Photo suite 73 -- Don't fence me in (very much)

Art reader's digest

From "Art and Fear," by David Bayles and Ted Orland, 1993:

Given a small kernel of reality and any measure of optimism, nebulous expectations whisper to you that the work will soar, that it will become easy, that it will make itself.  And verily, now and then the sky opens and the work does make itself.  Unreal expectations are easy to come by, both from emotional needs and from the hope or  memory of periods of wonder.  Unfortunately, expectations based on illusion lead almost always to disillusionment.

Conversely, expectations based on the work itself are the most useful tool the artist possesses.  What you need to know about the next piece is contained in the last piece.  The place to learn about your materials is in the last use of your materials.  The place to learn about your execution is in your execution.  The best information about what you love is in your last contact with what you love. Put simply, your work is your guide: a complete, comprehensive, limitless reference book on your work.  There is no other such book, and it is yours alone.  It functions this way for no one else.  Your fingerprints are all over your work, and you alone know how they got there.  Your work tells you about your working methods, your discipline, your strengths and weaknesses, your habitual gestures, your willingness to embrace.

The lessons you are meant to learn are in your work.  To see them, you need only look at the work clearly -- without judgement, without need or fear, without wishes or hopes.  Without emotional expectations.  Ask your work what it needs, not what you need.

Form, Not Function 2 -- hand-stitching

I always like to look at the work in juried shows and try to identify common themes or techniques that give a hint to the jurors' sensibilities or to trends in the art world.  At Form, Not Function this year, there was some nice hand-stitching, carrying on a trend that I've been seeing in quilts for the past few years.

Mary Ruth Smith's spectacular piece included applique and piecing but almost all of its design came from stitching.

Passage, Mary Ruth Smith, 27 1/2 x 27 1/2" (detail below)

Julia Pfaff's piece is a whole-cloth quilt with fabric paint making the amoebic shapes.  Each little shape -- the size of a kidney bean -- is outlined with tiny, precise hand stitching, then echoed with equally precise machine stitching.

Contrast X, Julia Pfaff, 65 1/2 x 28 1/2" (detail below)

Form, Not Function -- the big winners

"Form, Not Function: Quilt Art at the Carnegie" opened last weekend, the tenth year for this show.  To celebrate, there's a beautiful catalog that shows not only everything from this show but also all the previous best-in-show winners, and a listing of all participants, jurors and judges from the past.

Best in show this year was Betty Busby -- the second year in a row!  Her quilt features a thread-painted center surrounded by an expanse of natural handwoven cotton and a sunburst of fat wrapped cords, quilted with big, beautiful, subtle hand seed stitches.

Betty Busby, Retia, 60 x 45" (details below)

This year the Carnegie received a grant that will fund a generous award of excellence -- in effect, the second place winner -- for five years.  It went to Judy Kirpich for her intricately pieced quilt.

Judy Kirpich, Circles No. 6, 57 x 61", detail below

What's notable about Judy's work is that all those circles are pieced in, not appliqued, not fused.  I've seen her working in person and still don't understand how she manages to get everything so perfectly flat.  And her quilting is wonderful, making the circles pop and giving lots of variety to the backgrounds.

Because the Carnegie was doing the catalog this year, it asked artists to deliver their work a few weeks early so the show could be judged and the winners listed in the catalog.  That also had the pleasant side effect of allowing the two big winners to be hung in the prime spots of the gallery, at the two ends of the long classical room, which showed them at their best.

I'll write more later this week about other works in the show that I liked.  Meanwhile, why not give yourself a present and buy a copy of the catalog?

Sign of the week

Modern Quilting -- according to the Wall Street Journal

Last Friday's Wall Street Journal carried an article on our old favorite issue:  "Modern Quilters Stress Simplicity, Edgy Subjects."  Yes, it's Modern Quilting, which I wrote about a lot two years ago. It got to be a WSJ subject because Meg Cox, who used to work there, is a quilt aficionada and every now and then will write a story for them about her new interests.  Meg called me a couple of weeks ago and wanted to chat about my ideas on Modern Quilting, and she ended up quoting me in her story.

The news peg for this story was that Meg attended QuiltCon, the first national show of the Modern Quilt Guild, in February.  I had read about QuiltCon on various blogs at the time, and thought that it looked a lot like all the other big quilt shows, but apparently it was a bit different in its demographics.  "Instead of being clogged with electric mobility scooters, as in many quilting conferences, the aisles of QuiltCon... were full of strollers," Meg wrote in the article.  "This was a tech-savvy crowd: The show's organizers counted 2,000 tweets and 4,500 Instagram posts. A surprising number of the posts were about tattoos."

Meg liked something that I wrote in my blog two years ago and quoted it in the article:  "This New and Different Movement... is neither New nor Different."  She also quoted me as saying that I've seen nothing recently to change my mind on that opinion.

I wasn't the only crabby old quilter quoted in the article.  Holice Turnbow, a longtime fixture on the traditional quilting circuit and co-founder of the Hoffman Challenge, said, "Of the 50 attributes they list as modern, workmanship seems to be about 48."

In 2011, when I was trying hard to figure out exactly what Modern Quilting was, I ascertained that Modern Quilters wanted to break the rules.  Two years ago I was never able to learn just what rules they wanted to break, but now, thanks to the Wall Street Journal article, we have more info on that front.  Seems that the most talked-about quilts in the show were ones featuring our favorite four-letter word.

Give a F*ck, group quilt

Many people who attended the show blogged about these quilts and the consensus was that it was so courageous for the quilters to make them and for the show organizers to display them.  The purpose of the group quilt pictured above, according to the project organizer, Chawne Kimber, was to challenge the notion that some words must be censored from quilts.  (Yet she coyly spelled the quilt's title with an asterisk....)

So now we know that Modern Quilters want to break the rules about four-letter words.

Other quilts that caused comment at the show included one of a gun dripping blood.  With the institutional memory of an old lady, I point out that quilts about guns are nothing new; Bean Gilsdorf had two gun pieces in Quilt National, in 2003 and 2005, and in my humble opinion, they were more subtle and artistically noteworthy.

Bang You're Dead, Jacquie Gering (at QuiltCon )

Ouija #1, Bean Gilsdorf (Quilt National '03)

I'm sorry I can't provide a link to the entire article; the WSJ website is subscription-only.