Keeping an Art Journal Part 2: Ideas and Prompts
Keeping an art journal has become an integral part of my weaving practice this past year. (Read more about why here.)
I’ve found it helpful to use a simple structure for each piece I choose to journal about. These are the questions I ask myself and record about significant weavings:
Date
Materials: If I can, I include a sample, which in my case would be a scrap of yarn taped to the page.
Design Evolution: How the idea for the piece came to me, what inspired it, and how the original idea evolved in the course of making.
Lessons Learned: Almost every weaving teaches me something. Whether it be a lesson about how a certain yarn behaves, design problem solving, or color selection, it’s all worth recording. It will be so valuable to look back five years from now and be able to see when I discovered a new warp string I like, or how I worked through the problem of weaving a good half-circle.
Ideas: When the hands are busy, the mind tends to wander. I find that in the midst of one weaving, I’ll have a flood of ideas for others. Not only is it interesting to see what arises while weaving a certain piece, but the art journal can become an idea bank in the future if a time comes where I feel tapped out of inspiration.
While Weaving: This may be my favorite part. It puts the project at hand into a larger context of both my personal life, and what is happening in the world. A particular example that stands out occurred this summer. I was weaving a massive shag rug commission, which was incredibly time-consuming. I hand-cut thrifted materials into feathers, which I then affixed to warp strings in rya knots. I happened to be working on this labor intensive piece at the same time a wildfire was raging through the forest near my family’s cabin, blowing closer every day. On top of that, the Delta variant was newly spreading, Afghanistan was overrun by the Taliban, and my rheumatoid arthritis was badly flaring. This was a time of high anxiety and a racing mind, an interesting contrast to the plodding pace of the piece I had on the loom, which also happened to be fiery red and orange colors.
Thankfully, the fire eventually was contained (but not before burning several thousand acres of forest and damaging many structures in its path) and did not reach our cabin, but I’ll always think of it in concert with that weaving, which I called the Wildfire Rug.
An art journal is a personal record. It enables us to look back and recognize how we have changed, grown, and expanded as artists and humans.
What other journal prompts would you add?
