Embroidered Collage

I pulled fabric from bags by the sofa, parts of the guestroom, the closet, and many smaller boxes.  And then I did this.  The top box is cottons.  The bottom box is fancies, mostly in crazy quilt size pieces.  I have another box with larger pieces of fancies and canvas type fabrics.  And of course the coordinating hand-dyed bits are elsewhere.  But these are two palettes that I can draw from while I'm creating, all nicely set up.  The primary organization is by color, but there are a couple subsets for things like batiks and kimono fabrics.

I organized my beads by color too, but that doesn't look nearly so cool because they are in plastic bags inside other plastic bags.  I'm also mostly done with my fibers.  I'm at a bit of a loss as to how to handle the paper though.  Basically I'm still trying to get everything put away into my new closet so that I can reach for it and find it.  Having easy access to my supplies, instead of having to hunt for them, will make it much easier to keep making art when my time constricts later this summer.

I embellished the area around the reddish splotch with  a series of straight stitches.  Using the stacked triangles was inspired by looking at pictures of various types of turtle shells online.  I included a couple of colors used elsewhere in the piece, including the hexagons that still need to be added. 

I used my watercolor crayons to draw in a head and fins, then the liquid acrylic to wet the lines down and seal them.  The head and upper right limb will end up wrapped around the canvas and not be visible, but I wanted to put them in anyway.

The entire effect is actually rather subtle on the full work.  It doesn't jump out at you from across the room.  But I like the additional level of complexity in this focal area. 

The Amazon reviews on this book are a very mixed bag, from people who passionately declare how useless it is to those who found it extremely helpful.  I put off purchasing it for some time, but then I was able to get a good deal.  I wanted to read it, to at least see this perspective, as a considerable amount of my work is abstract.

The best part was the quotes from artists about their abstract work, both sprinkled throughout the text and attached directly to images of the artwork.  Other images had descriptive captions.  Many of them made me think a little differently.  Some history and rationale behind choices was discussed, such as in showing how one artist's work looks abstract but is actually a realistic rendering of crack in paving squares.

Many of the technique sections seemed out of place somehow.  Other books do them better and they only occasionally directly referred to how to use them for abstract versus other painting.  I can see how they might be useful if you come from a traditioal painting background, but as a mixed media artist I'd been exposed to almost all of it previously.

I think the book was a worthwhile purchase for me.  I'll read it again and think over some of the aspects and perhaps apply them to samples or completed work.  But it's definitely one that may or may not appeal to any given artist and it's hard to recommend one way or the other.

These atcs were done for a doodle themed swap.  One of the participants posterd her amazing colored detailed doodles and I just gaped in amazement.  For me doodles have always been simply black pen or grey pencil on plain paper or lined paper.  A leftover from school, I imagine, when that was all I had to hand.  In order to make the cards a bit spiffier I used a colored paper from Melissa's swap and started myself out with a silver filigree sticker in the corner.  The lines are inspired by the sticker, but in their nature are similar to what I'll doodle from nothing while on the phone at work.

I had hoped to return from my week away with pages of sketches and such from the evenings.  I did a great deal more vegging than I expected.  Admittedly the first half of the week we were installing floor and the second part we went to an amusement park and then hung out with friends, so I was both occupied and exhausted.  I did start working with the snowflake micrographs again.  I had used them for the embroidered snowflakes in Snowfall and decided to see how else I could stretch and play with the natural patterns.  I only completed one page, but I intend to continue.

I went to see this exhibit when it was at the New Hope branch of the Michener Museum, but never wrote about it because I wasn't quite sure what to say.  It emphasized the abstract nature of quilts and how individuals made interesting changes and innovations from the traditional patterns over the last 200 years.  Most of the pieces on display were still what we would probably call traditional quilts, but there were a couple of stunningly done modern pieces that fit more into the art quilt realm.

The feel of viewing the quilts in the hushed and open spaces of the museum setting was very different than the dull roar and backing curtains of a quilt show, whether small or large.  The setting emphasized each piece, as you would expect, but then the placards mentioned the stitch count per inch.  So were the exhibit's original curator deliberately ignoring the perception of an art/craft boundary or were they being confused about what they were doing?

But then I noticed that the Doylestown library had acquired the exhibit book, Wild by Design: Two Hundred Years of Innovation and Artistry in American Quilts by Janet Catherine Berlo and Patricia Cox Crewe.  After I read it my memories of the exhibit sprang to life.  The introduction was interesting, explaining about how improvisation and a quest for deliberate effects must have been used in a number of different quilts, based on the fabrics and patterns in them and how they differed from a perfectly standard example.  But the best part was the facing page to the quilt image, which was done in dialogue or interview format, each person adding a few insights to the understanding of that particular piece.  Only about half of the quilts in the book were in the exhibit at New Hope, about an even mix of the ones I really wanted to see and the ones I cared less about.

The people who brought this exhibit together wanted to emphasize design, whether it was executed in perfect craft or with merely adequate skills.  Many of these quilts would be passed over by the judges at a quilt show today.  I was better able to appreciate the design that went into them, knowing more about the back drop that the women were working in.  I'd like to go see the exhibit again, now, but am not sure I'll get up there before it closes on June 3. 

I enjoyed it the first time, but think I'd appreciate it more this time.  I find it ironic that of all the exhibits I would be dissatisfied by with less preparation, the first one that I remember having this feeling for is a quilt exhibit.  Maybe because I do know more background in general, or because I'm closer to it, I'm more critical of it?  That it was harder to just look and accept like I can do when I know very little?  Perhaps.