Feathers are perfect subjects for thread. Birds too, but there are many kinds of feathers, defined as always by the angle of the zigzag stitch.
I’ve been working on two birds this couple of weeks: a green heron and a goldfinch.
Goldfinch
It starts with a drawing. This is a drawing on Totally Stable. It goes on the back of the sandwich so it’s my pattern.
The head and underbody of the bid are soft overall feathers. These can be made with a back and forth zigzag stitch done side to side. Layer after layer of thread blends the colors.
Underbelly and leg Head top section of wings
The upper part of the wing follows the arc of the feather, shaded with the side to side zigzag The feathers are lined with gold and soft yellow to define them.
Pinions
The pinion feather stitching is made with angled stitches down the feather with a curved arc at the end.
The streak
These feathers have a streak of yellow defining the quill.
Quills do
All in all the stitching separates the kinds of feathers. And creates a bird made strictly of thread and stitchery.
Commissions force us to do many things. I don’t do realism well. Realism is why God made cameras. Art isn’t limited to realism. But there are people who love it. And need it. Truth to be told, l’m not good at it.
So my birds have purple and blue in them, and so do my frogs. It’s part shading, part colors building.
Dragonflies and roses detail l
I tend to make roses on spirals. It’s the way petals unfold.
Sometimes I let the tails spiral out. I like their motion. I’m told it’s not very realistic.
I have used rubbing plates for a more real rose. This is oil paint stick on hand dyed fabric. Outlined in metallic threads.
Lately I’ve tried roses with the points trimmed away or tucked in.
Will they be realistic enough? That remains to be seen. But they are probably as real as I can get.
Since Don gave me my studio, I’m there pretty much every day. This year, I had my last knee surgery in mid February and was back in the studio in April.
Working in a studio is sort of like gardening. You start something. Sometimes it simply grows on it’s own. Sometimes it grows in the dark. Sometimes you struggle with it. Sometimes it almost does itself.
But it’s a process. The art is a by product of learning and growth for every artist. The business of an artist is building their ability. The art happens by the way.
But this has been a good year, for a year when a fourth of it was spent recovering. I made over 50 quilts this year. I welcomed a new sewing machine. I learned some new tech. And I got to watch many of you stretch in your arts and lives as well. I am so grateful.
These aren’t all this year’s quilts. But here’s the highlights.
972 Shelter from the Storm971 Waterlily Pond
Whether I count it in work, learning, or new tools, it’s been a year I’m grateful for.
And I’m very grateful to Don, who is at the studio every day with me, ready when I need something lifted, or photoed, or looked at. He is the heart of my studio and I would be lost without him. He’s my heart too.
I hope this year brought you new tools. A new passion. Some time to make it happen. People who help you. And the grace to work with it, to work it out. Because if we don’t engage with our art, like a love, like a child like a pet, you can lose it.
Thank you all for the support you’ve given me. I hope I’ve supported you. We are all artists together, on our paths.
Two dimensional art is by nature static. It’s a flat image on a wall. So how do we make the image move? How do we make a two dimensional thing take flight?
There are several good tricks. Movement can be crafted in several small design decisions that convince our eye that the picture is in movement. This quilt I’ve been working on has a number of these features.
I was delighted when I saw a picture of a caterpillar perched on a fiddle head fern. I imagined a mob of caterpillars on the move, looking for lunch.
I started this quilt with some good movement in the fern heads themselves.
The Stems thrust upwards and the curved fern heads move at a spiral angle. Anything headed at an angle as if it’s falling is already in motion.
embroidery backembroidery front
I embroidered a number of caterpillars so I’d have some choices in color and shapes
I placed them several times, looking for the right flow.
This is the one I liked best. I went off the edge with my butterflies.
I like the flow, but it also works because of the interactions of the caterpillars. The angles of the bugs also suggest movement.
Finally I supplied lunch. It doesn’t really add that much to the movement, but the leaves with bites out of them makes me smile.
So to add movement to your art:
Put things at an angle
Go off the edge
Place elements where they interact together.
Put things into a path through the quilt.
The purpose of that movement is to send the eye through the journey of the visual path, to experience each part of the quilt through movement across it.
Some people spend a lot of time designing their art. They sketch. They plan. They build models. I’m so impressed. They can even tell you what it means.
I wish I could do that. I just can’t. It seems all of my art comes from random things, started but not finished, that I found later and made or put more random things on them. It sounds like a dreadfully chaotic way to make art. It is. It’s hellish for commissions. But it’s how I am. And if you want me to tell you what it’s about, you’ll need to wait several years until I get that straightened out. I am not in control of my art. All I can do is attend to it regularly, and do what it demands.
What is central to the process is the time stuff sticks around, on a photo wall before I commit to the next step. Is it right? Does it need to move three inches left? I’ve ruined many pieces by bulling through and finishing them without taking time to really look at them first.
I’m not helpless about this. And I’m not unskilled.It’s just the way it is. I suspect I’m not alone.
Art is a living thing, and a piece of art will tell you what it wants. And in the end, you didn’t so much make it as assist in it’s birth.
I laid out the background for this almost a year ago. Decided it needed white flowers on a pond edge. Didn’t know what else it needed. Lost it. Found it again. Lost it once more and then it resurfaced in the last cleaning. Somewhere in there I’d drawn a swimming frog in a batch of frogs. He didn’t get embroidered with the other batch, and I found him and thought, I really ought to finish him but I didn’t have a place to put him.
Then the piece of fabric surfaced. So I embroidered the frog, put in some water and rocks and a moon. Looked at it a while. HATED the moon. That almost never happens. But it just didn’t work.
When I was embroidering a batch of bugs and did three luna moths. One left over one just fluttered on to my quilt where the unfortunate moon was. White flowers and more water later it was done.
Did it take me two weeks? Or the two years to have the pieces fall together? Even I don’t know. I do know that fallow part of the process where you just stare at it, or lose it, or find it in a pile is an important part of the process, not to be missed or dissed.
I don’t know how to teach this kind of design. I can only show it in process. But I believe in it. I believe art grows like life, randomly, without sense, half by purpose but largely by accident, as it is. I can only stand back and watch.
As I’ve been reviewing this years work I discovered that things had gone definitely froggy. How does that happen? I really can’t say.
But I do think it’s important to pay attention to the images that haunt us. Frogs and toads are images of movement for me. But they also catch me on the corner of my self image. I tend to see myself as a frog.
972 Shelter from the Storm
Not green really. Just awkward. A bit off. Always a bit unsure of myself.
971 Waterlily Pond
But never without a sense of joy. I love frogs and find them often just part of the imagery I need to explore. And it’s just as well.
I’ve been working on The Garth for a while now. A garth is an open air garden in a church. This one is my memory of Capestrano where there are roses and lizards throughout the garden.
I’ve gotten the lizard embroidered, used a rubbed piece of fabric that looks like mosaic. A couple of weeks ago, I added in roses.
It’s all well and good to plop an image in the center of a piece. But If you’re trying to build a visual path for the eye to travel, that won’t work. The eye needs a pathway. It needs to be led through the piece.
How do we do that? It helps that the lizard is off center. The roses are a start. But it helps that start to use small elements to build a path for the eye through your quilt.
I made a batch of butterflies to interview. I really couldn’t tell which ones were going to do what I wanted. I tried the green ones, the orange ones, and an orange one with small stones.
The pathway between the orange butterflies and the stones move this in a path I like alot.
I drew the path so you can see it. The lizard and the roses are very pretty, but the butterflies and stones build the path so your eye can take it all in.
I’m fascinated with the concept of the visual path, and I keep working towards building them within my works. It depends not only on the major imagery, but on the small details that place us on the path.
This is another modified blog from almost ten years ago. It’s still an interesting story. And an interesting way to think about how we design our art.
It’ss almost impossible to talk about our art without talking about the art that comes before us. Before we talk about design, it’s worth saying that there are many different design aesthetics. It’s not that a design is good or bad necessarily. It’s designed to be part of the statement. The notions that fuel our art choices are a statement loud and clear past subject matter and past our technical handling of fabric and thread.
As quilters, a lot of us have backed into art by accident. We started with squares and one day found ourselves with an odd quilt that somehow was an art quilt. Maybe it had too much orange in it or you found yourself like me, embroidering frogs and bugs into the borders. There’s a tender soft spot in most quilter’s artistic persona. The part that said that you should have gone to art school or studied water color. So our first designs spring out of a personal view. Later, as we become more facile, we realize that the choices in design are a huge statement all their own.
My first artistic love was the impressionists. I grew up near Chicago, and there was a pilgrimage every year to the Art Institute. I strolled through the halls looking for paintings like old friends. Since they were my first real introduction to art, they felt bland to me. Safe. Something soft and soothing out of my childhood.You know it’s become mainstream when you see it on a birthday cake. This astonishing cake is by Megpi, a pastry chef in Silver Lake. California. You can see her work if you follow the link to Flickr.
impressionist cake, a photo by megpi on Flickr Since you can buy Van Gogh’s work on umbrellas and coffee cups, it’s easy to miss the point that he was a raving revolutionary in his time. His work nauseated the current critics, got him hospitalized, was refused for all the important salon shows, and the subject of ridicule in the press. Time and familiarity have made him a lionized artist, but that was not who he was when he began.
I was immediately in love when I discovered Japanese prints. It was a while before I realized why. The Impressionists took much of their new artistic vision from the prints out of Japan. The first prints that came out of Japan hugely influenced them as beginning artists.
In contrast, this is a painting called Nocturne from around 1825 by Turner. Turner would have represented the design aesthetics from the early 19th century, that Van Gogh and the other impressionists and Post Expressionists blew out of the water.
Early 19th Century Western art was about permanence. It honored stability. It was a world of people in their proper places, forever and ever. It used Greek and Roman scenes and portraits of nobility as an way of saying we had an eternal understanding of a changeless world.
Japanese art was about the moment. It moved. It created a path for the eye to follow. It went off the page. The impressionists saw it, fell in love with the concept and incorporated it into the designing of their art. The movement is called Japanisme. It was in my humble opinion, the beginning of modern art. And changed us all.
Myself, I cherish movement. I plot my quilts to travel from one side to another, taking the eye on a journey across the surface. The visual path and vertical path quilts I’ve been exploring are all about the traveling eye.
The decisions behind design are the most telling. Without a word they say so much about what we create, what we find important, and what we value. The way we structure our art is at least half the story we have to tell.
I’ve spent the last year rebuilding my body of work. When I married Don, I had perhaps maybe 40-50 quilts in house depending on how old the quilts are you are showing. For the first three years my occupation here was mostly in figuring out how to live around another human being. Then I had knees redone. Three actually. You can need to have to have a knee done twice. Don gave me his house as a studio a year and a half ago. All of a sudden I’m working again on a daily basis. It’s good for me. It’s good for my heart and soul.
So I’ve been experimenting for my own pleasure, but I’ve also been working towards having enough work to show. I don’t intend to teach on the road again, but I do love showing my work. And since it doesn’t necessarily fit into the standard quilt show, I’ve always sought out sole artist shows.
That means having a full body of work. Your standard one person quilt show in a small gallery is probably 12-20 quilts depending on the size of the gallery and the size of the quilts.
Five years of not producing work doesn’t sound like the quilts would disappear. But they did. Some sold. Some got given. We went from around 50 to 15.
The size of an art quilt is about the space it fills. If it’s in a large gallery or show, it needs to be the size of God’s underwear. If it’s for a small space, it needs to fill the space appropriately to make itself known. It should at either size, change the energy of the space by it’s presence.
So this last year and a half has been a building up of work. I love doing the little pieces. They’re light and fun and full of experimentation. I’ve always loved them.
Lady Mantis 2
Floral Arrangement 25
Very Brave Little Bugs
I’ve always loved doing the visual paths. They’re elongated universes designed to take your eye through a trip They make a huge statement without being huge and they fill a space in a unique way.
Lily Pond
Mother Toad
Stag Party 2
But big quilts. Big quilts take for ever. Big quilts are always a huge risk. They are hard , hard work. And they’re made to be show stoppers. As in, if you want a show, be prepared to make a mountain of these. Or your sort of stopped.
They usually take 9 months to a year, although I don’t work on them constantly. If they are disappointing when you finish, it’s a huge loss of time and energy.
I’ve never found that I could take a small design and blow it up large. The space fills in differently if you do that, and it’s hard to make something that’s interesting both as close up and at a distance.
Obviously it’s a matter of balance. Most people have a size in their head that is comfortable, and that’s as big or small as they go. But it’s worth working past your comfort.
Does size matter? Yes and no. Size makes impact. It makes a statement. It makes legend work.
But small work, intricate work makes a small space resonate with it’s energy. It’s worth doing it all, as best as you can. The stretch either way is good for you.
