Category: Art

Masters: Art Quilts, Volume 2 Giveaway

Back in August, I reviewed the second volume of Martha Sielman’s (and Lark Books’) Masters: Art Quilts, Volume 2. You can read it here, if you don’t remember all the pithy things I said. I focused mostly on the male quilters included in the book in August. Honestly, it’s hard to pick a few to focus on…each time I look at it, I like different artists. Today, for instance, I’m sorta fascinated with Karin Franzen’s birds. I saw some of her pieces at the La Conner Quilt Museum back in April 2009, and they are always more wonderful in person than photographed, but certainly that doesn’t stop me from studying her work in this book.

I had given Martha Sielman my name as being interested in reviewing the book, hopefully receiving a copy from Lark. As you might read back in July, I was too tempted by sitting at the SAQA table at IQF Long Beach to stop myself from buying the book, which is a good thing for you, because now I have an extra copy. I’ve had it all month, and wish I’d been organized enough to do this giveaway early enough so that someone could have had an extra holiday gift, but I was too busy to even deal with my credit card bill, so here we are…a New Year’s gift to you. Comment below and I’ll draw on January 1st and mail it off to you. (yes, I promise to remember to do this).

I emailed Lark this time and asked for some pictures…you know, like 20 of them. They thanked me for my interest and sent four. Hey, that’s four more than I had last time! So enjoy…

This is Emily Richardson’s After the Sea Ship (silk, acrylic paint, hand sewn)…

You can see quite a bit of her work at the Gross McCleaf Gallery. At the moment, that page just shows a bunch of empty boxes, but if you click on them, some fairly amazing photos of her work pop up…you can definitely see the hand-stitching and the luminosity of the silks and sheers. I’ve seen her work in person, and it is drop-dead gorgeous. I actually think this piece looks better in the book than it does in this picture.

I didn’t mention Gayle Fraas and Duncan Slade the last time I reviewed the book. I wasn’t sure I liked their pieces at first, but in retrospect, the combination of far-away landscapes or maps with a close-up of water seems to reflect the ultra-realism of the images combined with hand-stitching. Their technique and ability to work together seems seamless. They live near the water as well and it shows in their work.

Alice Beasley is another artist I didn’t mention, although I am interested in how she makes faces. She doesn’t flinch from prints in her portraits, and her work recently got her a spot in Quilt National’s current show, so I’m not the only noticing her work is intriguing and makes you look twice. I wish she would blog more often, but she does admit her issues with technology…there are plenty of us who have started blogging only to realize we don’t really want to talk to the world. I’d like to see Beasley’s work up close too, although this book does a fairly good job of showing me a variety of her work.

Risë Nagin is a long-known name in textile art, but her piece Gate keeps bugging me to go back and look at it again.

This site on American Art was the closest I could find to a website for her. You should go watch this great video of her design process, though…

I love listening to and reading about how artists make their work. The piece above is not a small one, by the way…it’s 70″ square.

I did mention Izabella Baykova in my previous review, and since seeing her work for the first time in the Masters volume, Martha Sielman also published a short article on her work in Quilting Arts, the October/November issue (which is somewhere in my house). The piece below is Little Night Serenade #13 Allegro.

I would love to see her work up close…it’s hard to imagine from the pictures what her techniques are…and of course, as another quilt artist, I want to know how she MAKES it. Actually, the images themselves are worth it to just see from afar, but I suspect the detail in windows of this piece are lost in the photographs. The book says she uses sheer silks and paint and embroidery to create her work…it must take many hours to make a piece like this one. Does she start with a drawing? Is there a photograph she uses? Is it all in her head? These are the things I want explained.

Linda MacDonald’s work is also in the Masters’ book…I’ve been intrigued by her work for years, mostly because I came from a screenprinting background and hers were the first quilts that incorporated what looked like a printmaking background in their style. She actually uses a freezer-paper pattern and airbrushes her pieces, but they have the black lines that remind me of lino printmaking. Her focus is environmental issues, so the cut stump of lost forests shows up often.

Dorothy Caldwell’s Bowl is smaller than it feels to me, being only 18″ square.

You can see a lot of her work here. In the Masters book, Sielman describes Caldwell as drawing many lines in the wax before printing, all those hatchmarks done by hand, very labor-intensive work. It seems the more time we spend on our work, the more it holds others’ attention. I wasn’t thrilled by Caldwell’s work before, but have gone back to look at it again and again, so it has obviously done its job well. The textures of the markmaking and the simple line of the bowl, so simple it doesn’t even connect properly, draws me back…and that blue polka-dotted fabric hanging from the side…is it in the bowl or outside? I really do like this piece after staring at it over and over again.

Simply put, the book is a treat to go back and view again and again…even the more geometric works, which generally don’t float my boat, some of them are growing on me, whether it’s the movement of colors or the shapes caused by the patterns. Collections like these are important to our turning the quilt-as-craft into quilt-as-art.

Now I can go back to my quiet house (kids at dad’s!) and finish cleaning the litter trays…my gift to the cats. It’s an exciting Xmas Eve here in the Nida household…remember to comment with a way for me to get a hold of you if you would like a copy of the Masters Volume 2 book.

I’m Not Crazy…An Exhibit, Not an Affirmation…

This is how busy I’ve been…I announced this on Facebook a week ago and haven’t had time to come over here and give what details I have. SAQA has a curator-in-training program that I tried to get into last year with my idea of an exhibit called Uncovered, focusing on the nude in textile art. The exhibit travels with the Mancuso quilt shows; in fact, the No Place to Call Home exhibit I was in last year that caused such a ruckus in Virginia was the first of these training exhibits. They were leery of the nudity and suggested I find a gallery venue (gee, I have those just lined up!) for the exhibit, and maybe someday I will. I applied again this year and was excited to learn last week that I was accepted into the program with this year’s attempt, I’m Not Crazy.

I can’t give full details yet, except that I’m the curator, not the juror (still working on that). The call for entries will officially go out in early January and entries will be due in the month of May, juried in June. The show will travel with all the Mancuso quilt shows for a year, which is very cool. Pieces need to be at least 20″ in width or height, no more than 50″ in width, and no more than 65″ in height. You do have to be a SAQA member to participate, but you don’t have to be in the United States.

Here is what I was thinking for the theme, based on some experiences with family members, friends, and friends’ family members who are all dealing with mental issues or the fallout from those issues…it’s pervasive.

Mental illness carries with it a stigma;  many of us have experience with disorders, temporary or permanent, curable or not, that in the past and in some cultures even today would be labeled as crazy.

The stigma of mental illness can make it difficult to admit its effect on our loved ones or ourselves. Disorders as common as anxiety or depression, or less common, like schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder, can have a devastating effect on families and friends, and on ourselves. It might be temporary or even curable, or it might not be either. Negativity towards those who have these disorders often causes many people to keep the diagnosis hidden from friends and family.

  • What does “crazy” look like?
  • What does it feel like?
  • How does the world look through the eyes of someone experiencing a panic attack or depression or other mental disorder?
  • How does loving or caring for someone with a mental disorder look and feel?

I’m looking for work that covers these experiences: from the eyes of the caregiver, the friend, the family member, and, of course, those who have experienced any of these disorders themselves. It doesn’t have to be depressing…in my family, we deal with death and illness and crazy by making fun, laughing, finding other ways to get through it. Sometimes all you can do is make jokes, because you’ve spent too much time worrying.

Anyway, think about it. I’ll post links as the prospectus is ready to post.

I have to say that while I was coming up with this idea (it crept up on me), this song kept going through my head…

And it still is…

Interpretations at the VAM and Other Bits of a Day

I went to the opening of Interpretations at the Visions Art Museum here in San Diego last weekend, but between negotiating between hungry/cranky teens, the number of people there, and my own exhaustion, I didn’t really feel like I had seen the show. I didn’t have the time and space to really look at the pieces, plus I didn’t write anything down about pieces, which made it hard to make a concrete review possible.

So I went back today. Today is a school holiday, but grades are due Monday, so I spent a lot of the day dealing with that and ferrying girlchild around, but my mom hadn’t seen the show either, so we headed out there around lunchtime. No pictures are allowed in the gallery…I have this one of the door…

That IS exciting! If you’re one of the artists featured below and you’d like me to add a picture of your piece to this post, let me know and I’ll either steal it (with your permission) off your website, or you can send me a picture…I’m all about advertising for you!

One thing I like about this show is that it has a nice variety of types of quilt art, from bright to earth tones, from abstract to figurative to decorative. There was nothing particularly realistic…even the few photo pieces were altered or zoomed in enough that they became more abstracts than anything else. There was a lot of dense quilting and hand-stitching and markmaking on fabric. There was a lot to look at…of course, part of that is having 30+ artists in the show, rather than a more concentrated focus on 2 or 3 artists, when you get to see the depth of a person’s work.

As I mentioned before, in the past, all the works were on the website, but this time, there are just a few, so I will find artists’ websites when I can.

As you come into the exhibit, Alicia Merrett’s Mapping Earth is a bright spot on the wall. She has recently started making what she calls textile maps, which look like views from the sky of the patterns of roads and fields on the earth, but it’s really her use of color that makes this piece sing. You can see it on her website under the exhibitions tab.

Vicki L. Carlson’s piece Worlds Apart is also going to be in the Art Quilt Elements exhibit, so here’s your chance to see it before it wanders off to the East Coast. It’s an interesting piece that has been dyed in overlapping circles of color. I can’t find a website for her, but her piece is currently on the main Interpretations page linked above. I actually like it better from a distance, as it looks like the overlaps are more sheer and multilayered; close up you can see that it’s all one layer.

Betty Busby’s piece Plexus reminds me of lizard skin in 4 parts. I don’t like this piece as much as her other work, but it’s still fascinating to look at, because of her skillful use of shading to make the piece three-dimensional. You can see Plexus if you scroll down the Macros page here…along with some other fascinating pieces. Even more interesting is her blog, where she talks about some of her techniques and how she works. I’m always fascinated by the artist’s mind and process.

Lisa Kijak’s Neon Schwinn Bicycle caught my eye. Her blog tells the story of the unlit neon signs that she is reproducing in fabric. This one is from the Safety Cycle Bike Shop in Los Angeles and is shown on her blog.

Pamela Allen has a piece in the show called Fishing Derby, Mesopotamia 1200 BC, which just made my daughter sing this song (while bouncing up and down in front of the quilt).

(They Might Be Giants singing The Mesopotamians, which she learned in school, of course)

I always like Allen’s work; this one has some great sky quilting and a tassel for a horse’s tail. If you scroll down on this page, you will see it.

Judith Plotner’s piece Sunset II has some interesting hand-stitching in it that really makes the piece. When I went to find a webpage for Judith, Google got all violent with me and said her site might contain malware of some sort. I guess I’m paranoid, because I didn’t keep going. You can see a few of her pieces here, on the Surface Design webpage. If you know Judith, you might tell her to Google her webpage and try to make sense of their warning.

In Peggy A. Brown’s piece, Another Form I, the black lines criss-crossing the piece add interest and focus to the piece. As with Plotner’s piece, I try to imagine the work without that one element (the handstitching or the black lines), and it really emphasizes how important something as simple as a few lines or stitches might be. Brown is a watercolor artist who translates her watercolor work into fabric.

Jeanne M. Marklin’s piece Grief does an amazing job of translating that feeling into fabric. There’s the sense of drowning and falling down and inky darkness and spots of light. You can see it on her blog here. There is no explanation of the piece on the blog, although she talks about learning shibori.

My biggest problem with writing this post (besides no pictures) is that I’ve added about 5 blogs to my reader…like I need MORE.

Paula Kovarik’s quilt Pundit is stark and graphic, but the best part is the finger sticking up into the air seems to affect the quilting lines. It was not a surprise to me then to see on her website that quilting is a significant element in her work AND that she is a graphic designer. Both are obvious in this work, which is on her blog here.

Gillian Moss’ work Second Chance, which can be seen on the Interpretations website here, utilizes a variety of non-standard quilting fabrics (some wool, sparkly bits, batik, and leather) that don’t seem like they would go together to make this simple but beautiful piece. She uses hand- and machine-stitching to attach the pieces and emphasize their shapes, but the key is the recycling of fabrics that already WERE something…I swear that green wool plaid came out of my stash. I had a skirt in progress in that fabric from my teen years…seriously.

I was pleased to see Shelley Brenner Baird, a co-conspirator in Sightlines, at the opening; she had traveled from Ohio for better weather (whoops, sorry), but her piece Plot caught my eye with its tight quilting and markmaking reminiscent of peeling paint and graffiti. You can see it on her website here (or below, with her permission). It’s hard to get a sense of its size and presence on the web; it plays much better hanging on a wall.

Continuing with the Sightlines connection, across from Shelley’s piece was Virginia Spiegel’s Boundary Waters 51. I thought I had never seen one of her pieces up close and personal, only on the web, and the detailed stitching was amazing. There is a definite sense of movement from all the color and stitching. You can see it here. Of course, I HAD seen another of her pieces (seriously, I’m still not remembering…must have been in another mindframe)…Boundary Waters 50 is in Creative Force with my piece Lost. I seriously can’t even visualize it at the moment…strange how the brain edits experience. I am sitting here with my eyes closed, trying to imagine the exhibit, which I saw in Houston AND Long Beach. Sigh. The boychild asked me the other day about where he got his memory ability from…I am very good at photographic-type memory stuff, remembering where I saw something on a page, but not always with remembering tasks (that’s what a calendar and an iPhone are for)…so this is really bugging me. I really can see a pretty good facsimile of the show in my head, and it’s not there. Sorry, Virginia.

Marianne Burr was at the opening. If she caught you looking at her piece, she handed you her card, which I found amusing. Her piece In the Desert combines a graphic design of gear shapes with hand-stitching, in her characteristic style. I’m a sucker for graphic work, so this fits. Her website has many example of her work, although I don’t see this piece.

Sandra Poteet’s piece Monochrome I: Deep Inky caught the boychild’s eye, presumably because it was mostly black, but way down in the gray flat areas at the bottom (because most of it is textured), are a couple of divers, an octopus, and some fish stitched out in a thin black line. She calls this type of piece a “Schrunchie,” based on what she does to the fabric…if you scroll down a bit, Deep Inky is on this page.

Lori Lupe Pelish’s piece Something, Nothing, Everything is a beautiful triptych. I’ve always liked how she takes the tiny calicoes and Civil-War-type fabrics and meshes them together to make her portraits. Each of the figures in the three small quilts looks like they’re thinking…about something, nothing, everything. I could not find a picture of this piece on the web, which is unfortunate, because it’s truly wonderful.

I didn’t take notes on all the quilts. My mom liked stuff that didn’t interest me…she loved the Caryl Bryer Fallert piece that didn’t rock my boat. I believe it’s this piece, Chromatic Feathers #1. That’s why you should always go to art exhibits with other people…they make you stop and look at the stuff that you wouldn’t necessarily stop for…I did not realize how freakin’ TINY her zigzag was…I don’t think I ever stitch that small…plus mom pointed out the hand-dyes. There were a few others like that which didn’t make it into my notes, so don’t feel bad if I didn’t mention you…I had limited time (and girlchild was calling and texting me while I was gone).

The show is up until January, so if you’re in town, you might want to check it out…it does have a nice variety of pieces. With that, I should try to run some of my multitude of errands, eh? Whatever. I really want to hole up in here and make art until April (must have something to do with the rainy weather and lack of teenagers).