New Challenge- Extreme

Throughout the history of art, artists have pushed themselves to step outside of the accepted forms. We see this in textiles, paint and sculptures, every area where there is creativity. The natural progression is to learn the "rules", the techniques and skills, use them until they are comfortable and old and then step out of that comfort zone.
Ask what if?
How much can I change things?
What is the most extreme form I can create and still have something I want to make and will be happy to have made?

Hibiscus with Plumeria Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia O'Keeffe pushed the limits of size.
Amongst other artists who stepped out into new areas are Kazimir Malevich, Paul Klee, Joan Miro, Richard Diebenkorn, Jackson Pollock, and perhaps my least favourite artist Willem deKooning. All challenge us in one way or another and make us restless with the work we make.

Paul Klee Ad Parnassum

Quilters and textile workers also love to push boundaries and work on concepts. Who are your sources of inspiration? Huguette Caland challenges me with her lines and dots- repetition
Gloria Loughman with her colours and the intricate details of her landscapes.

What will you choose:
work with only one design element, line, colour, value etc
an extreme range of colour or work in white
very large images or very small                                
complex  or simple
abstract?
The choice is yours.

City flowerbeds and oriental tiles

May be you have noticed that I like circles and wavy lines. 

So I‘ve decided to use these shapes for Art Deco theme.

After the design forms were chosen it was time to find the main idea of my “city” quilt.

I live in a very green city with a lot of flowerbeds and at the same time we have many building with oriental tiles and I decided to combine these two beauties in one quilt.

Rosehip Seeds

I wanted to produce something in the American Art Deco style for this challenge. My original idea was to design a seed packet which fits in with my theme of fruits and seeds quite nicely. As I progressed though, it seems to have metamorphosed into a poster.

I created the final design in PaintShop Photo Pro X3 using vector graphics and then used this as a template for the piecing.

The rosehip was made separately using a reverse appliqué method and then attached to the background as a whole.

All the fabric except the black is hand dyed by me as per Helen Deighan’s method for graduated effects from her book Dyeing in Plastic Bags.  

The lettering was achieved by printing onto Artist Transfer Paper (ATP) and ironing this on.

I decided not to do lots of free machine embroidery on this piece as I wanted to keep it clean and simple.

This closeup shows how the yellow fabric has been left around the seeds during the process of  reverse appliqué

Leaves á la Art Deco

The theme I have chosen for this year´s 4 quilts, is leaves. The challenge this time was Art Deco. After some research about Art Deco I have tried to interpret this challenge by using strong colors and stained-glass, which resulted in these 3 geometric, colorful, abstract, eucalyptus leaves and its seeds on a background with rectangular forms surrounded with black strips.

The black parts  in the leaves are kunin felt - under the circles, as well as under the red square shapes -   and black cotton fabrics.

The black lines in the background are bias strips. The background is pieced and the leaves are appliquéd as well as raw edge appliquéd. The piece is machine quilted and some hand quilting is made on the light grey background pieces to obtain some texture.

Size: 15 x 20 inches

Crossing the line

I really like Art Deco - one of my assessment quilts for the City and Guilds was based on 1930s stained glass windows. To accommodate my theme of the year, fences, I checked out a lot of Art Deco inspired railings, bannisters and fences, but most of them relied heavily on symmetry. Somehow, they weren't going to express anything I felt in tune with. So I turned to travel posters, which have that graphic quality I am frequently drawn to explore.

This worked much better. I found an art deco style font, called Kaikoura. This was especially apt, as the town of Kaikoura is only about 2 hours drive from me. Kai means food, and koura means crayfish. The ocean is particularly deep, with the Hikurangi Trench just off shore. This brings a lot of seafood to the area, crayfish (a kind of lobster), paua (abalone) and other fish, which attract seals, dolphins, whales and orca. Kaikoura is a whale-watching town, with boats and planes going out any time the weather is good enough. It is also unusual in having mountains coming right down almost to the sea.

But Kaikoura also has a race course, which I think only has one race a year. I took a liberty here, as the racing in Kaikoura is harness racing,  not gallops.  But I like the simpler outlines of the horses and jockeys. Here I could incorporate my fences in an art deco setting. I was happy!

Yellow Tulips

Tulips are such elegant flowers, simple in shapes and in so many wonderful colours. And since Art Deco is very simplified, it was a perfect match for my personal challenge, tulips. Looking through images from my garden, I settled on the one I used in an earlier challenge, LOVE, and used it as a template for raw edge applique, with hand dyed cotton.
As a background, I used something that reminded me of radioes from the 1930s, freehand cut and pieced commersial fabrics, on top of pale green linen.
 

 The quilting in the background is simply straight lines, the tulips are free hand machinequilted, with French knots.

100 King Street

It was interesting to compare the Art Deco movement in the UK with that in America where buildings sweep into the sky with great power and confidence in the future. Buildings in the UK seem to  sprawl, there is a gentler feeling they settle into the landscape and don't challenge or dominate the history and environment around them.

Posters from this time follow the trend, images soar upwards using perspective to enhance that feeling and express confidence and the promise of the future, colours tend to be limited and lines are clean in their design, and that was what I wanted to capture in my piece.

100 King Street was designed by Edwin Lutyens in 1928 for Midland Bank and was constructed in 1933-35. It is classified as either Art Deco or Modernist Classical depending on the reference site. At four stories high this building reaches up from the four roads that surround it. The lovely angles gave me the opportunity to once again play with perspective, this time using 3 point, and exaggerate that height. This time looking looking inwards through the windows I filled the building with silver and gold a nod to the wealth and lights burning brightly as people go about their business.

Materials used: Commercial fabric customised with Inktense pencils, blocks and fabric paints, metallic voile, netting, screen print, machine appliqué and quilting

screen print through freezer paper stencil

Working in a Series, some thoughts

Some of our members have done classes with respected teachers on working in a series. It is generally accepted that this way of working will help any artist to uncover elements that have personal meaning, which will in turn produce a body of work that has artistic integrity.

I came across an artist recently whose paintings could easily have been expressed in fabric and stitch.

Valeriane Leblond is of French/Quebec origin and now lives in Wales. Her paintings are often oil on various wooden substrates. She has been exploring her adopted homeland since 2007. Her landscapes have a fresh charm, and encapsulate the essential features of Welsh rural and coastal life.

The way she works illustrates how we can explore a subject by using different scales, colour palettes, horizon lines and all the design elements, such as rhythm, repetition, harmony, that we read about in our Art and Design manuals and course notes.

I will give the works their English titles, as the original titles are in Welsh. When I look at these paintings I can so easily imagine the quilting lines, hand stitching and textures.

Would that it was still summer

There is no catch

ebb and flow

autumn equinox

gold moon

Notice that there are traditional quilts featured in some of her paintings - a bonus!

Value and How to Create it

Value is an interesting design tool it can create drama and mood.
Dark values carry a sombre feel while light colours give a feeling of peacefulness. If you want to create a focal point, surround a light area with a dark one, it will create a frame that draws the eye like a magnet. Used in conjunction with texture, colour and line, interest can be heightened and intriguing images created. In his picture Temple Gardens, Paul Klee uses value to draw your eye around the painting.

Temple Gardens

A grey scale image makes this clear, as your eye dances around following the black shapes or the light ones.

In quilting, then, the key is finding enough pieces of fabric in your chosen colour to create the values you "need". 

Edinburgh Sunset

Edinburg Sunset, challenged my stash, and as I have 5 large boxes of fabric and odd pieces tucked here and there in drawers and on shelves because the boxes are too full, I just couldn't explain the need for more fat quarters when all that was needed was a tiny square or two. 

Fortunately I have a wonderful tin of Inktense pencils and a selection of textile paints. 

The pencils were used to darken the fabric for the windows. To use them just colour, then brush with a barely wet paint brush and iron once dry to set the pigment (protect your work surface with a piece of paper or plastic sheet). Then the fabric can be bonded using any bonding agent of your choice. The textile paint was used to create the orange red sky fabric,  foreground and windows on the dark house. A good range in value can be achieved by dilution of the paint with water (again protect your work surface), or more than one coat. Lightly sprinkling with salt while it's wet will create texture, if it is left to dry without moving. Again heat set the colour with an iron set for the fabric, in both cases I protect my iron with baking parchment. As both paint and pencils blend and mix with water, you only need a few colours to create a wide range. I would recommend this as an alternative to buying more fabric if small pieces are your passion and you enjoy a little colouring. 

Techniques used for Dragonfly in Green

Nicole asked me to explain in more depth how I got my original image for my last piece, so here goes.

The original image came from a gelli block print on white cotton fabric. I printed the dragonfly on plain copy paper, cut around the edges and then placed it on the pre-dye/print pasted gelli block. I then took the end of a small paint brush and drew around the lines of the image. I peeled the paper away and transferred the image to the white cotton.

Dragonfly print - Amanda Sievers

Once dry, I ironed and scanned the fabric. I tend to do this with a lot of the fabric I produce so that I can then use the image multiple times to either print onto fabric using the printer or to manipulate on the computer and then print or use as an image transfer before cutting the original fabric.

After scanning, I manipulated this image on my computer using Paint Shop Pro 7. I did several manipulations until I was happy with this one.

For 'Dragonfly in Green', I used the 'ImageSplitter' application which you can find easily on the internet. I sized the image and then split the image into 6 x A4 sheets which I printed on my laser printer. I then transferred the image using Amsterdam Matte Medium onto white sheer polyester.

Once dry, you soak and then rub off the excess paper from the back, and voila, you have your image to quilt!

Dragonfly in Green - Amanda Sievers

Edinburgh Sunset

 I chose buildings as my theme for the year and Through The Window for the series title  Buildings are endlessly fascinating with all their variations and yet they all have the same basic features, roofs, windows, walls etc. They have a multitude of different purposes and we decorate them with ingenuity to make them stand out or blend in. The one thing they all have in common is people. What goes on behind those windows,when we are inside do we learn, rest, dream or search for something new? What is going through the minds of the people on the outside, where are they hurrying to? Life is constantly fascinating.

For this challenge the image came from a view through a window in Edinburgh. I recently took a design class and wanted to use the lessons to take my art into a more informed place so value, colour, line, shape and figure / ground were considered. Cubism was the influence for the style, particularly the work of Oscar Bleumner. The colour scheme is a split complementary using yellow green and blue green with red orange and red purple. Unfortunately the dark green blue reads as blue against the other greens on screen something to do with the light possibly.

Materials used are, fabric paint and Intense crayons on commercial and hand dyed cottons, Bondaweb and a variety of threads. Raw edge appliqué with machine quilting is the method of construction. The quilt is not quite finished as a hand injury prevents the use of a cutting ruler, hand sewing and very controlled stitching. It will be bound with a 1/4 inch black binding once I can complete it. Completed quilt will be 15.5 x 24 inches.

Spring in the city

The name of my series is “City” and the theme of this challenge is “Green”.

I live in a very green city. There are a lot of trees and flowerbeds. I especially like spring in our city when the leaves and plants are so fresh and sunrays can get you everywhere.

So that was the starting point of my quilt: a lot of buildings, a lot of windows and a lot of green... and sunrays in the morning.

Dragonfly in Green

My theme for this year is dragonflies. I have always loved dragonflies, their gorgeous iridescent colours, their darting movements and their ability to land and be perfectly still for long periods. They are elegant and mysterious to me.

According to one website I went to, the dragonfly, in almost every part of the world symbolizes change and change in the perspective of self realization; and the kind of change that has its source in mental and emotional maturity and the understanding of the deeper meaning of life. These are things that I think we go through our entire lives, learning, developing and changing as we move through life. I also feel this is how my art is developing and therefore I feel the dragonfly is a good fit for my theme.

The green component after printing was more of a lime/yellow green which I feel possibly makes it look more yellow than green on screen. I used various green rayon thread to heavily quilt the piece which I hope has emphasized the green element.

Dragonfly in Green

Dragonfly in Green - Detail 1

Dragonfly in Green - Detail 2

Materials used: Polyester sheer, laser printed images, Madeira rayon thread, cotton batting.

Spring Challenge - Art Deco

Spring Challenge

Art Deco

The next challenge is to make a quilt influenced by Art Deco.

The term Art Deco refers to a style that spanned the boom of the roaring 1920s and the bust of the Depression-ridden 1930s. It affected all forms of design, from the fine and decorative arts to fashion, film, photography, transport and product design. The name Art Deco was taken from Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratives et Industrials Modernes held in Paris in 1925.

I have a book on Art Deco Textiles which mentions...

Techniques: Cubism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Futurism, Modernism, Pochoir

Artists: Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Derain, Dufy, Kokoschka, Kandinsky, Beckmann, Nolde, Boccioni, Severini, Balla, Paul Iribe, Seguy, Benedictus, George Barbier, Clarice Cliff

Some interesting information is available on the Victoria & Albert Museum website at V&A - Art Deco

There is a lot of inspiration to be found on the web, just google ‘art deco’ or any of the other key words I have mentioned and check out all the images. I have inserted a selection into this post.

 Cubism, Charles Braque

Textile designs by Eugene Seguy

Expressionism, Franz Marc

Fauvism, Andre Derain

Futurism Fortunato Depero

Pochoir

Clarice Cliff

Chrysler building New York

The Queen Mary