Protected: What I Did over Easter Weekend
Art Quilt Portfolio: People and Portraits, Review and Giveaway
I love that I get books to review…it’s even better when it’s a book I already own, so I can give away the extra. I got an artist copy of the Art Quilt Portfolio: People and Portraits, but I also received a review copy, so if you want it, just comment to that effect and I’ll draw names next Friday, April 5, and mail it out to you.
I did read this book cover to cover. It’s my favorite kind of book, full of a good variety of artists and pictures, with nice big pictures of the art, and insights into what the artists think about their work and their process. Yes, I am one of the featured artists, but if I didn’t like the book, I wouldn’t be giving a positive review.
Martha Sielman did a great job tailoring the questions to the specific work of the artists and providing us with some people we’ve all heard of and some who were merely blips on my radar (and even some I’d never heard of, which just means I’m not listening hard enough).
The profiled artists include Joan Sowada, Bodil Gardner, Maria Elkins, Colette Berends, Pat Kumicich, Sherry Davis Kleinman, Cheryl Dineen Ferrin, Yoshiko Kurihara, Lora Rocke, Margot Lovinger, Ulva Ugerup, Viola Burley Leak, Margene Gloria May, Lori Lupe Pelish, Sonia Bardella, Leni Wiener, Mary Pal, Jenny Bowker, myself, Pam RuBert, and Carol Goddu. Each featured artist had about 6 quilts pictured on 6 pages. I liked that each artist covered topics that were specific to their work and lives. In trying to answer interview questions in the past, I know that trying to answer wide-open and vague questions is difficult. Sielman definitely did her homework before sending out questions to the artists, and you can clearly hear the artist’s voice in each section.
There is a wide variety of work here, from the more realistic work done by Bardella, Elkins, and Rocke; to the more abstract pieces of Pelish, Burley Leak, and May; into the whimsical and expressive work of RuBert, Ugerup and Gardner; to Pal, Dineen Ferrin, and Bowker’s intriguing and revealing portraits of particular people. I was fascinated by Kurihara, Berends, and Goddu’s use of fabrics, although they don’t work in a similar fashion at all. I have been lucky to have been following the work of Lovinger for years, and Wiener’s blog is a great background to how she creates her work. Sowada and Davis Kleinman’s work have been on my radar for a good long time, and Kumicich is a recent find, as she is one of the artists in the I’m Not Crazy exhibit I curated.
I would suggest reading Elizabeth Barton’s review as well…she makes an interesting comparison between this volume and the Nature volume of Art Quilt Portfolio. She brings up a point that I also noticed, that there is no contact information in each artist’s section, and even the information at the back is fairly sparse. Although I know how to Google, it would be nice to have that information, even if half of it were out of date by publication…maybe that is why they leave it out.
I mentioned when I reviewed the Nature volume that I liked the galleries of other artists, but they seemed to make more sense in the Nature volume. There were logical topics. I suggested that for the People and Portraits, coming up with gallery titles that were relevant and yet were a means to gather work together would be difficult, and I was apparently right about that. I’m not sure I see the connections in some of the galleries…it might be OK to just not title them. I did enjoy the variety of other artists working with the figure, especially artists whose work I had not seen before. I think that is one of the great strengths of this type of book, in that it is not predictable, that the artists we might expect to see profiled here were not necessarily the artists chosen.
I’m looking forward to seeing what Sielman comes up with next. Again, if you want my copy, comment…
Protected: Shhh…I’m Working…
Dinah Sargeant at College of the Canyons
I have some favorite artists out there. One of them is Dinah Sargeant, whose work I’d seen on and off in books (Quilt National, Quilt Visions, etc.) over the years. I think the first piece of hers that I saw in person was in SAQA’s traveling exhibit Creative Force, which included one of my pieces as well. I stared at hers for a long time…her work seems to ask for that level of attention. I had the pleasure of finally meeting her at the Visions opening last October.
I saw a notice of a solo show of hers up in the Los Angeles area, opening last weekend, and I thought about going up there. It was the first day of my Spring Break; plus we have friends up there that we rarely see. It’s a trek to LaLa Land, but it seemed like something that was worth doing, so we headed out Saturday morning.
The exhibit is at College of the Canyons Art Gallery in Santa Clarita, California, and runs through April 25. The exhibit may be viewed Mon-Thurs 11:00-3:00 or by appointment. I know the hours are limited, but it’s worth making a call to see it.
The exhibit was well worth it. I’ve never seen so many Sargeant pieces in one place, and I had never seen one of her dolls in person, only in pictures. Both fare much better in real life, and the gallery was well-lit and a big, open space that was well-suited to standing back and giving her work some space.
Her dolls invite careful examination…there are so many details and the hands are fascinating…
Her website has closeups of many of the dolls (I was not great at taking photos, again!). I did get a closeup of this one’s face and heart area…
The arrows shooting off the head and heart area, combined with the hand-stitching on the face (and the beautiful quilts behind!) made this doll one of my favorites (of course, I forgot to get its name).
This is 2-Be…a much darker doll, with a plastic belly ball full of liquid and fetus…
Behind her is Seer and Fledgling…here is a better picture of Fledgling…
But even that doesn’t do the piece justice. The color vibrated in the light-filled gallery. The face is enigmatic; the figures are vague shapes, but even then, it is clear that the figure holds a bird and a nest is behind. Someone is being helped out of the nest.
Echo was another favorite of mine, with the dogs in the bottom left and the ribbons spiraling throughout, seeming to encircle imaginary figures.
It’s interesting that I never saw the face in the bottom right until I was looking at the photo here. There is so much depth of color and imagery in her work that it takes a long stare to believe you’ve seen all of the piece. Like I said, these are so much more alive and intriguing in person…I am so glad I went up to see this exhibit.
This piece, Link, was installed under beautiful natural light, which highlighted the colors and depth of dye throughout.
There is a sense of escape in the birdlike creatures who fly up, while the other figures sit in their glass domes, connected only by the orange line.
This gives you a better idea of the space given to each piece…it’s amazing how clean white walls enhance the work.
Orbit is the doll on the left, and the quilt is Tentacle Woman.
The movement in Sargeant’s quilts is part of what draws me to them, along with the use of color and abstraction. You know there is a great deal of emotion in these quilts, as they try to communicate with you. They just keep pulling me back to try to make sense of the message.
I recommend the exhibit…it’s worth a trip if you are in the Los Angeles area. I will be enjoying another one of her pieces at Quilt National in May.
Kathy Nida 