was having trouble sitting as four year olds do. I handed her my purse sketchbook and one of my fairly child proof fountain pens. Her mother admonished her to ONLY use one page. I turned around and said please as many as you can fill. She spent the next fifteen minutes very busy. Fortunately she kept her marks to the paper, always a bit of a worry with our smaller population.

 

Yesterday, while sitting in a café waiting for my winter tires to be put on at the dealership I pulled out my sketchbook. From the child’s shapes I made my own lines and characters. This was a very enjoyable hour. Now maybe at the next concert I can pass back the sketch book and she can add to my marks… This is a game I started to play when I was in the University and required to carry around a sketch book. Sometimes it’s so much more fun to be inspired by others…

Weekend creative pursuits…

Dear Creative Adventurers,

On the weekend I try to put the paint brush down and explore other creative avenues. As the months get cold I have turned my creative downtime efforts to knitting.

I read a book recently where one of the characters knit kitchen towels. At first I was like hmmm… Then one day while mopping up a spill. I was quite undone by how ineffective my kitchen towel was working. Here in Germany a proper kitchen towel is cotton and thin. While pretty not very effective in mopping spills. Then there is the fact that I cannot find cream and dark gray to match my kitchen to save my life. I got to thinking…then researching…

I have knit my first cotton kitchen cream and dark gray towel. The pattern looks like the screen of a white and black TV fuzz. While not exactly beautiful, quite functional. I have tried to knit these before but ran out of interest before I had it started. I definitely needed a pattern with a little challenge to keep me going. So this is the pattern I found https://www.pinterest.de/pin/291537775874519172/. I began and then discovered my thread was too thin. I still have not figured out where on the package the thickness is. As it was half the thickness I required I put both colors together. Making a colored patterned dishcloth at that point seemed beyond my abilities. Here are the results of my labors:

I am currently on towel number two. Since I have managed to make one kitchen towel that can mop spills up why not another? Only something with a two color pattern. I have never knitted a two color pattern before. https://www.purlsoho.com/create/2013/06/16/whits-knits-slip-stitch-dishtowels/. As I only had two colors I went with the navy and white, only cream and dark gray. While trying the pattern out it was clear I was not understanding some of the pattern. I turned to Fiber Spider on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4W0j8kjJjtk He did a brilliant job at showing how to pull one color up into the next row. I could have read that pattern forever and just never got it. Seeing Fiber Spider pull the underneath stitch to the next row made complete sense.  I nearly completed the second one here it is pictured:

I have found knitting particularly helpful to keeping my nerves in tact. If I spend too much time listening to German I get lost in the tangle of German grammar. When I knit my fingers are busy, my mind is free to explore the conundrum to what I am hearing. Ask my husband, last night we watched a German Krimi. I kept checking if I was understanding everything properly. If you want to know about how to build a rocket engine he can explain it to the very last spark plug in either language. Keeping track if the trainer slept with the daughter and the mother he is board. So the joke is I ask then explain and he says yes you are right… Or straightens out where my translation became my fantasy. LOL

What do you do that fills your creativity and calms your soul?

Sincerely,

Emily Frömel

Creative Adventurers...

Dear Creative Adventurers,

I have been pondering how to write real on this blog since I began publishing five years ago. There were to many I’s and me’s. I would like to document my art for your interest. I have been exploring how to feed the creative well for a very long time. So I think while I am documenting my art I will also explore our creative processes. So come along with me while we find the edge of this mirage…called creativity.

I have been scared, terrified really, of writing this blog. Seems odd, yes? These are what the devils on my shoulder say… “Who you are today is not who you will be tomorrow.” “All those writing lessons and you can still write an incredible run on sentence.” As you might imagine this is just the start.

I have had some health scares this last year forcing me to slow down and consider the devils on my shoulder. To make a long story short I am shelving them. Tomorrow we may both be new people. Here the evolution will be documented. Yes on occasion I get excited and forget a good English sentence has only approximately 12 words. Please feel free to drop me a line when you find an extended word train. I will do my best to edit and catch most of them.

I started taking a course online for keeping me real about meditating. This is an exercise to help me de-stress, stay on track with eating well and sleep. One of the things required to document our process is write daily. Just something short observing how meditation has helped that day. I have found I can do this. So why not something quick for a blog as well?

So here I am. Writing on the process my art is taking and creative adventures. Please feel free to explore the edge of the creative mirage with me...

Sincerely,

Emily Frömel