the abstraction continues

My fiber pieces continue to evolve. I now find it nearly impossible to do realism in either fiber or my other medium, watercolor. I just don't see the point of doing something that could be duplicated, or improved, by capturing with a camera. And they become less refined--it's more about the texture than the properness.

Take this piece for an example. I was experimenting with putting different types of silk together, and then dyeing them so that the color was independent of the sheen. For some reason, I liked it with the seams showing when it was done--something that wouldn't have occurred to me a couple of years ago. Silk is a bugger to deal with, and the quilting of it (carelessly I admit) left some puckers here and there--but I like them. The raw edges are fraying and exciting.

But the orange needed something. I first added the curved blue piece, but that wasn't quite enough. Up close you can see that I kind of replicated the shape, although enlarged and more freeform, in blue stitching above the actual blue piece of silk. Overall, the piece began to come together.

One of my mentors in art told me that art should look good from three distances--something like 20 feet, 3 feet, and 1 foot. For the 1 foot part of this, before quilting, I used the Shiva paintsticks again, rubbed over the same rubber stamp I talked about in an earlier post. The marks are subtle, but they add to the surface interest.

Now about the abstraction. So far I haven't mentioned the name of this piece, because it will reveal part of what I was thinking about--it's called 'blue bird'. Before that, has you recognized the swatch of blue as a bird shape? Does the name influence your view of the piece? I can't separate the two when looking at it, but then I created it so I find it hard to be totally objective.

And that lack of objectivity is part of my view of abstraction--I can't separate my inspiration from the piece, no matter if the inspiration is foremost in my brain as I begin a piece, or if it only reveals itself as the piece progresses. Does that matter? Probably not. But the process of coming from realism to abstraction has made me look at other abstract art with a different eye--the education of doing rather than just looking.