Favorite Quotes #2 - Why Make Art?

"Oh, it's outrageous to consider creating art, isn't it? But life is short. And intense. And we need art to inspire and amuse us."
by Lisa Halpern, in "insight: the cornish magazine", 2010.  Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle

This is a brand new favorite quote, not one of my old stand-bys, found last night while musing over college promo materials before chucking them in the recycle bin.

Woven Memories

This little quilt has connections to several other things I've blogged about:

Little Stones

Poking around in quilty blogs one day, I discovered Jude Hill.  I was immediately enchanted with her artistry, her photography, the ambiance of her posts, and her approach to her artwork.

Reading on, I discovered that one of her projects includes collecting small pieces from her readers that will eventually be included in her artwork.  I am really intrigued by this concept of using the internet as a tool or medium in creating art, not just as a static means of communication and information overload.

Something From Nothing

Several years ago, I was contacted by an interior decorator who was clearing out her studio.  She wondered if I'd like her old fabric samples.  "Sure!" I said, never one to turn down a gift of cool fabric.  I drove over to her place, and discovered that she had enough to fill my trunk.  Wow.  

I brought it all home, sorted it out, gave what I didn't think I'd ever use to a grade school art room, and piled the rest into a big plastic storage bin.  

And there it sat for a few more years, until my kids grew up and there began to be more time for art.  What with parenting and repairing quilts, I hadn't done much play for the sake of play for quite a while.

Deer Creek Fen quilt at home

My zoologist friend visited me in June and picked up the landscape quilt I made for her.  It is a portrait of the fen where she does her fieldwork.

The quilt is now happily hanging in its new home.  My friend just sent photos, and here they are.  I am so happy to see it in situ.  The colors really work well with the rest of the room, I think.  And my friend can work at her desk and dream about being out in the kayak - gliding through the grasses and visiting the bog buckmoths, the turtles, frogs, and dragonflies, all the while watched over by the deer and hawk.  Yea!!

The complete story of this quilt's creation starts here with her photos and fabric selection and creating the landscape, and continues with creating the animals, more detailing and adding the borders are here and here, and finally, photos of the completed quilt.  I'm really grateful to my friend for the inspiration to create such a detailed and exciting quilt.

Family History

While writing the previous post about my refrigerator quilt, I took advantage of the "interwebs", which didn't exist to such a great extent at the time I made the quilt, to research this postcard from Germany.  It features my last name in the original German spelling.  "Wasser" is the German word for water, pronounced "vah-ser".  

My Refrigerator Quilt

I used to belong to FACET, a critique group of art quilters.  Besides meeting monthly for critique sessions, we also created a couple of traveling shows.  The one I'm going to talk about in this post was created in 2000 and called "Narrative Portraits".  We always tried to come up with a theme that would be flexible enough to inspire all our members and include all the varied techniques represented in our work.

My portrait concept came to me one night while chopping veggies for dinner.  My kids were 10 and 6 at the time.  We got, and still get, our veggies with a subscription to an organic farm.  I do a lot of chopping.

Holiday Treats

Oftentimes, beginning quilters start with what I've heard entitled "The Pillow and Placemat Stage".  I certainly did!  But now, all these years later, I've really gotten away from making little quilty doo-dads, focusing more on the quilt repair and art quilt realms.  But sometimes these things are still fun, and sometimes gifts are called for.  So here are my holiday treats:

Last weekend, I joined a couple of other local artists in a holiday open studio sale.  For that, I made two little wall quilts, each about 12" square.

I Never Really Did Like That Pattern

My longtime friend Leigh Gaitskill used one of my quilts to illustrate a recent post on her blog.  Thanks, Leigh!!  Leigh is a yoga and spiritual teacher with many years of practice and healing and learning.  You can read her post, about how we may have hidden the diamond heart, our central spiritual essence, at:  http://bluegrassnotes.wordpress.com/2011/11/18/living-from-essence/

I Never Really Did Like That Pattern

Here's my artist statement about the quilt.  Yes, it certainly has many similarities to the concepts that Leigh is describing.

For the Record - Photographing My Quilts

I photographed my marvelous bog quilt, in the hour or so between the sky clouding over and the winds and rain beginning.  I get the best results by photographing outdoors in natural light.  That means, I have to wait for the right weather conditions to materialize, and then be ready to drop everything else and head outdoors.  I need:

1. a day that's overcast, so the lighting is diffuse (minimizing the texturing of the quilting so the design of the quilt shows well)

Back to the Fen

In the home stretch now!

I've completed (I think....) the final detailing and embroidering on the bog quilt.  Here's the scoop:

I did, indeed, make another kayak, so that it is long enough to extend across the border.  This is the third and hopefully, hopefully final attempt at the kayak!  I managed to salvage the grey bits this time, and reattach them to the new kayak body.  But I did need to embroider the detailing on them again.  I also, added a black cord and attachments.

Fen Quilt Update

Recent developments at the fen:

My friend asked if I could make the kayak smoother.  I've been interfacing everything with a super-light interfacing, just for a bit of substance in handling and to help secure the tiny tips of the shapes, but it didn't really give the charmeuse much more stiffness.  This is nice for a blouse of course, but didn't help the illusion of being a fiberglass kayak.  So, I took off the kayak and make another with a very heavy interfacing.

Animals of the Fen

As promised, here come the animals to populate the fen quilt.  

My friend, as I said earlier, specified particular species of each animal.  It wasn't hard to find photos of each via google.  I also found info on each animal's size, so I could reproduce them somewhat in scale.  

I put each photo into Illustrator (I imagine any program would work somewhat the same, but I'm nowheres near a computer expert).  I drew a box the size I wanted the animal to be, and scaled the photo accordingly.  Then I printed them out, traced each onto paper, pinned them on the quilt, and checked it out with my friend.  I posted a photo of the quilt with paper animals in place in a previous post.

When the sizing was all set, I used the tracings as patterns to cut the fabrics for the basis of each animal.  Again, the fabrics were all stabilized with iron-on interfacing before I cut.  I stitched the animals in place, using a zig-zag with invisible thread.

Quilting in the Fen

My current art quilt project is a major one.  I've been working on this quilt for longer than I'd like to admit.  So this rather lengthy, photo-filled post will serve to bring you up to date with an overview of the steps I've taken so far.  This is a very condensed version of the process.  There were many detailed decision points and adjustments along the way, of course.

A friend of mine from college days, who is a zoologist, asked me to create a quilt depicting the fen in upstate New York where she does her fieldwork.  She sent me many photos that she has taken there.  Here's the overview shot that became the basis for the quilt.  In it, you will see three bog buckmoths, one of the creatures she studies there.