The Questionnaire: Terry Jarrard-Dimond

The Questionnaire is meant to be a lighter version of a bio, a little more revealing in some respects and personal without all the facts bogging it down. I supply the questions and the respondents supply the answers. Either one or both of us supply the images.


Note: After my last post about spacing, the Blogger God came after me. This post has been a nightmare to control for spacing and type size. I apologize if it has a strange look here and there. It is not intentional and totally out of my control.

             Terry Jarrard-Dimond            

What is your favorite color?

Red! I feel an actual vibration from some shades of red.

Image caption: "Passion," hand-dyed cotton, machine pieced and quilted, 62"H x 71"W

What is your favorite word?

I have a friend who uses Magnificent a lot and that always tickles me. I think my word may be Wonderful! I've never thought of that before.

What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?

I love to be with creative people. I have been in workshops where I could feel the creativity in the air and knew I was working at a high level based on that extra energy.




What turns you off?

 I am turned off by people who are too aggressive or engage in what I call "big talk". This kind of behavior makes me want to get as far away from the person as possible.I




What profession other than artist would you most like to be?

If I were not an artist I'd love to be a musician. I don't have any musical talent but you can always dream. I think it would be an excellent experience to interact with someone else by playing music together.



  

Image caption: "Seek Shelter," hand-dyed cotton, machine pieced and quilted, 17"H x 17"

What is your favorite book or movie?

My favorite book is "The Queen Must Die" by William Longgood. The book reveals the secrets of bee culture and how it might be viewed if their culture was applied to people. Men.....you best hope that never happens.

Who is your favorite musician, musical group or style of music?

I have enjoyed jazz since I was a teenager. Recently I have been listening to some more experimental music but still related to jazz. Groups such as Praful, The Karminsky Experience and Tipsy. The world wide web has made is much easier to find groups like these.





Find more artists like The Karminsky Experience Inc. at Myspace Music



What do you most value in your friends?

Warmth and dependability. I love people who are involved in their own lives but still have room for others.



Name three artists whose work has influenced your own or whose work you most relate to.

Eva Hesse, Tom Dimond and Nancy Crow. I have always admired the exploration of concepts and materials by Eva Hesse and the bravery she showed by making the work. Tom Dimond is my husband and it has been very inspiring to watch him work with ideas he has pursued for many years. Nancy Crow inspired me to find my voice with fabric through her work and her example

Eva Hesse: Untitled (Seven Poles), Set of 7 pieces, resin and fibre-glass, polyethylene, aluminium wire, 272 x 240 cm. I enjoy the lumpiness of these forms, which for me refers to the physical movements she made when she wrapped the poles. I just saw this work in person as it is part of the permanent collection at the Musee National D'Art Moderne, Centre de Creation Industrielle in Paris.

Tom Dimond: "Yellow Circles," monoprint, 24" H x 20" W. This piece is in our personal collection and I hope it remains so. It is a monoprint Tom did at Blacksnake Press in Greenville, SC. It is quiet and serene and emits a soft glow. I look at it every day. My eyes go to it every time I enter the room where it hangs.

Constructions #58 © Nancy Crow. 100 percent cotton fabrics, hand dyed by Nancy Crow. Cut and machine-pieced improvisionally by Nancy Crow. Hand quilted by Marla Hattabaugh with pattern denoted by Nancy Crow.

I have always loved this piece by Nancy Crow as it is so deceptively complex. There are very subtle color shifts going on, especially in the lightest columns, which are a delight to discover. One additional reason I selected this piece is that I have not only seen it in person but assisted in hanging it at Nancy's barn a few years ago for a group of her students. Because there are so many pieces of fabric requiring many seams, the piece is very heavy.

Name an artist whose work you admire but which may be unlike yours.

I am currently enamored with the painting of Gerhard Richter. I love the thickness of his painted surfaces and the smeary colors. I can just feel the weight of the amount of paint he uses. Dye on fabric is very different.

A work by Gerhard Richter showing his "smeary" colors

A work by Terry inspired by Richter

Another Richter-inspired work

And yet another

What is your idea of earthly happiness?

Having my family with me. Being healthy. Having lots of time to work in my studio and not having to go grocery shopping.




More Work by Terry Jarrard-Dimond

"Forest Floor," constructed from hand-dyed cotton fabric, free cut, machine pieced and quilted, 78.25" x 78.25". This piece is currently included in the exhibition "Color Improvisations" in Stuttgart, Germany.

"Alone Together"

"She Came Undone," hand-dyed cotton, pieced and quilted, 49"H x 45"W

"Barn Dance," hand-dyed cotton, machine pieced and quilted, 85"H x 82"W

You can see more of Terry's work at www.terryjarrarddimond.com

and follow her blog at studio24-7.blogspot.com

(Note that Terry will be teaching classes this fall and spring. Get details about classes on her blog.)

Just Thinkin'

Like all the rest of the 241 people signed up to attend the Fourth Annual Encaustic Conference at Montserrat College of Art, I am getting ready to immerse myself in all things encaustic. Part of that readiness for me is preparing my talk about art blogging - The Why, How and Who of Art Blogging. So I'm thinking even more than usual about blogging.

I am preparing my talk not in Power Point (dumb-dumb bullets) but in the form of a blog. So after my presentation on June 16th, I'll link to that blog on this one and you can see the results of my extraordinary concentration.

Meanwhile, I'm thinkin' about:

Finding me a patron like Christian Boltanski did. You've probably read about his show "No Man's Land", which is not a feminist separatist colony, but an exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory consisting of a huge mound of recycled clothing and a 5-story crane that continually picks up and deposits bites of clothes from the piles. A soundtrack of a human heartbeat accompanies the action. Boltanski means the work to refer to the futility of trying to hold onto anything in life and the impossibility of ascertaining the meaning of life itself.

I'm sure the piece is impressive because of its enormous scale and the repetitive motion and sound, but what most interested me in the review was the paragraph on page 2 that described the deal Boltanski has with an art collector and professional gambler named David Walsh. This uber-patron has agreed to pay Boltanski $2500 per month FOR LIFE to permit a video camera in his studio to document his "working life." Truly Art in the Studio, the video footage will eventually be transmitted 24/7 from a museum in Tasmania that Walsh plans to open in 2011. The gamble for Walsh is that Boltanski will die soon and reduce the price of the artwork, whereas Boltanski is banking on his life continuing. “Of course,” Mr. Walsh added, referring to the value of the work, “It would be absolutely great if he died in his studio. But I don’t think it’s ethical to organize it.” (quote from the linked NYT review). Such a deal!



Hoping my brain's not turning to mush the more I surf:
From the C-Monster blog, a report from Wired magazine by Nicholas Carr headed "The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains" about how online reading and hypertext linking are affecting the human brain. It seems that online reading makes us read faster, more shallowly and with less retention than reading a text. Is it because we are distracted by the embedded hyperlinks or because we're thinking about the next blog or website we're going to visit or is the boss looking over our shoulder? This is a pretty interesting article that also talks about so-called "working memory" versus long-term memory.

My cognitive load is shattering

Working memory (also referred to as "cognitive load") is used as a scratch pad for holding onto information until it can be stored more permanently. But, like a computer's temporary storage for copied and pasted material (whose name I can't recall due to a flaw in my long-term memory), items in the working memory only stay there until they are transferred or replaced by something new. When we are distracted, the working memory is unable to retain the information and transfer it into permanent storage where we can draw on it for use in deep thoughts of a complex nature. (Something beyond what the Kardashians are up to this week.)

So when we skip around through all those links or multi-task, we are dropping our cognitive load - sort of like Boltanski's piles of clothes. No wonder I feel like my brain is a sieve sometimes; it is!

    
Having my brain turned to mush by trying to decipher artspeak:
From Sharon Butler's Two Coats of Paint blog (see how many blogs I'm reading!), an item about Gerhard Richter being pissed off about being by-passed for the 2011 Venice Biennale in favor of a performance artist named Christoph Schlingensief. Curator Suzanne Gaensheimer says that she chose Schlingensief (now there's a mouthful of names) because he "challenges both the content and the form of decidedness while transgressing borders." Excuse me, but WTF is that supposed to mean? Why it means, "I view his work as a contribution to discussions about the deterritorialization of the arts and to questions regarding the social relevance of art," she says. So is all art going to be on Facebook?, I ask. Are we going to deterritorialize and social network it into nothingness?, I ask.

Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting)," 2009, oil on canvas, 84cm x 84cm

I know, I know, I'm a dinosaur who thinks painting and sculpture are far more important than (at least most) performance and video. That stuff is all so impermanent and fleeting - far too internettish and not a permanent load for my cognizance the way a Richter is.

Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting), 1994