Fautographie

Another desirable bookIt has a chapter on shadows
including "shadow of the photographer" (of which I have my own huge collection)

From the show

These two pieces were shown at the Festival of Quilts last month. They're here now for the record.

"And Flowers Almost Poems" is 140 cm long, 30 cm wide -It's strips of thin plain silk, little bits of heavier flowery vintage silk, strips of dupion stamped with characters like "love" and "peace" (and flower, beauty, grace, happiness, from a set of rubber stamps, put together to resemble lines of chinese poems). The parallel stitching functions as quilting, and with a bit more practice I'll be able to get nice smooth curves - "Rainstorms" was in the "Elemental" challenge--It incorporates monoprints done on fabric with ordinary printing ink (I like the type of mark you get this way) -and it also uses layers of overlapping sheer fabric -

Back to basics - black and white

Unable to get out to see an exhibition one grey Sunday morning, I started thinking about one seen in 2006 -- the huge paintings of John Virtue, a landscape artist who lives in Devon and was artist in residence at the National Gallery.

He works only in black and white, and uses a variety of brushes etc to apply paint to canvas.

On his way to his studio at the gallery every morning, he'd stop at various places and do sketches of the urban river landscape. In the studio, he translated these onto canvases 7 x 3.5 -- metres, that is.

"Just" black and white -- you wonder after seeing these why bother using colour. I think that "because it's there" we want to use everything, whereas we should be stripping back to being as simple as possible. As Prokofiev said, "There is still so much beautiful music to write in C major."

And if you're aiming really high: "True perfection exists not when there is nothing more to be put in, but when nothing more can be taken out."

Pinning

Instead of the usual three layers, I'm using a combined backing/wadding of fleece. It happened to be around; I don't have a big enough piece of wadding on hand, and want to get this finished! The machine quilting is a bit scary, though - a little practice on a scrap is definitely needed.

Note the sophisticated pinning tool - a chopstick. It certainly saves the fingers and helps get those safety pins closed.

I'm still astonished to find eyelash yarn on the blocks. Who put that there, then?

Stitch experiment

8 inches square - trying out different threads with one kind of stitched mark. The two layers and little coloured border makes it feel good to do.

Tramlines

The news is good

Workshop with Lisa Walton

The workshop, arranged by London Quilters, was based on Lisa's quilt "Breaking the Drought". We learned tricks of embellishing, layout, and quilting this pattern. What a scene of concentration. Note the fabrics on the bench - these are Lisa's hand-dyes, and the ones spread open are painted, graded from one colour to another. Irresistible.
Lisa uses her painted fabric for whole-cloth creations. She paints several layers at once - including a top layer of organza. This piece is embellished with lots of beads -
By mid-afternoon we each had a few blocks ready. Here's Lisa giving us some tricks for getting the layout to work -Back home I kept right on working, embellishing all my hand-dyed recylced damasks - there are enough to make a piece 48" square. This lurid photo shows my blocks laid out, ready to sew together - and quilt, of course. The blue border (still to come) will have a block jutting into it -- which, Lisa explained, saves buying huge amounts of fabric, just to cut the long borders along the length.
Of course in a workshop you have to get out of your comfort zone at least once. I really resisted the eyelash yarn at first, but by the end of the day had to ask for some more....

Pierre Soulages

Very exciting to discover this French abstract painter. Born in 1919, he's known as "the painter of black".

His big achievement was the 95 windows of the Abbey of Conques. Here are some pages from the book on this (I now wish I'd bought it!)And some of his other work -

Walking

"Art is, after all, only a trace - like a footprint which shows that one has walked bravely and in great happiness." (Robert Henri)

More, much more, about the history of walking is here:

"Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking. Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. it is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals." (p.5)

Interestingly, the book has a little pathway at the bottom of each page, along which run quote after quote - about walking, of course.

"In my room the world is beyond my understanding," wrote Wallace Stevens in "On the Surface of Things", "But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four / Hills, and a cloud."

Parker at Ikon

Gosh it was almost a year ago that the CQ committee met in Birmingham. On the way to the Cornelia Parker exhibition at the Ikon Gallery, we were busy with our cameras -
Here's the gallery, a converted school in a renovated area near the canal -

Nice original features -
I found the reflections of the work, in the glass protecting some of the work, as interesting as the work itself - these suspended bits of earth are from the works around the leaning tower of Pisa; the people in the gallery add something that's otherwise missing -
Exhibitions give you fresh eyes to take back to your own environment. Like for this bit of plaster dripped by a careless workman, renovating a bathroom -

The fabric of vision - dress and drapery in painting

You find things, don't you, that you can't quite bring yourself to throw away. This exhibition at the National Gallery in 2002 looked at some of the ways artists from the Renaissance to the early 20th century used dress and drapery to capture the eye with meaning and feeling.My own eye was captured by drapery in a painting by Donato Ceti, 1713, and by this combination of colours:
pale gold
bluegrey
siena
ochre
mustard
gold
orange
scarlet and
dark brown/purple

Rebecca Crompton

Why weren't there any pix of work by Rebecca Crompton (1895-1947) on the web, I lamented some time ago. This English embroiderer, nay artist, should be more widely known.

This is "The Magic Garden", 1937. 52 x 32 cm; cotton applique and free surface stitches.The photo is in "5000 years of textiles", ed. Jennifer Harris, published in 1993 by British Museum Press, paperback edition 2004.

She was one of the first advisers to the Needlework Development Scheme (started by J P Coates in 1934) and "taught the use of simple macterials and simple stitches to create lively and imaginative pieces. She was also one of the first teachers to promote the use of he domestic sewing machine as auseful tool in the embroiderer's repertoire, and, despite initial opposition, various types of machine were soon used either in conjunction with hand embroidery or alone."

You can see other pictures of her work here and here (both those links will take you to rich sources of needlework images, by the way) - and you can get the exhibition catalogue "Rebecca Crompton and Elizabeth Grace Thompson, Pioneers of Stitchery in the 1930s" from the Embroiderers Guild bookshop.

Another Sunday in the country

Off early along the M40 - in the murk.Beyond the Buckinghamshire-Oxfordshire border the road drops down from the hills, usually a great view. This time we were cheered by the brighter sky.
I love this hillside, even in the rain -After sorting stuff out in the boatyard, we headed towards Banbury. Here's the famous Banbury Cross -
And some advertising from pre-internet days -
The town has a great cookshop, lots of temptation --
More murk and torrents of rain on the way home. Photographing the spray kept me busy. Watch out pedestrians!
And then there was this. Most cars were turning back, but we saw a cyclist going through, and the water only came just over his chain -
that water did make the car smell rather. The cyclist looked pretty disgusted, too.

Busywork in the car

Preparing a little shibori -Here it is all gathered up -
And painted with fabric paint (with a bit of purple on the other side) -
Released -
Ready - but for what? - with the threads plaited, ready to be used for another one -
In my impatience to undo it, I ironed it dry, and made these prints in the process -