For the library

I'm thrilled that my quilt "Hatching" is in Linda Seward's new book - appropriately, for an ex-librarian, on the bibliography page -

"The Ultimate Guide to Art Quilting" becomes available on 7 July, and Linda will be giving a lecture on what was involved in putting it together, and signing copies, at the Festival of Quilts - 

It's a comprehensive guide to the techniques that art quilters use, as you can see from the table of contents (click to enlarge) -

Illustrations and succinct descriptions (carefully thought out) provide enough information to get going with the technique, and the bibliography gives books that go into the topic in more detail.

Throughout there are many alluring photos of art quilts from both sides of the Atlantic -

 Sandy has a thorough review of the book on her blog (sandysnowden.blogspot.co.uk).

Blast from the past

The brochure from an early Festival of Quilts - possibly the first one -

It has grown in size and is the highlight of the UK quilter's year, with contingents from Holland, Germany, etc visiting too. Many more lectures and workshops are on offer now.

It was possibly in 2003 that I went to FOQ for the first time, for the day - somewhat diffidently, and on the slow train! When someone told me she had six quilts in the show, I resolved to have at least one ready for it the next year. This turned out to be a little piece that was submitted (and chosen) for the "Fabric of Nature" exhibition at the Nature in Art gallery in Twigworth, Gloucestershire. It was definitely a thrill to see the entire exhibition hanging "in the centre" in 2004 ... and a milestone for me. Alas, there seems to be no photo of this quilt ... it was made of metallic organza leaves captured between layers of net, and later went into someone else's collection. My photo was lost in a computer crash, but it lives in my memory.

Postscript - thanks to Mags Ramsay for so promptly and thoughtfully sending along a photo of the "leaves" quilt -

The veins in the leaves were made as pintucks, and it took five minutes to make each leaf. I made hundreds of these leaves for  some pieces shown at Leighton House Gallery in 2000, and more for use in a series of quilts (eg "After the Rain") in which the midrib was caught between triangles so that the edges of the leaves were free and the various colours of the silks showed behind them.

Daily painting - of this, that, and the other thing

Various paintings are on the go ... here are some, for the record.

covering up the unsatisfactory plant
(Is it time to start again with this one?)

"the wrinkly one" has become a repository for leftover paint, applied
mostly with a palette knife

dilute paint on watercolour paper - sprayed, dribbled, flicked, etc
(derived from the blurry roadside/trackside photographs)

- painting with a blob of yogurt  added to (and concealed in) soup -
"don't play with your food!" (hmph, whyever not!)

Museums closing

Sad to hear that two specialist museums are set to close. These are perilous times...

(via)

Firepower, London's oldest military museum, is to close at the end of 2016, in a move which allows Woolwich council to squeeze a more attractive return from the site. The root of the problem is “the Museum will be unable to live within the available income and it is also clear that the location is very unlikely to be able to deliver the number of visitors in the timescale needed for financial sustainability.” A new home will be identified locally to house some of the collection. The staff of the museum are unable to comment. A petition to save the museum has been set up here.

Another closure is the De Morgan Centre in Wandsworth - its last day is 28 June. This collection of ceramics by William De Morgan and his wife Evelyn, a painter, has struggled in recent years, and is currently occupying "a bit of spare space" at Wandsworth Museum, which is moving. The whole story is here.

On the more positive side, there's a tiny museum, somewhere in Senate House (University of London), that was never really open, though it had a bit of funding for a curator for a while and exists as blog posts about the collection. "Visit" the Museum of Writing's blog here. It shows an amazing variety of objects, like this toucan inkwell -

The collection, assembled by Alan Cole over several decades, consists of more than 80,000 individual artifacts and also contains reference materials to the history of writing.

Poetry Thursday - two short poems touching on war

Handbag

My mother's old leather handbag,
crowded with letters she carried
all through the war. The smell
of my mother's handbag: mints
and liptsick and Coty powder.
The look of those letters, softened
and worn at the edges, opened,
read, and refolded so often.
Letters from my father. Odour
of leather and powder, which ever
since then has meant womanliness,
and love, and anguish, and war.

- by Ruth Fainlight (via; hear it read here)

A bag like this, perhaps - it has a similar story 

A Dead Statesman
I could not dig: I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?

- by Rudyard Kipling (via)

Ruth Fainlight (b.1931) has lived in England since the age of 15 and was a friend of Sylvia Plath. She is also a translator and has written short stories and opera librettos. Her work is marked by the special attention she pays to the apparently ordinary stuff of life, the significant truths she finds in domestic life. 

Though Kipling (1865-1936) is often seen as a warmonger and imperialist, his early energetic poems  contain harshly satirical portraits. He has been called "poetry’s Dickens, an outsider and journalist with an unrivalled ear for sound and speech". Like Dickens he had an unhappy childhood, and further grief from the death of his soldier son in 1915.

Sketchbook course, week 4

After the drawing session at the V&A cast courts, a show-and-tell of drawings and photographs -

after which we "did something" ... hopefully the discussion of the work led to some ideas on what to do, and the photocopies of  the requested pages gave use something to start with.

I took a newspaper from the box under the sink and started cutting shapes out of one of the photocopies, to be placed on another photocopy - drawing with a scalpel -

Using text as tone became using patterning from images. Perhaps they don't mix all that well..

Cutting through several layers of the newspaper, I found that one of the articles was about the collage artist Hannah Hoch, which was rather apropos -

Hmm, should have kept that cutout page ... but I do have a collection of the cut shapes for further work on this -

The mixture of shapes and patterning resembles the mixture of styles and objects in the cast court itself -

Some of the other activity, elsewhere in the class -

Dislocated

With the 1 July deadline not so far away, and my experiments towards my first ideas for the CQ "Dislocation" challenge unsatisfactory, another approach to the subject has been developing. It started with the "blurred photos" taken at the V&A and elsewhere

and also out of the window of moving trains and cars, like these -

All dealing with the idea of travel of some sort, moving from one place to another ... and being in a frame of mind that persists throughout this relocation. Or does it? If it does, is "there" then the same as "here" was?

Leaving that rather unfruitful line of thinking aside, I looked hard at some of the blurred images on my camera and gathered some information from them, as well as a feeling for the duration of the blue and the size of blurred areas.

 And stretched the photos to augment the blur -

stretched then squished then cropped

stretched to fit into a larger canvas

subtle stuff happening in a detail

It would have been "easy" to print these onto fabric, apart from the small matter of size - 50cm wide (or long) won't fit my printer. So Plan B it was -- painting with acrylics onto fabric.

Finding fabric - cottons, linen, silk;  adding lines of machine stitch (travel lines?) to some -

Before painting began, these were layered up, so that another kind of "dislocation" would happen - the thinner, wetter paint marks would soak through the top layer into the next one. Then I painted with blues, yellows, greens, white, even a bit of black, for a few hours, and arranged the strips in various permutations, eventually deciding on this sequence -

(It will be rotated 90 degrees to be hung.)

Here's one I did earlier - the sample -

On an offcut, notes on which thread was used for quilting, in the (false?) hope of being thoughtful in choosing which thread where -

After the 8" square sample - here's the real thing under the needle -

I'm almost halfway down, and at the point of being overwhelmed by thread choices - too many possibilities!

(The painter's tape helps keep the stitching lines level, and the clips make it easy to unroll and reroll, for fitting under the machine.)

After the quilting, it might need some additional painting (adding some flash to the blur) - and then there's the trimming, the edging, the labelling, the photographing, the sending off ... and the waiting to hear whether it's been accepted ...

Jardin blanc

basking

busy bumblebees

Beautiful...

But - blasted backache!

Monday miscellany

Jenny Hearn, "Reflections of Summer"

Franki Kohler, "Sunflower Scrap II"

Two quilts from the SAQA art quilt news mail-out - one pretty ... the other, personally preferable. My own need to make something "pretty" seems to have evaporated, thank goodness; perhaps the sombre painting has knocked it on the head, or perhaps I've totally lost aesthetic judgment (hope not).

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"Suffolk Landscape with Train" 1937

An artist new to me, Graham Bell. Several of his paintings are in the Kenneth Clark: Looking for Civilisation show at Tate Britain. Born in South Africa, Bell (1910-1943) was a founder member of the Euston Road School, and for several years in the 1930s abandoned painting for journalism. He joined the RAF and was killed on a training flight.

***

Street art - somewhere in London. Also, the disposition of street furniture adds greatly to the picture.

***

"Narratives make sense of the world but they do not necessarily reflect the world as it is." Professor Hugh Cunningham, in his lecture "What's happened to childhood"

***

"Peep Show" by Janet Crosby (Inspired By The V&A, 2004)

Islington Art Society show

The rather basic gallery that is in the Stoke Newington Library building held over 200 works, and some interesting things among them.

collage by Brian Innes

painted onto pages from an encyclopedia

pleasant grouping of prints by
Hannah Archer, Brian Innes, Christopher Cockburn, Sarah Garvey

strangely compelling... (Munch meets Bellany?)

painting onto newspaper - works well for the subject

such a pleasure to see work made by friends - Sylvia Whitehouse
was a printmaker before veering into textiles 

outside the gallery, a noticeboard has become abstract found art

Apologies to the artists whose names I didn't note down at the time. 

This is the one I would have, should have, taken home - it could be telling one or several of many stories -

Untitled, by Hannah Archer
drypoint and monoprint