Weather Conditions and Art

The other day I was setting up my dad's cable modem and new PC. He showed me several website of Boothbay artist Robert Colburn and several others. One of them quoted Lloyd Goodrich's essay on Winslow Homer, mentioning that Homer waited two years for a recurrence of the weather conditions he needed for a particular painting. I'm beginning to understand that mentality. Light, shadows, sun, wind, clouds, and haze, combine to form complex patterns that are often difficult to duplicate. And flora has its own cycle of leaves, blossoms, color, ripening, and decay.

So here I am waiting! Last winter I shot several photos of rose-hips on their barren bushes. In the summer, I started manipulating the best one to use in a quilt. My thought was to print it on cotton and organza in various sizes, and overlay with a fused applique of the main elements of the photo. But as I got into playing with the image, I realized that the backgrounds were too complex to easily rework, and that I should really take new shots that were more rigidly controlled.

In October, I walked out to the island with my camera, all ready to start shooting. Alas, the bushes were still covered with leaves! Pretty, yellow leaves, to be sure, but that wasn't what I wanted for this piece. So I waited... Now I'm excited to get up to Clark Island at Christmas, and hoping that conditions will be right and I'll get the perfect lighting. I may have to move branches around to get the right composition, but if all the details come together, I'll have the image I've been waiting for to start the first quilt project for 2010.

My stay at the Maine house this October was different from any time before. I had a planned schedule for telecommuting, and I had specific quilting objectives. Although I had hoped to get there a week or two earlier, work and health conspired to set the agenda. The fall foliage display was past its peak when I arrived, but my walks took me past the late bloomers - the maples that flaunted their colors beside the road, and the reluctant oaks whose leaves might have been overlooked, but for their stark points and graceful curves.

As a child, I picked up brightly colored leaves to sandwich between waxed paper. Somehow the iron preserved the color. Now, I plucked the leaves by shape and size, knowing that the color would come from my imaginings, and that the leaves themselves would curl and fade before I did them justice.

The maple leaf series, that I began in the fall of 2003 in Bala Cynwyd, took on a new life, a new excitement. Once the leaves were traced, I fragmented them to abstract and stylize the shapes.

Ultimately it worked! The first few layouts looked a little too much like palm trees, but threadwork came to the rescue.

There's more to come - each cycle of seasons brings a new perspective on the circle of life.

Dotted Batik Experiment

At the beginning of June 2009, I started exploring a dotted batik fabric. The gentle curve of the rows of dots suggested motion. I began cutting different rectangular and circular shapes and creating compositions to examine the interaction of the different colors. The paths of the dots were arranged to interact with the other shapes. I'm using beads to accent the rows of dots and carry the movement across some of the circles.

Although working on small pieces (most of these are between 6x9" and 9x12") is very effective for trying different approaches, and getting the work finished, it also makes it easier to create more variations. If you're not careful you can end up with a lot of pieces and it will take a lot of time to finish up and move on to another series.