You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'quilts' category.
A couple of weekends ago I went to Alicia Merrett’s 2 day Text on Fabric workshop in which I learned how to print on fabric using Thermofax screens and acrylic paints. I’ve been hearing about and seeing this technique for awhile now and frankly had thought it would be a lot more technical and complex than it actually is. A Thermofax screen is basically a stencil and quicker and cheaper to prepare than a silk screen. It can be used with acrylic & textile paints, discharge media or adhesives to use with foiling. I was impressed with the level of detail that can be achieved. There are a lot of ready-made screens about and Thermofax Screens based in the UK has a custom screen service. I have a little shopping list of a few screens to buy – feathers and the Chartre labyrinth AND I am going to have a couple of screens made with an alphabet font so that I can incorporate some of my writing and poetry into my fibre art.
Alicia had brought several screens to the class for us to practice with, along with some of her beautifully vibrant art quilts. Day 1 was spent printing and on the second day, most of us started working on a project. Alicia also showed us her fine line magic piecing technique.
The workshop took place at Cowslip Workshops near Launceston, Cornwall. At lunch on the second day, Alicia’s husband Steve joined us and told us about a very romantic book that they have just published. Darling Alicia chronicles their written exchange of love letters in 1966 and 1967 (between Argentina, where they met, and India) which culminated in a reunion in India and their now forty-plus years of marrriage. We talked about really living life and taking risks. Regrets are for those who never took the chance in the first place and a creative person can always make something new from their mistakes.
The food was excellent by the way – homemade, locally sourced and organic whenever possible. Lunch was butternut squash or parsnip soup, fresh bread, quiche, cheeses, coleslaw, beetroot salad and a greenleaf salad. We also had cake and/or scones and jam with afternoon tea, coffee, cappucino or hot chocolate. You can just go for the food at their cafe and they have a few special food events.
I just finished making a piece called Beannacht from some of the fabric I screenprinted. I used a brown and plum palette with highlights of gold in the fabric, stitch and printing.
Beannacht
Detail
and more detail
On the back, I attached a blessing written by one of my favourite writers, John O’Donohue, called Beannacht. I painted handmade paper with a wash of gold Stuart Gill fabric paint and printed the words onto it in brown ink.
Beannacht is a Gaelic word for blessing or benediction. Here are the words -
Beannacht
On the day
when the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble
May the clay dance
to balance you.
And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets into you.
May a flock of colours
indigo, red, green
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.
When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean blackens
beneath you
May there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.
- John O’Donohue
And here is the blessing read by John shortly before his death in 2008. Such beautiful, healing words and what a voice!
I made Beannacht for my friend and finished stitching the hanging sleeve on at work. At lunchtime, I took it outside to the copse to photograph it. I made a circle from some sticks and placed it in the middle. To let the land and the autumn and the now thin golden threads of light bless the piece.
Bonnie McCaffery has just released her latest vidcast, a tour around the 2008 Festival of Quilts Exhibit in Birmingham, England. If you weren’t lucky enough to be there, come have a look!
Another thing I did in Birmingham last weekend was go to the Festival of Quilts at the NEC. I met up with a couple of fibre friends and also met some new fibre/cyber friends that I’d met via my blog and the QA email digest.
It was a great show and I especially loved the contemporary art quilts made by some Northern European quilt artists. I like seeing other people’s work and how they apply techniques. I wish it were possible to get more of the essence of the meaning and inspiration behind the work, but it’s difficult in such a large venue.
I had a couple of quilts in the show too.
Manhattan Angel, 60″ x 28″
Detail
Ivory Fish, 39″ x 39″
Detail
I was really happy to have my quilts in the show and especially proud of Ivory Fish. I’ll tell the story about that one later on. There has been a lot of discussion recently on the QA email digest about entering juried shows, acceptance/ rejection of work and untangling critique/ feedback/validation of one’s work. I’m not too bothered at this point about competing and critique. I’m really focusing on what I want to say with my art work and don’t want to be led by entry deadlines or criteria. I’d also rather show my work in venues that take into account what is beneath the surface and will be looking into shows like Sacred Threads.
I met up with Bonnie McCaffery, a quilt teacher who also produces monthly vidcasts of quilters and quilt shows. She has the privilege of getting to hear about what is beneath the surface of a quilt, the meaning and inspiration. She told me about a few from the FoQ that will appear in her upcoming vidcasts, which I am looking forward to watching.
One thing I like about the FoQ is that there are small galleries in which an individual or group can show their work. Being an INFP, I get overstimulated by big crowds and lots of visual input, so it’s nice to go into the smaller galleries and chat to the makers. I also took a few breaks. Two years ago, there was a chillout room which is there no longer. However, I asked a nurse who was coming out of the Medical Centre there at the NEC if she knew of an alternative and she let me come in for a lie down. So I had forty winks and went back in feeling refreshed.
I shopped for some pretty trinkets, leather cord and suede ribbon to make some more stuff from.
I talked to a few people about how to put metallic text onto dark blue fabric and came away with some supplies to play around with and develop into my next art quilt. I practically haunted the Art Van Go stand whenever I wasn’t looking at quilts.
Finally a few snapshots I took outside of the NEC.
This little quilt is the sister piece to ‘Eloquent River’.
All of my memories, 12.5″ x 12.5″
It was inspired by this special place along the river.
I started the sketch in the river studio with Neocolor II crayons.
I decided to use fabric paints in addition to the wax crayons on this one, so did much of the rest of the painting in my indoor studio.
At first, I started to get hung up on “I don’t know how to paint, this won’t look like how it really is . . .” so I stopped and wrote and came up with this poem.
I remembered that it doesn’t really matter if it ‘looks like how it really is’, because
All of my memories
paint the river journey
like the fleeting
wild daffodils
and sunshadow tree trunks
falling across the water –
rippling tree reflections
guide the river home.
The river constantly changes from season to season and hour to hour, even in the same spot. My experience and memories of the river also change depending on about a million different things. If I want my artwork about the river to look exactly like how it ‘really’ is, I’ll take a photograph and leave it at that.
In the meantime, all of my memories and impressions will paint and shape the piece I am working on.
———————————–
Here’s the process I used to work the poem into the piece.
I had already decided the size of the finished piece and the placement of the design elements; the central painted image and the four squares. These were in relation to ‘Eloquent River’. I wrote the poem how I wanted it to flow onto the quilt.
Then I designed the poem on the computer, printed it out and reviewed it
I printed the poem onto handmade paper and painted it with fabric paint,
shredded the edges,
and finally glued the poem into place with acrylic gel medium mixed with paint.
Once I got the text into place on my background, I stitched the painting, which I had already started to thread sketch, onto the centre. I gradually added more paint to the text area as needed so it blended in better.
Detail
More detail
Together
Ver Sacrum means ‘holy spring’ or ’sacred spring’.
I had this quilt up in my studio, until about a week ago. Now that my studio is more or less set back up, I’ve turned the wall space into design/inspiration space.
Ver Sacrum took about 3-4 years to complete. It started out as tree reflections on the water and I was originally going to appliqué lily pads on the surface. Then they became wintertime bare trees and I added floating leaves and two moths.
Then I wrote a haiku and figured out how to write the words onto the border – first I tried stitching them and then settled on stenciling with Markel oil paint sticks.
‘Winter leaves gently floating, silently witness Spring’s return’
I wasn’t sure about the quilting until I took a trip to Vienna a couple of years ago and became inspired by the Viennese Secessionist artists, eg Gustav Klimt, Karl Moser, Otto Wagner. Ver Sacrum was the name of a major Austrian magazine of the Jugendstil period published from 1898 to 1903. The publication gained great influence on art production around 1900. The artistic layout was in the hands of the artists of the Vienna Secession and thus familiarized a broad readership with the works of individual artists who were playing an important role in the development of modern art.
Finally, two winters ago, we had a very long, very cold winter. Lots of frosty days. I was walking to the bus stop in February wondering if spring would ever come that year.
The wild daffodil and wild primrose shoots were just starting to come through.
Then, there amongst the trees, I could could feel a feminine presence that had not been there before. A beautiful, heavily pregnant nude woman standing with her eyes closed and cradling her belly. . . and I knew that spring had returned.
I modelled the woman after my friend Anna who was my work colleague at the time. She was about to go on maternity leave. As her pregnancy progressed, she became more and more dreamy and would sit with her hands on her belly, adrift in another place.
What I love about this quilt is that it took so long to complete and I was able to go with the process and put it to one side until the next step along the way became clear. It taught me about my creative process and I learned to dialogue with the artwork and be guided by the work.
I also love it’s subtlety. A person needs to be with the quilt and really look to see all that is there – the words on the border, the moths fluttering with the falling leaves, the plants twining up from the ground and finally the woman standing quietly amongst the trees.
I’ve not entered it into competition because the studio photograph doesn’t reveal many of these subtleties and because the part inside the border is so heavily quilted that the borders are very ripply. I’m considering re-quilting the borders with invisible thread and hoping it won’t detract too much from the text (and will flatten the quilt out) and writing my entry to explain there is a lot of detail that needs to be seen in person and giving it a go.
Marc Chagall is my favorite painter. I love his dreamy, romantic images and his vivid color palette which communicates happiness and optimism. His quirky goats, roosters and fishes. He started drawing and writing poetry when he was quite young. Against his parents wishes, he decided to pursue his passion to be an artist.
‘My art is an extravagant art, a flaming vermillion, a blue soul flooding over my paintings’
La Marie, 1950
There is a very good overview of Marc Chagall’s life at The Worldwide Art Gallery
In 1915 he married the great love of his life and soul-mate, Bella Rosenfeld. She was the constant subject in many of his paintings and his companion in life until her death in 1944.
The Birthday, 1915
The Woman and the Roses, 1929
The Lovers
In 2005 I was commissioned to make a very special art quilt to celebrate the 20th wedding anniversary of Bernard and Connie Kortick. I was given a completely free rein in the design and chose a Marc Chagall painting as my inspiration. I used Angelina fibres and organza for the rooster’s body and machine embroidered the couple embracing in his tail feathers. It turned out that Marc Chagall is one of Connie’s favorite artists and they have some of his prints in their home! Pretty amazing coincidence.
The Color of Love, 2005
On the back of the quilt, I wrote a quote by Chagall using Markal Oil Paint Sticks.
I’ve seen a collection of Chagalls drawings at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and few of his paintings in the Guggenheim in Manhattan. The last time I was in Paris I made a special visit to the Opéra Garnier to see the ceiling he had painted in 1964. The building itself is very beautiful, but Chagall’s ceiling moved me to tears.
Opéra Garnier celing
Opéra Garnier celing – detail
Some of my Chagall dreams are
- to see a major exhibition of his work (I’ll have to wait until one comes around again)
- to see his mosaic sculpture in Chicago and mosaic murals at the Met in New York City
- to visit the Chagall Museum in Nice
- to visit All Saint’s Church, Tudely, Kent which has a complete set of his stained glass windows
- to buy one of his lithographs the next time that I am in Amsterdam
PS Happy Valentine’s Day
