"Blown Away"

In 2001 or so, new to the internet, I joined AlternativeQuiltList, a yahoogroup. This was in the good old days when there was lots of discussion in the discussion groups - that sphere of action now seems to have been taken over by blogs, which has its pros and cons.

Anyway, AQL had a "painting challenge" where you chose an artist and wrote a bit about them on the list, then made a quilt based on their work or something that arose from your research. My choice for the first round was Elisabeth Vigee Lebrun, who painted aristocrats around the time of the French Revolution. More about her another time (maybe).

For the second round I wanted something completely different - so, why not Australian Aboriginal art? I chanced on an online photo of a "desert garden" on the Art and Australia magazine site. It's no longer there, but looked rather like this -

and turned out to be by an artist named Gloria Petyarre. I loved the flow of the shapes, and did a sample, and then pulled out all sorts of yellow, orange, red, brown fabrics, and it evolved into quite a large piece (44 cm x 100 cm).

Each of the seven sections has a different combination of colours. The "leaves" are about the size of a thumbnail, built up in layers to cover the background, and then the different sections are applied to a piece of black fabric -Here are a couple of details - More recently, Gloria Petyarre has been painting Bush Medicine Dreaming -