Tibetan Dolls and Brain Changes on a New Blog

My dear friends, Kristin Blancke and Franco Pizzi (who organize tours of India, Nepal, Tibet, and Bhutan for Italian, French, and Belgian travelers through their company Viaggi in Asia), have a new blog (in Italian). They’re off to a good start with two fascinating posts:

Brains Can Change

The first speaks of the intriguing field of neuroplasticity. It turns out that brain development does not end with childhood! (This assertion is actually an essential underpinning for Buddhist practice — that through our efforts we can change our own minds. Exciting new research demonstrates that those mind changes actually show up in our brains.) Scientists at the University of Wisconsin have used sophisticated brain scanning equipment (fMRI and EEG) to examine the effects on brain activity of meditation practice and the cultivation of emotional states, such as compassion. Here’s a link to a one-hour Dan Rather report on brain plasticity covering the University of Wisconsin research and others, and including an interview with the Dalai Lama. Two books have been written by participants in the experiment. The Joy of Living: Unlocking the Secret & Science of Happiness by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche is excellent and life-affirming — a joy to read! I have not yet read Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill by Matthieu Ricard but I’m looking forward to doing so soon.

Dolls 4 Tibet

With their second post, Franco and Kristin introduce us to Mona, a German textile artist living in Dharamsala. Motivated by her search for healthy and interesting toys for her own daughter, Mona applied her creative talents to designing endearing cloth dolls. Each doll is dressed in the traditional costume of a Tibetan region and is identified with a name and a story. They’re made of natural fibers and are produced by a small team of Tibetan women working under Mona’s direction. Take a look at the photos and videos here. (If you follow the links to YouTube, click on “watch in high-quality” for smooth viewing. The videos are in English after the first introduction.)

Where did the time go?

It’s been entirely too long since I posted. Two long holiday weekends in Italy. Lots of quilting experiments, using Dijanne Cevaal’s Seventy-Two Ways Not to Stipple or Meander for inspiration.

Working on my nomad girl’s face. Here she is so far:

Finishing and shipping a couple of small Dzogchen pieces. Preparing posters and postcards for my vendor’s stall at the Dalai Lama’s teachings in Nottingham at the end of the month. Visiting a quilting group in Alessandria, Italy…

Tomorrow, I’ll meet a Tibetan art professor in Bologna to brainstorm research and study possibilities.

No place for stepfamilies in the Italian language

In my ongoing efforts to expand my skills, I’ve been taking a machine quilting class from Ramona Conconi in Melide (Lugano), Switzerland. And I also did a Saturday workshop in serigraphy (silkscreen printing) with her. This quilt is a result of both lessons.

The print is from a photo of my stepdaughter which I took on our trip to Paris last spring. The quilt will be a gift for her 20th birthday this week. I hope she won’t mind my beginner’s mis-stitching.

As many of you know, I live in Italy and my husband and stepchildren are Italian. Stepmom is often a challenging role wherever it’s played but, in Italy, it offers an additional, unexpected challenge: there’s no name for the relationship! Nor for stepchild, stepson, stepdaughter, stepsister/brother, etc. Of course, they have fairy tales in Italy, but the words used there have retained their negative connotation. No one would use them in the real world unless they intended to insult. Divorce has only been legitimized recently in Italy, and the church makes great effort to keep it marginalized, even if more than half the marriages in Milan end in divorce — or some approximation of it. The social denial of its existence results in a lack of vocabulary to talk about the new relationships that follow from it.

If I want to talk about my stepdaughter in Italian, I have to say the equivalent of ‘my husband’s daughter’, as if I myself have no relationship with her. My stepson is ‘my husband’s son’. And for them, I’m their ‘father’s wife’, even if we’ve been family for more than seven years. This has an emotional impact that is not pleasant. It denies the unique relationship that exists between us. It alienates us from one another in the public eye. (Not when we talk to each other, since we don’t use labels in direct speech, but still…) It’s even stranger when I hear my parents referred to as their nonni (grandparents), my siblings as their zii (aunt and uncle), my nephews and nieces as their cugini (cousins). Of course, all of these labels make sense because I’m their —– … moglie di papà (dad’s wife). Rather disconcerting…

Anyway, here’s a detail of the quilting for my stepfiglia (my invented anglo-italian word for stepdaughter that no one understands but who cares?):

I’m such a novice with the sewing machine, but I love the possibilities it offers. The speed and potential for spontaneity are appealing to me now. I finished this quilt in three days. Can’t do that with a thangka… and I wouldn’t want to.

But that reminds me of an encounter I had several years ago in Dharamsala:

I met a Tibetan man from Amdo who makes the glued form of applique thangka, with facial features and contour lines drawn on afterwards. Some of these works are very finely produced while others are remarkably shoddy. I never saw this man’s work but I remember his challenge to me.

“I can make a Buddha in three days!” he quipped. “How long does it take you?”

I quietly smiled and said, “A bit longer.”

I’m proud of the work I do on my six-month Buddhas and I think the differences are clear to the viewer. But I have to admit a part of me has always wished that I too could see a completed result in three days! And now I have. Not a Buddha, perhaps, but a portrait of a lovely sentient being who probably has some buddha nature too.

More Beauty in Milan

Here are some more images of happened-upon beauty in Milan:

You will have noticed by now that there are no shots of the Duomo or the Galleria or other famous sites in my collection. That’s because the point of this exercise is not to visit beauty but to see beauty here, wherever I am. So I walk around my neighborhood or, in the case of this last group, carry the camera while I go out grocery shopping and to pick up a mailing tube and some sticky labels. The photos may not be perfectly clear, since I took them while holding the camera with one hand, balancing the tube and my groceries in the other, trying to keep my purse from sliding off my shoulder.

I’ve learned a couple of tricks to uncovering beauty in this less-than-beautiful city:

1. Look up - though the ground floors tend to be rather nondescript, barred, and covered in graffiti, there are lovely balconies on the third and fourth floors.
2. Look narrow (i.e., at the details) - the general urban fabric of Milan is not so well woven, but a few fine threads sparkle.

An interesting note: Even walking around with a camera, I guess I don’t look like a tourist. Three people asked me for directions while I was out. And I actually knew how to point them to the right place!

Tibetan Appliqué on Squidoo

I spent the last ten days writing an article about the history and cultural context of the thangkas I make. I’ve posted it on my new Squidoo page and hope that you’ll visit and read it. A warning: it’s quite long and you’re in no way obligated to finish it! But I’d love to hear your feedback and comments.

So little research has been done on the textile forms of thangkas — embroidered, woven, and appliqué. People often write me asking for resources for their studies, and I give them the same few articles by Newark Museum Curator, Valrae Reynolds and one by historian of Tibetan art, Michael Henss. There are a lot of books about Tibetan painting, but the appliqué tradition usually only gets a paragraph, if that, and a couple of images.

It’s confusing to try to figure out exactly how the form evolved in the interplay of Tibetan painting and religious authority with Chinese (and Mongolian and Tangut) politico-economic power and silk textile production. I’ve done my best to summarize the history, the cultural context, the social structures, and the techniques of Tibetan fabric thangkas — drawing on the limited writings I’ve found as well as my own experience “in the field.” I hope it’s useful. I hope more research will be done. I hope you’ll correct my mistakes. And I look forward to learning more and sharing it with you.

I also have a rather trivial technical question for any of you web gurus out there… or anyone else who has an opinion:

Appliqué in English comes from the French and is spelled with an accent mark over the final “e”. But when English-speaking people type a search term in Google (or wherever else they may type it), I’m guessing they normally do it without the accent marks. There are no accented letters on US keyboards, and the special-character keyboard shortcuts may or may not work in your browser. Actually, as far as I can tell, Google doesn’t make a distinction as to whether I enter “applique” like most Americans would or “appliqué” like most French people or sticklers for spelling would. Since I like to spell things correctly, I use the accent mark in most of my writing. But since I want to be sure anyone who searches for Tibetan applique will find me, I throw in some instances without the accent mark. Does it matter?

Creating Buddhas Trailer

Click on the picture below to play the trailer of the documentary Isadora Leidenfrost and I have been working on.

Mixed Media Portraits at Joggles

I just finished an online course with Alma Stoller through Joggles.com. It was great fun and allowed me to be spontaneous in a way the slow and precise nature of my usual artwork doesn’t allow. Here’s the portrait I created:

Thanks Alma for a liberating experience!

Look for beauty

Last week, my husband and I visited an open-air sculpture museum and a city whose streets and squares serve as exhibition spaces for contemporary sculpture. Both were in the rolling countryside of Emilia-Romagna, near Bologna. Last summer, by chance, we had discovered the marvelous Giardino di Daniel Spoerri in Seggiano, Tuscany and, just recently, I found a new book called Arte Open Air: Guida ai Parchi d’Arte Contemporanea in Italia which speaks (in Italian) of several similar places around Italy. The way these places situate sculpture in nature is truly magical and has a remarkable and profound effect on me. The interrelationship between art and nature causes me to appreciate both in new ways. I’ve never been especially fond of sculpture, but as I related to these objects dynamically, they came to life, changing their appearance and altering their environment as I moved about them, viewing them from different directions, different distances, with different backdrops. They also brought me to life as I became aware of a wonderful awake quality in my looking. Especially in the city of sculpture, Fanano, not knowing where the next piece might appear, I walked watchfully, eager to discover whatever was there.

I’m trying to remember that awake quality and bring it to bear in my daily life. An eagerness to discover whatever is there.

I haven’t been very consistent in taking my “beauty in Milan” photos since the idea occurred to me on that first happy hint-of-spring day, but I did take one the next day and a few today. And the feeling of wakefulness is similar to that in the sculpture parks. It takes some effort to get started, and some very deliberate looking, but the result is very satisfying. Here are a few pics of some beauty I found in my neighborhood:

To-Do and Not-to-Do Lists

Lisa Call is a textile artist whose blog is filled with the inspiring work she does on herself, as well as on her fabrics. Her recent post, titled Not To Do List, inspired me to clarify my own priorities in life in a new way.

Of course, both my physical desktop and my computer desktop are frequently strewn with to-do lists of varying time frames — things I need to do today or this week, people to call, projects and goals for moving my career forward, action plans for increasing my effectiveness and satisfaction, for managing the household and tackling the daily chores… But a general life-priority to-do list, paired with a similar not-to-do list seems to offer a good framework for staying on course, in general, and true to my most enduring intentions. I consider these lists to be works in process, to be refined over time, but here’s a start:

Not-to-do List

Don’t

• Get caught in negative thinking spirals.
• Cast blame (verbally or in thought).
• Pull out my eyebrows and eyelashes or pick and bite my fingers and nails.
• Berate myself for pulling out my eyebrows and eyelashes or picking and biting my fingers and nails.
• Struggle against the situation I find myself in.
• Avoid doing things I fear, if everything else in me says to do it.
• Compare, when it serves as justification for complaining.
• Be reactive.

To-do List

Do

• Interrupt negative thinking.
• Favor presence over thinking.
• Be a receptive listener — create a space in which others communicate openly.
• Love, nurture, and cultivate my environment.
• Meditate every day.
• Exercise regularly.
• Reach out to people.
• Write.
• Create beauty.
• Relax.
• Open to my current experience.
• Be spontaneous.
• Go for walks.
• Be responsive.

Update on the dyeing experiments

Oh, this blogging business is complicated. Once you decide to start and think that you’re just going to have to be disciplined and creative about generating posts, you discover that there are endless things to learn about search engine placement and that all the research you did when you designed your website YEARS ago is now virtually obsolete… There’s no end to the learning process! And as you try to tackle it all, you realize it’s been over a week since you posted and that you never followed up on that dye experiment…

So here goes:

I got some responses from Dharma Trading and Jacquard products and it seems the warp or weft threads of my fabric may be shrinking, causing the surface puckering. They suggest that I try stretching the fabric and painting it with the dye, then steam fixing it. The problem (besides the fact that it’s a more complicated process and I’ll have to rig up a steamer) is that the same puckering may occur during steaming. We’ll see.

Actually, on closer examination, it seems to me that the warp threads are actually breaking down or unraveling somehow. They’re springy in my dyed pieces, whereas they were crisp and snappy in the undyed fabric. The dyed cloth is almost stretchy in the warp direction. I’m still working on this and trying to understand, so any input would be appreciated!

Okay, back to reading about keywords and metatags and thinking about redesigning my website now.

Bye all.