Photographed this afternoon: the work in progress on a sewing body (in blur, just because), with most likely this fall’s last batch of my favorite lilies.
Tag Archives: spider lily
Creative Process, Late July, 2017.
Above: post steam set (the high-heat, steam-not-water procedure is outsourced to craftsmen in Tokyo who mostly work with kimono clients), red dye now bright and alive. Approx.120 things I secretly feared would go wrong, one of which being overdoing the dye, meaning way too many dye particles sitting upon fabric grain, from which a major trouble certainly results, a mistake I once made in 2003, did not happen. Dyed surface now stable, time for me to relax.
Below: a macro shot of a spider lily petal, the muse for the above piece I’ve been working on, photographed as I discovered its magic back in Fall 2014.
Things seldom make sense for the first 98 percent of the process.
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Above: Dream Lily (Nine), one of the very first photos I took of spider lily petals – a visual memo I made back in late 2012, of ideas for the dress series to emerge.
Below: fast forward several years. Spider Lily Red – Flare 1 (the series and its first piece), acid dye on silk, process, detail, photographed on 15th of July, a day after I stopped painting on the piece – there was nothing more to add.
Looking back to where it began before stepping into the remaining 2 percent, crossing my fingers.
Abstraction in Nature, March 12, 2017.
We live on a Planet of Jewels.
A macro shot of a spider lily petal, and,
the first of the “Spider Lily Red” dresses, close detail of the front panel, almost there, how it looked this afternoon.
Last Edited: December 06, 2020.
Honey indeed.
(Jizou: a Buddhist rock statue, its humble presence usually found on roadside, in a corner of a temple, as a requiem for departed, an aid for suffering.)
Best jizous I’ve ever seen live in my neighborhood. Their stone-made presence weighs of the spirit. I sit and ponder on their shrine’s faded wooden verandah. So lucky, ain’t I. Then I glance over, their expression exudes. Surely honey, indeed, and that is quite so with everybody. Lucky, everyone, in ways no one else can know.
Carved, most probably by a monk on pilgrimage, he won it within himself, to let it speak through the simplest of lines. You ought to know simple is hard, creativity brutal, what you got inside, turns up regardless. That’s quite alright they say, they are the best jizous I’ve ever seen.
Red of the lilies around them somehow look the deepest. Someone who knew, once stood here. I think of the monk, the time he lived long since past, chiseling in bold, determined strikes, what he conveyed a timeless truth. Walking back to my car I find, in a bouquet of my favorite lilies, a glimpse of my own lucky bouncing in my arms.
All photos were taken on last Sunday of September 2016, at a location, best remain undisclosed, where I regularly raise a cup to our individual luckies.
Return of the Muse.
On September 4th, noctilucas visited the bay I frequent. Just a few days after New Moon. I hid from LED street lights and watched for hours, the waves, broke with neon blue contours.
One other time I saw them, it was on a ripple-less shore, on one of the tiny islands of Seto. I was very young, three, four, maybe five. The glowing blue edge of the warm, still water, the way I felt that night. I remember, as if, I was alone with the sea.
In progress: “Spider Lily Red”, acid dye on silk. The top is the Lily, the inspiration, back to blossom for the next couple of weeks.
Nature as an Inspiration – February 09, 2016
The actual petal is about 3cm long. Straight-edged at start, it then progressively blossoms into a free style wavy form and tangles with other ones until they become a crazy mass of flaming red. Photographed in early Autumn 2014 as a research for a series of dyed dresses named Spider Lily Red.
Artist at Work – September 28, 2015
Lily. I want to be you.
Nature as an Inspiration – September 09, 2015
Budding in Red, Brighter.
Just as salmons are swimming up the stream, my 5 swatches they had returned from the specialists, with dye particles steam set, settled between fabric grains. (What swatches? Refer to the previous post please.)
The photo above is one of the swatches – number 2, the first try at the “line drawing” – getting a quick bath in dye-fixing liquid.
In the following video I included a short footage of me washing off the excess dye in special solution, tap water and magic portion that prevents dye from staining the rest of the fabric.
Also in the video is the sound of salmons inching up the shallows of the river – the same river as I frequented to rendezvous with spider lilies just a month ago – if you listen carefully you’d hear them making splashes.
Like the lilies, they are here earlier this year. Well what’s up Nature may I ask, but then again, what do I know to question their timings.
As for the dyed lilies on the swatches, the color – red – came out brighter post-setting, sorta suitable for the budding of the project.
ALERT:
This video contains flickering lights.
(Sunlight reflections on stream surface.)
The project in question is called “Spider Lily Red”, this link will take you to the posts I’ve written since it’s early stages. Thank you for your visit, check back again soon.
