Once again, I have made an art quilt, using hand-dyed and painted cotton with stitch, based on a small painted collage.
Here is the 10" x 10" collage that inspired the composition. The texture in the top third was created by painting tissue paper and then gluing it onto a painted background. The turquoise rectangle in the middle left was made the same way.
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| original painted collage, 10" x 10" |
As before, I printed out a photo of the original piece, measured the various elements, and tripled them in size, creating templates for the different shapes.
Wanting to triple the size of the "devilled eggs" print, I found some old printed blue cotton, and used the back of it, applying paint to the navy blue background. I like the imperfections created in the stamping/painting process.
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| painting and stitching detail |
Not having quite the right colour for the lower margin, I substituted another hand-stencilled cotton from a previous
marathon of printing on cloth, numbers on a dark blue background.
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| painting and stitching detail |
The white circles that were stamped on in the original were reproduced in a scribbled stitching line for the art quilt.
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| stitching detail |
Stitching was used to enhance some of the other cloth shapes, but it was not my intention to make the stitching so noticeable that it added another strong element. I felt there was enough going on in the piece without added distractions.
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| stitching detail |
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| stitching detail |
The art quilt is shown below, and will serve as the third in this series. I have committed to staging a solo show in a large venue in January, and I may well continue to make more in this series to produce a cohesive display. Sometimes a deadline is inspirational!
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| painted and stitched art quilt, 24" x 24" |
3 comments:
Lovely pieces, inspirational for me as well to see you proceed. Merci!
I like this one very much, Heather. What fascinates me most, though, is trying to determine what you are exploring. Is it simply composition elements (colour, line, proportion etc.) or is there an underlying idea/theme?
Thank you, Precille, for your words of encouragement.
Margaret, at this point the series has been inspired by the complementary colours of blue and orange, but that may well evolve.
I have enjoyed making painted collages for the last couple of years, and now I'm interested to see if I can express these abstract compositions in cloth and stitch. Can I come up with something really exciting and unique? For example, cloth-on-cloth typically makes for a "hard edge". How do I create "soft" edges in cloth? By doing extensive stitching back-and-forth over the adjacent shapes? By painting over the cloth shapes? By placing two closely-related colours together so the border is indistinct? And yes, I am always evaluatingf the success of the composition.
I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with this exploration, but I am enjoying the journey!
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