Embroidered Collage

I never want to commit to posting every day ever again.

At least not on this blog. 

Artist Perpetually in Progress is first and foremost my journal done for my benefit.  I love sharing what I am doing and knowing I have readers and writing some pieces geared more for you than for myself.  But it got to the point where I was trying to figure out what I would write about, not what art-related activity I would do.  In another blog that would be a great motivator and useful.  But not in this one.  The art has to come first and the writing second.

I do hope to participate in National Blog Posting Month again next year, just with a different blog.  I will return to posting every day or so with this one. 

Of course, with that said, I think I have three straight days of posts coming up.  But I don't HAVE to write them that way if I'd rather do something else.

This week's lesson focused on the effects that an embroiderer can achieve by varying such things as spacing and thread type.  I played with some of Sharon's suggestions with the buttonhole stitch, one of those she featured in the class write-up.  My favorite part is the first row.  It makes me think of doing a sampler of squares filled with such patterns and seeing the different textural ways that I can achieve the same value of light or dark by varying stitch spacing.

I had seen the giant floating head in one of the art news magazines, so it wasn't too much of a shock, but the nude couple depicted with Lite Brite bits was something of a surprise.  Amazingly well done, too.  The Outwin Boochever 2006 Portrait Competition was my favorite part of the Portrait Gallery.  I loved seeing all those different media that had been judged excellent depictions of contemporary portraiture.  It was inspiring and made me think even harder about using faces as a basic unit for future work.

The contemporary exhibit transitioned into the exhibit of presidential portraits.  It wasn't as interesting to me personally, in terms of the art, but it was well-laid out and interesting to walk through and share with my mother and grandmother.  One thing that did capture my attention was the three portraits of George Washington.  They had the famous iconic piece, but there were also two others facing it, done by different artists.  He didn't hardly look like the same man, a relative maybe, but not the same man, and they were all done within only a few years of each other. 

The National Portrait Gallery and the American Art Museum are both part of the Reynolds Center, their exhibit space alternating and intertwining throughout the old patents building.  It was a very effective display that only opened in June of this year.  I'm glad I had a chance to visit.

Aluminum foil, brown paper, and some other random household items are what went into this magnificence.  When I first saw "The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millenium General Assembly" by James Hampton I mistook it for rich and heavy metalwork, which I am sure was the intent.  Instead it is made of humble materials and resides in a nook the size of a small room in the Folk Art section of the American Art Museum.  Talk about being struck in the face with how you really don't need every new gadget to make art.

Another highlight of the museum visit was the Luce Conservatory section.  The collections were in a high ceilinged room that used to be a library with two balconies.  The upper stacks had been turned into display cases where art was grouped into categories and filling every available space, so different from the usual environment of putting a great deal of space between the works, intended to highlight them.  It was an interesting affect.  I could get a much better sense of an era or an average by a glance, but I really had to concentrate to see only one piece, isolating it in my mind instead of having it isolated for me by the hanging arrangement.  You could also walk back into glass hallways that enclosed the rooms where the conservators actually worked on the museum's collection.  No one was there, as it was Saturday, but the explanatory exhibits were very well done.

Oh, there's a guy painting the wall inside the museum.  I wonder why he's doing that during business hours.  And, wait, why is it going to be pink?  He's not moving.  Blink.  That's right!

These were the thoughts running through my head because I had forgotten that the featured special exhibit at the Michener Museum in Doylestown was the hyper-realistic statues of Duane Hanson.  For a few moments, as I walked closer to this piece set amid the regular exhibits, I was captured by the illusion. 

I had seen the statues in magazines before, but it hurt my brain to see them in person, because I kept expecting them to move.  Hanson develops the primary forms by creating molds from models then dresses and paints and draws to create the details in the skin and features that fool the eye.  The coloring has just the right amount of unevenness to it.  One statue was of a lady sleeping in her bikini and you could see that she had been out in the sun too long because she was pinking up with a bit of a burn.

This exhibit really drove home to me how an exacting realism can capture the viewer.  A number of artists in mixed media combine realism with abstraction by using photos, but I wonder who out there does so in just one medium, painting or drawing, for example.  How does the contrast work visually?

I made this roughly 8"x8" piece in late 2004 as a contribution to a fabric book and sent it off, receiving a nifty little art doll as a thank you in return.  I can see so clearly here the seeds of the work that I am pursuing now.  There are layers of media and scale, repetition and variation, and stitching plays an important role.  It has inspired me to wonder if I would like to do some works on ungessoed canvas, putting in the primary color layer with fabric paints and crayons and pens, building up on it with paper, fabric, and stitch, then stretching it over the wooden bars.  It would still be mixed media, but its appearance would lean more towards fiber art.