Here’s some more of my impressions of Quilt National 2013, full quilt pictures, and some of the other events that weekend. Again, I always think you should buy the book. We should support the institutions that support us the best we can.

There were many opportunities to look at and photograph the art, yet I still find there were some I missed, especially as I was reviewing my mom’s pictures, realizing I didn’t really look at everything. At some point, I think it’s just overwhelming. I’m only going to provide artist links to those I didn’t link to in the last Quilt National post, mostly for my own sanity (there are LOTS of them!). So go back to HERE to the Artist Talks post if you think there should be a link and there isn’t.

Here are some general views of the space, which was large and open. In this photo, you can see the right side of Robin Schwalb’s Jive Boss Sweat, then the right side of Barbara Schneider’s Forest Floor, var. 2. To the right is Susan Brook’s Together and Sandy Gregg’s Listen to the Rhythm of the Falling Rain. Way in the back, you can just see Katherine Knauer’s Solar City. In the forefront is Kate Sturman Gorman’s Bernadette in Artichokes, with Dinah Sargeant’s Old Child and Paula Kovarik’s Round and Round It Goes barely visible to the right.

In this photo, most of Susan V. Polansky’s piece No One But You is visible on the left, and now you can see all of Robin Schwalb’s Jive Boss Sweat, then the left side of Barbara Schneider’s Forest Floor, var. 2. Polansky said that her quilt was about being lost in the moment. She said it took 3 years to make the quilt, that she had so many distractions going on, but that celebrating the moment was part of what the quilt was about.

On the left is Anne Smith’s quirky Gabriel and on the right is Leslie A. Hall’s Casual Query #3.

To the right of Hall’s piece is Susan Shie’s Dragon Sushi: 9 of Pyrex Cups in the Kitchen Tarot, with Rachel Brumer’s Large Regional Still Lives visible to the right.

This is another view of Polansky and Schwalb’s pieces in the distance, with Mary Rowan Quinn’s High Expectations in the center. Sandy Gregg’s Listen to the Rhythm of the Falling Rain is on the far right.

In the very back corner is Bonnie Peterson’s Kora (Pilgrimage), with Dale Preston Barry’s Yellow Ladder to the right. My quilt Spread Out on the Pavement is next and Sara Impey’s Bitter Pills is the next to the right. On the far right is Linda Levin’s Central Park West Sunrise.

This picture shows the very rightmost side of Sidnee Snell’s Riveted on the left, followed by the right side of Marianne R. Williamson’s Hidden Falls. On the far right is Miriam Nathan-Roberts’ Salt & Pepper, followed by Patty Hawkins’ Sunlit Canyon. You can see in this picture how long the building is.

This is Lisa Kijak’s El Cortez, Las Vegas, with Cynthia Corbin’s Threadbare to the right.

Rita Merten’s Plastic Trees #5, Olive Grove in Ampolla, Spain, is to the left, with Kerby C. Smith’s Graffiti Series: Chain Link on the right.

I think that’s Denise Linet’s Letters to Myself–Page 4 on the far left, with Linda Colsh’s Defiant in the far back. Colsh was one of the jurors, and she talked about calligraphic marks and big strokes, which are apparent in her piece. Beatrice Lanter’s Blossoms is in the foreground. Behind it to the right are Karen Tunnell’s Bubbles and Carol Watkins‘ Vintage. Peggy Brown’s Soliloquy II peaks out on the right. Brown talked about fusing paper onto fabric, then painting over it.

Another view of Polansky’s piece is behind Dinah Sargeant’s Old Child, facing Susan Shie’s Dragon Sushi: 9 of Pyrex Cups in the Kitchen Tarot.

From here, I have shots of some of the quilts…I can never really explain what catches my eye, but know that it changed throughout the weekend.

This is Susan Shie’s Dragon Sushi: 9 of Pyrex Cups in the Kitchen Tarot. You could stare for hours at this piece and still have something to look at later. Shie always does a good job of documenting her pieces on her website (above), so I suggest you read her story. She did a series of drawings about a trip she took to Spain in 2012. This piece has many of the adventures and stories about her trip.

Next is Lorie McCown’s piece My Grandmother’s Dresses. Someone was talking to me when McCown was talking, so all I had typed into my phone was “Frida Kahlo.” I walked over and looked at her quilt again and blanked. Luckily, Lorie is an online friend and she saved me by sending me a short explanation. She had been reading Frida’s biography and wanted to base her work on a personal, biographical level…she called it “digging the well,” which she claims I do as well. Although I’ve never called it that, it’s true that a lot of what I draw is personal. She used her granny’s old clothing and embroidery and handwork to refer back to how she started in sewing…which is how I started too. The simple forms of the dresses repeated throughout is a nice contrast to the textures in the fabrics themselves; there’s a detail in my next post that shows this a bit better.

This is a full picture of Laura Fogg’s Jammin’, which I described in the last post on the artists’ talks. You can see the circles that I think of as coffee cup marks even now that I can see the echo of the center of the guitars in her stitching.

This is most of Paula Kovarik’s Round and Round It Goes. My camera was being a nasty beast and refusing to let me see anything in the viewfinder, so this is the best I have…that said, the best way to see her piece is in the many detail shots (like on the endpapers of the catalog). The details are amazing (next post!). She started with a recycled tablecloth, and the goal was to make it pretty, like a doily, until you get up close. There is nasty bad stuff balanced by beauty, dead fish near the sun rising, wildlife abounding near oil derricks.

Dinah Sargeant’s Old Child is beautiful and subtle…I meant to ask her about how she gets the fabrics to look the way she wants…does she just throw dye around or is there a purpose? Does she dye for just that quilt? Silly me, I sat next to her for at least an hour Saturday night and forgot to ask her all the questions that were in my head while I was photographing it. I will just have to chase her down again. This is a series about the passage of time. Her dad is going to be 95, so these quilts are like stories, showing the circular recognition between parent and child…as I and my parents age, I can see those relationships in her work.

Brienne Elisabeth Brown’s Moonset is another very subtle piece from a distance. She says she is fascinated by moods and monsters, so when her husband interrupts her detailed stitching time, sometimes she sews his details into one of the monsters in her moon. She sews very slowly, which I think is the only way to put those creatures in her quilts. I have a detail coming up in a future post.

This is my own Spread Out on the Pavement. It seems dark in every photo…it IS a dark quilt, I guess. So my dad and some other viewer noticed a snake tongue between her legs…which I didn’t actually remember putting there. Remember that I did the original drawing (which is part of the quilt) in 2001…and then in 2012, I interpreted it in fabric. Looking at the drawing, I don’t know if I meant it to be the crease between calf and thigh or what…but when I chose the fabrics in 2012, I obviously went for snake tongue. Good catch, Dad.

This is Bonnie Peterson’s Kora (Pilgrimage). She talked about a trip to Beijing the year before the Olympics and issues with the Chinese government and Tibet. She used monks’ sayings and Tibetan prayer wheels in her piece to represent treaties between China and Tibet. The piece refers to some of the Tibetan rituals.

Dianne Firth’s Storm was amazing in that it is largely transparent and creates an interesting shadow on the wall behind. She is a landscape architect by trade and likes the idea of minimalist ideas capturing the ephemeral, passing moments. She used transparent materials to show the movements of air and the turmoil of storm effects. She was trying to show the angry nature of air changes in a storm…but also play with the idea that we can’t see air; we can only see the markers of air movement.

Shin-hee Chin’s Florence Nightingale was a differently constructed piece, reminding me of the crocheted circular rugs that my grandfather used to crochet.

Elizabeth Barton’s Legacy shows her grandson holding the oil derrick on his back. There were many quilts related to the environment in this exhibit. The idea of resting our oil greed on the backs of our children and grandchildren is certainly one of our legacies.

You can see the traditional roots in Eleanor McCain and Kevin Womack’s Swaddling to Shroud–Birthing Bed. Stay tuned for a detail in the next post that will enlighten you as to why that viewer is so close to the quilt.

Anne Smith’s Gabriel really is a colorful and playful quilt, especially with the pink tennies hanging down off the bottom of Angel Gabriel’s feet.

Judith Content’s Cenote Azul was stunning. Content was another one of the jurors; her pieces always have a sense of peace and beauty that glows from within. She talked about being inspired by nature’s waterways, especially coastal waterways in Northern California, but that this piece was based on a freshwater marsh on the Rio Grande right before a monsoon hit.

A side view of Barbara Schneider’s Forest Floor, var. 2. shows you some of the 3D aspects of this piece.

Brooke Atherton’s SpringField won Best of Show and was an amazing piece of work. The details were mind-boggling. She talked about journaling, saying that everything on the quilt was there for a reason. She called them icons and said if you touched one, it told a story, and all those stories were woven together into a larger story.

My mom captured Kate Sturman Gorman talking about Bernadette in Artichokes. She emphasized the importance of family history, stating that the world is made up of stories, not patterns. This is her aunt and it shows the migration from the old world to the new world. The plants in the foreground are actually thistles, but she liked artichokes better.

Susan Elizabeth Cunningham’s NetWork 1 is digitally printed photos of a Christo installation.

This is another view of Lanter’s Blossoms with Linet’s piece on the right and Christine Chester’s piece Layers of Memory on the left.

My mom captured Katie Pasquini Masopust in front of her piece Dolente (Sorrowfully).

This is Carol Goossens’ piece As Summer Slowly Fades…

Judy Hooworth’s piece Creek Drawing #8 mimics the movements of water with very simple line movement.

Pamela Allen’s My Town by the River is different than most of her portrait pieces…strangely calm.

Judith Plotner’s Urban Melody shows her continuing work with graffiti, which she photographs and then plays with in Photoshop. She screenprints parts of it and then uses raw canvas and paint to complete her pieces, leaving edges raw. I thought it was interesting that she talked about living off the grid far away from the city, but all her recent work is city-based.

Molly Allen’s No One Knows Not Even Poets How Much the Human Heart Can Hold –Zelda Fitzgerald is a different piece. The title is included, pieced into the quilt.

This is Sidnee Snell’s Riveting about the bridge she is apparently obsessed with. A friend and I compared Snell’s piece to another photo-derived piece…hers glows with depth and light that can only be achieved by multiple layers of cloth and stitching.

Miriam Nathan-Roberts’ Salt & Pepper did start out as a photograph, but she wrote in the catalog about how important it is to her that she significantly alters the digital image with her hand, her stitching. She did well with portraying so many layers of glass and shiny metal in fabric, always a difficult prospect.

Here is Deidre Adam’s piece Tracings III, with my dad standing next to it. I’ve watched video of how Adams creates her pieces with paint and texture, and they are even more amazing in real life. Photographs just don’t show the glow and texture coming off the real thing.

Here is a good shot of Marian Zielinski’s Goodnight, Sweet Prince, a fitting tribute to her dad.

I have another post of detail shots that I’m working on…it may in fact take me another three days. I’m a wordy beast.

On Saturday afternoon, I attended the SAQA conference upstairs in the Dairy Barn, but that will need to be another post as well, or I will never finish this. Saturday evening was a pizza dinner in the same room…I can’t remember if that was a SAQA thing or an artist thing or what, but that was some of the best part, talking to other artists about their art.

On Sunday morning, I went to the Friends of Fiber Art breakfast. My table mates included Deb Cashatt of Pixeladies fame on the left; Beth Smith from Visions Art Museum (we followed each other back home via Phoenix); the infamous Del Thomas, whose blog I’ve read for years; Marianne Burr; Karen Rips; and her husband Ted.

We had some interesting conversations about art, glass, blogging, and taking photographs while driving…like you do.

The Dairy Barn itself is an old dairy barn…shocking, I know.

This is a side view, with the Ohio quilt block on the barn.

This is the view as you drive up to the space.

Here is another view, with beautiful Ohio skies in the background.

This pretty bird was hanging out in the parking area, right outside a small herb garden.

We did make one short trip into Athens for caffeine and sugar. Here is my photo of a random building in Athens.

We are obviously not in Earthquake Country…that building is made of bricks!

This long-winded sign made me laugh.

Sometimes I have to write directions like this on my tests for matching sections, so kids know what to do…it seems there must be an easier way. I know California prefers short, incomprehensible signs, which are also fun to photograph.

My next and last Quilt National post is all about the details, my favorite part.