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The recovered piece continues to evolve. It has been hanging on my design wall off and on for the past few days, and it just didn't feel right. Maybe it's the image of a human figure I keep imposing on it. Maybe it's the technical difficulty of putting the pieces together. Maybe it's the top piece that I don't like as much as the other pieces.
So today I tried simplifying it to this:
It would be my intent to sew the pieces together so there would be no gaps as show in this snapshot. It has an oriental feel to it, and is much simpler and calmer than the previous variation.
So do I wait another week to see if this the right way? So sew it together and move on with my art? I vacillate even as I type this. Maybe tomorrow I'll decide....or put it off...
And of course this leaves me with three other pieces to play with. I really like the thin long strips that formed the arms...could they be stand alone pieces? I could see them hanging on a narrow wall...art for problem spaces...
Today is Blog Action Day. Bloggers around the world are taking one day to post on the same subject; this year it's 'environment.'
I was trained as a botanist. These days, the only real botany I do is as a volunteer for The Nature Conservancy at a preserve near my home (Kibbe Life Science Research Station, Warsaw, Illinois), helping to establish a small tall grass prairie and restoring oak woodlands (a globally endangered ecosystem).
But this environment impacts all of my work as an artist--it informs me, inspires me, and sometimes depresses me by the state it is in. I try to say something about the microcosm in which I live with every piece of art I make--for instance, Prairie Fire 2 was inspired by actual prescribed burns at Kibbe, the colorful fire on a cloudy day, the charred ground left behind the leaping flames.
So the word 'environment' is very close to my heart, and thus to my art. I can't make art without it, I need to do all I can to preserve it.
The piece is almost done. Until a few hours ago, I wasn't sure if it was a series of seven pieces, or one piece with seven parts. Now that it's laid out this way, I'm pretty sure it's one piece.
Although each piece stands fairly well on its own, I like the connected-ness of them being put together in this figure-like shape. Does it make sense that they want to be together? That they're happier this way?
Forget the technical challenge of putting them together; there's just a synergy at work here that I can't ignore. So I'll figure out the technical parts, finish it up, and then move on.
I'm not the only fiber artist cutting things apart and putting them back together--check out Katherine Sand's blog post. Great minds thinking alike and all that.
And I keep thinking back to the original piece, prediaster. There was a time when it was very cool, but incomplete. I took the wrong fork in the road trying to complete it, and there was no going back. But if I hadn't made that mistake, would the resultant piece be as good as this one? I guess there's no way to know...but I may dye another piece of silk and start all over....
I got carried away with paint today. It's fabric, I can make more, but still. I should have known better.
I started out yesterday with gold paint on the stalks I had quilted in. OK, but a little bright. How to tone it down...how about some transparent black paint? Toned them down, and then bled out into the rest of the piece in unattractive ways.
So I decided, with nothing to lose, to get out the rotary cutter and ruler and start whacking out the bad parts and making a bunch of little pieces.
Some of the shapes are rather cool--the long narrow ones especially. I see the pieces being finished into a series of related pieces. The worse parts can be covered with something, or else add more paint to cover up the problem...don't quite know yet, but it's kind of an exciting idea that I get to work on making decent art, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat...if I'm lucky.
The thought for the day is then, don't worry, be happy. And keep working.
This is the kind of quilting I was trying to describe. A blend of geometric lines and organic shapes.
The piece shown is a piece of silk I dyed a couple of weeks ago after seeing Katherine Sands' blog about the difference in color between using soda ash and vinegar to fix fiber reactive dyes to silk. So I tried brushing stripes of each onto a piece of silk, then adding dye. The differences in color are hard to see, but I ended up with a nice piece of cloth anyway.
A great discussion of the importance of line in fiber art is going on in the Art and Perception blog by Jane Underwood--she does a good job of describing what I'm doing (well, she's not really talking about me, but her, but it's kind of the same thing). Line that produces texture like this is one of the main reasons I quilt most of my pieces.
When I get done quilting this piece, I am thinking of adding some touches of paint to the organic shapes, just to highlight them. And adding some hand stitching to the spaces.
At the same time, I'm trying to figure out how to capture the beauty and simpleness of yet another buckeye--this time the fruit of a bottlebrush buckeye. They're very velvety and cool colors right now as they ripen.
I thought I would start this post with a picture of the guy who thinks he owns this place. I call him Dale, and I caught him surveying his kingdom from my back stoop. Since he eats lots of acorns and hasn't done any damage so far, I like having him around.
I've been playing around some with my art. I saw the work of Deborah Gwinn, and even though her work is on paper, she's using similar techniques to what I do with bleach on cloth. More complex, but it gave me an idea.
For one of the play dates we in RRFA do, I took a piece of black cotton and laid some stalks of northern sea oats on it. I then sprayed bleach over the surface unevenly, leaving a negative image of the grass. I liked the piece, but it had a flaw (note to self: iron out any creases before spraying bleach), and I wasn't sure where to take it.
Then I saw Deborah's work and thought, 'ah, positive against negative'. I took a bleach pen and drew sea oats over the surface of the piece. The bleach pen was a little old, and I didn't get any areas to go to the white that the original bleach had done. But I like the tan (and wish I had about 10 yards more of this black that doesn't discharge to rust), and may leave it. Here's the result:
I'm going to quilt it using an idea I'm stealing from a friend of mine, combining organic shapes with close geometric stitching. But first I have to decide whether or not to go back in with some fresh bleach and put in some white highlights. That's my excuse for not doing anything yet, and I'm sticking with it.
I got the happy news while away for the weekend that my piece Brown Eyes was accepted into Art Quilts XII in Chandler, Arizona.
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