Establishing a Style

Henri Matisse once said: "I found myself ... by looking over my earlier works ...
There I found something that was always the same and which, at first glance, I
thought to be monotonous repetition. It was the mark of my personality, which
appeared the same no matter what different states of mind I happened to have
passed through."

I never thought I had a style until my crit group said something to the effect that they know my work anywhere. This was a surprise because *I* think each piece is so different and unique from the others- I am always trying new techniques and my fabric choices are, shall we say, 'untraditional'. But that alone is enough to establish a recognisable style. Some people do the same thing over and over, some use only a limited color pallette or always follow a particular inner guiding voice that dictates a loose grid fomat or an off-the-edges thrust or hysterical blindness to craftsmanship rules. But Matisse says it so cleanly above.

I have spent the entire day working on my new piece and it's coming together pretty nicely. Tomorrow I will have to start removing elements of it from the wall and get some areas sewn together before I lose it. I am using pinks on this one, it just happened when my brain was turned off and I was up on the fourth rung of the ladder in the pink section and whammo, an old African fabric put it all together for me. I am certainly using up a lot of remnants on this one too- small pieces that have been floating around for years. My 'rule' is that I must use the entire piece whan I find these, or throw the remainders away. I am old and need to get going on production before someone else has to get rid of my 12' wall o' cloth!

I think I have also knocked the placard issue too for the show- I have cut out the title letters in a font my art director hates, and now am trying to figure out how to do the smaller text, hopefully finding a way to glue inkjet text right to the board without the backing paper showing. Cutting stencils is just too time consuming for a dumb job like this. If I ONLY had a Gocco...