This is my final piece in 3 Creative Studios' 2010 Art Quilt Challenge Group.
When we got the challenge word "destination", I immediately thought about the plans BSP and I have for our future.
Showing posts with label Art 2010. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Art 2010. Show all posts
Regular Monday post below:
I know I don't usually post my textile art pieces on this blog, but I've been so busy I didn't have time to finish a traditonal quilt for my usual Monday post.
This was the 5th piece I made for the Three Creative Studios Challenge. Our word was "music". I decided to interpret it as "time to face the" music, and make my quilt about the ecological disasters we inflict upon our home and the culpability each of us holds in that.
On the left is smoke stack from a factory with an oil rigging juxtaposed on the front of it, a miasma of pollution surrounding it and the scorched sun, while a toxic sludge pours out of it running beneath the earth and seeping into our ground water.
On the right is a scarecrow, traditionally something to terrify without danger; however, you will note that the scarecrow has become a skeleton - a warning to us all.
Details on construction at textile art blog if you're interested: Coneflowers in Leslieville
This is my most recent piece that I call “Once, I Was a Child.”
When we initially received the challenge word “reflection” from Three Creative Studios; I immediately thought of all the beautiful images I’ve seen of things reflected in water, and wanted to do something like that. But since the parameters of this challenge that I’ve set for myself are that all of them must use the same techniques (so that I can grow in them); and on a black background so they would have continuity – I wasn’t quite sure how to translate water in that way. And while I puzzled over that, another idea came to me.
Reflection - as in remembrance.
As soon as that meaning came to me, I thought about how I often reflect on my childhood, and that whenever I do; what immediately comes to my mind is this static image of myself: always with my dog, standing or in the act of walking away from the viewer (myself – which is quite interesting) through the fields; or walking through the forest, the sun dappling the leaves and creating sun spots on the forest floor. In that case, the image I see is of my own hand, brushing against the leaves and branches, the sun dapples leaving light spots on my skin.
This is an idyllic, pastoral view of my youth – and though I did spend days, weeks, perhaps over the years – the time amounted to months - in solitary splendor, travelling the woods and fields in and around my parents’ property with my dog; and though I was extraordinarily happy at those times: the reality of my past is that it was an extremely unhappy one.
That pastoral pastiche that I have in my head is something like a placeholder – the prettiest ribbon you can imagine - wrapped around a dark, heavy steel box, weighted with chains and locks too big too hold with just one set of hands – and the content of that box is the grim reality of my childhood.
Nevertheless – that box and its contents do not make the placeholder less true - the time I spent in the fields and the woods with my intensely loved dog is far more real to me than anything in that box. Those images bring me peace, and are the building blocks of the present deep contentment in my life.
“Life is an unrelenting comedy. Therein lies the tragedy.”
When we initially received the challenge word “reflection” from Three Creative Studios; I immediately thought of all the beautiful images I’ve seen of things reflected in water, and wanted to do something like that. But since the parameters of this challenge that I’ve set for myself are that all of them must use the same techniques (so that I can grow in them); and on a black background so they would have continuity – I wasn’t quite sure how to translate water in that way. And while I puzzled over that, another idea came to me.
Reflection - as in remembrance.
As soon as that meaning came to me, I thought about how I often reflect on my childhood, and that whenever I do; what immediately comes to my mind is this static image of myself: always with my dog, standing or in the act of walking away from the viewer (myself – which is quite interesting) through the fields; or walking through the forest, the sun dappling the leaves and creating sun spots on the forest floor. In that case, the image I see is of my own hand, brushing against the leaves and branches, the sun dapples leaving light spots on my skin.
This is an idyllic, pastoral view of my youth – and though I did spend days, weeks, perhaps over the years – the time amounted to months - in solitary splendor, travelling the woods and fields in and around my parents’ property with my dog; and though I was extraordinarily happy at those times: the reality of my past is that it was an extremely unhappy one.
That pastoral pastiche that I have in my head is something like a placeholder – the prettiest ribbon you can imagine - wrapped around a dark, heavy steel box, weighted with chains and locks too big too hold with just one set of hands – and the content of that box is the grim reality of my childhood.
Nevertheless – that box and its contents do not make the placeholder less true - the time I spent in the fields and the woods with my intensely loved dog is far more real to me than anything in that box. Those images bring me peace, and are the building blocks of the present deep contentment in my life.
And so, my piece contains that reflection – a mummified re-memory of myself and my beloved dog in the field of my imagination; a big fluffy cloud - it too painted by my idyllic imagination - and written on the side – a dose of my old reality.
“Life is an unrelenting comedy. Therein lies the tragedy.”
My little quilt - “Once, I Was A Child”
Coming up in future posts, we'll re-visit some of my prior pieces in this series, and see the results of some new experiements.
Kit
This is the third quilt in my challenge series from 3 Creative Studios Our challenge word this time was "Rhythm".
I started out with a different, but simliar iteration of this quilt when we first got the word “rhythm”. I knew I wanted to convey all the rhythms in the world – music and drums and dance and movement and the pull of gravity, tides in the sea… so I initially sketched out three panels encompassing these ideas and excitedly went about making them.
I began with the same woman I have depicted here, only in purples and golds on iridsescent blacks dotted with “stars”, and I was pleased; and began to pull fabrics for the other three panels - but then stumbled upon how to incoporate these three disparate panels together.
I fussed about it for weeks, stalled in my process, and time running out, finally decided to start with the ”earth in rhythm” panel – and hope that the process of "how" would reveal itself in the making.
The "earth in rhythm" panel was initially much bigger than this smaller earth in the final product, and as you can see, for some reason I felt the earth’s rhythm had to be depicted in fire-y oranges and bright and calming blues.
And then, as I was constructing my large, rhythmic earth, I had my “aha” moment. My dancer was drawing energy from the earth itself.
And so I had my ” rhythm”. Which I call “Double Helix on the Downbeat”.
It's finally done - my favourite quilt that I've ever made, "A Sparrow in the Rain".
I finished this quilt six weeks ago, but now I can finally post it. It's the second of our bi-monthly challenges. The word this time was "passage".
I'm a INFJ - some of you will know what that means, some of you won't. It's short hand for "I like people, but I prefer to not be around them." *laughs*
I do like people, I'm gregarious and outgoing, but what feeds that is alone time, and LOTS of it.
So, because I like people, I'm a joiner. I like being a part of something bigger than myself, but once I'm in, I don't like it, because there's, you know - people, and they want stuff from you, but even worse, they expect stuff from you, and what if you can't (cuz you probably can't!) meet their expectations??!?? *eep*
Given my druthers, I'd really much rather be with a book in a forest glade with nothing around me but the wind soughing through the trees, or better yet - in my sewing room, deep inside my head.
So, when 3 Creative Studios offered a quilt challenge, it seemed tailor-made for me. I get to participate in a group, but there aren't any real demands on me, other than a timetable that I can fudge a bit, because no one's actually waiting for me to show up with a product. Hurray! And, there's a challenge portion of the game - somethng that will help me grow.
In real life, it didn't work that way. *s* I became so intimidated at the idea of producing something that I would have to show to other quilters, some of whom were artists, that I froze.
Our first challenge was to produce, by the end of February, a quilt on the theme "puzzle". I was stumped. I mean everyone knows what a “puzzle” is – and I didn’t want to do that - i.e. no jigsaws, no rubiks cubes, no labyrinths with a Minotaur hiding somewhere… (well actually, I'd love to do a labyrinth with a Minotaur hiding in it, I just don't have the skill to produce such a thing yet!) So, I was trying to think of something that would connote “puzzle” without being too literal. And I came up with... bupkus. *le sigh*
*When BSP and I married, I had two cats, and BSP had two, one of whom passed away. We later fostered two four week old kittens, and then couldn't bear to give them up, so ended up with FIVE cats. The craziest thing about that is not that we have five cats, but that we're DOG people. But that's a whole other story. ;)
I do like people, I'm gregarious and outgoing, but what feeds that is alone time, and LOTS of it.
So, because I like people, I'm a joiner. I like being a part of something bigger than myself, but once I'm in, I don't like it, because there's, you know - people, and they want stuff from you, but even worse, they expect stuff from you, and what if you can't (cuz you probably can't!) meet their expectations??!?? *eep*
Given my druthers, I'd really much rather be with a book in a forest glade with nothing around me but the wind soughing through the trees, or better yet - in my sewing room, deep inside my head.
So, when 3 Creative Studios offered a quilt challenge, it seemed tailor-made for me. I get to participate in a group, but there aren't any real demands on me, other than a timetable that I can fudge a bit, because no one's actually waiting for me to show up with a product. Hurray! And, there's a challenge portion of the game - somethng that will help me grow.
In real life, it didn't work that way. *s* I became so intimidated at the idea of producing something that I would have to show to other quilters, some of whom were artists, that I froze.
Our first challenge was to produce, by the end of February, a quilt on the theme "puzzle". I was stumped. I mean everyone knows what a “puzzle” is – and I didn’t want to do that - i.e. no jigsaws, no rubiks cubes, no labyrinths with a Minotaur hiding somewhere… (well actually, I'd love to do a labyrinth with a Minotaur hiding in it, I just don't have the skill to produce such a thing yet!) So, I was trying to think of something that would connote “puzzle” without being too literal. And I came up with... bupkus. *le sigh*
I was starting to feel a bit panicky about my lack of an idea, I even went so far as to canvass my friends for what their idea of a "puzzle" was (sudoko, crosswords, riddles, jenga) but my cats provided the answer the other night.
I was in our home office, doing something on the computer, when one of the cats began playing chase in the hallway with a toy mouse. I noticed it was Maggie, one of two of our cats that doesn't like toy mice, so I looked a little closer and realized she was batting around a REAL mouse.
A REAL MOUSE!!!
I followed her down the hall as she picked it up in her mouth, trotted off to the kitchen, dropped it, and began batting it around again. Two of the other cats came into the kitchen to see what she was doing, so at one point, there were three adult cats surrounding the baby mouse. The mouse - well, it's best we leave the mouse merrily "playing" in the kitchen with the cats - but later, when I went back to the office, I wondered, "How in the world does a house with five cats* in it, have a mouse?
And I had my puzzle.
I immediately did a quick line drawing of my puzzle quilt: five bowls of food lined up in the kitchen representing our five cats, our white porcelain tile floor as a background, and our dark wood kitchen cabinets.
I like the little bowls - composed of the tiniest bits of scraps; the black sequined mouse, and the little silver tracks of where the mouse has been.
I think that with the next puzzle, I'll be less intimidated and be able to produce something that's more "me"; and though, as usual, I see all the places I could improve it the second it's done (from both a technical and artistic perspective); but in the meantime, I'm pleased I got over the hurdle.
I'm looking forward to the next challenge!*When BSP and I married, I had two cats, and BSP had two, one of whom passed away. We later fostered two four week old kittens, and then couldn't bear to give them up, so ended up with FIVE cats. The craziest thing about that is not that we have five cats, but that we're DOG people. But that's a whole other story. ;)
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