I was the lucky recipient of a copy of Art Quilt Portfolio: The Natural World, by Martha Sielman (Lark Books publishing). I was especially interested, because I’m going to be in the People and Portraits volume next year, so it was a joy to see how beautiful the book is: nice paper, good-sized pictures, lots of color, but enough writing to keep me interested. I’m into these books for the pictures, sure, but I love to read how artists think and work, and this book provides plenty of that.

There are 19 artists and 1 fiber art group profiled in the book, and a myriad of other artists who have one or two quilts in themed sections such as Animals or Leaves. Of course, my brain tries to play this out into the People and Portraits book and gets Men and Women and Children and Aliens (not the illegal kind, but the Area 51 kind) and Naked People as themed sections (guess where I go?)…but I’m sure they’ll be much more intelligent than that.

These themed sections mean we get to see a wide variety of nature-themed quilts beyond the artist profiles, which is a nice addition to the book. It’s not limited to just those artists, and there are some in the themed sections that surprised me…I did not know that Leslie Gabrielse had ever made a nature quilt…and it was quite a beautiful tree.

Having been through the interview process with Sielman, she does a good job of keeping the artist’s tone in their section. Also, there were artists I was not familiar with, like Ginny Smith and Cassandra Williams (although I recognized the giraffe quilt), and some favorites of mine, like Betty Busby and Annemieke Mein. While I love to see my old favorites, I also enjoy learning about new artists (this is why my blog list on Google Reader is so huge). Smith has some primitive-looking, yet brightly colored crows who are calling my name (not literally) and Williams’ Dance of the Deep, a quilt with a stunning octopus, impresses me with her realism on the face of traditional diamond piecing. I remember my mom showing me a book of Mein’s work many years ago…I’m as impressed with it now as I was then. And you’ve heard me go on about Busby before.

One of the parts I love about this book is that the artist seems to be talking directly to you. In Judith Trager’s section, she tells the reader to keep working: “Don’t ever stop working. Whatever your circumstances are, don’t ever stop making art…It is important to keep doing it, because it keeps you alive.” Hello sister! I’m trying. But yeah. I’m with you on that. We learn about their background, their choice to work in fiber, where they live as a connection to why they make nature-related art, and how they work on specific pieces. This adds to the worth of this volume. I’ve reviewed art quilt books before, and I am frustrated when it is all pictures and no story. I want to delve deep into the artist’s brain and figure out why they do what they do and what it means to them. This book provides all that.

I’m looking forward to reading through this book on the way to some soccer tournament (cough cough tomorrow!). I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys artists talking about their work, or those who like quilts of flowers and birds and trees and insects, because there are plenty of those to make you happy…definitely worth a purchase (it was on my wish list…so I guess I’m lucky it didn’t show up for my birthday).

Boychild drew for the winner of Masters: Art Quilts, Volume 2 this morning…I’ve sent an email to Linda M. and am waiting for her address to mail it off. Thanks to all who visited and commented…it’s always nice to hear from humans.

because I can’t be trusted to remember to post tomorrow about it! No really! I haven’t slept in days!

OK, so if you want the Masters: Art Quilts, Volume 2 that I offered up back here on this review post, then you need to go to that post and say YES! Pick ME! Because I deserve it!

Or you can just say you’re interested…whatever works for you. I’m having a hard time finding that much energy for that level of excitement, mostly because I’ve spent hours ironing turtles together. More about that later. Honestly, if you forget to click on the link and put your comment here, it’s not like I’m some crazy rules-hound who will refuse to put you in the drawing. And yes, Lark Books sent me this book for free, but I had already bought it, so it’s not like I’m getting anything for this, because I don’t ever really give stuff away (sorry, I’m just lame that way…plus I am a packrat and think I will need EVERYTHING when the end comes, which is why I keep watching Hoarders to scare myself into cleaning and throwing away stuff).

That was just TMI. Want the book? Tell me.

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.