Form, Not Function 4 -- realistic people

I was surprised at the number of representational works at FNF this year.  Of the representations, most were of people, and mostly faces.  Here are some of the more realistic treatments:

Linda Anderson, Remembering 

Linda was a prizewinner at last year's FNF, using the same technique of fabric painting plus intricate multicolor threadwork to make beautifully accurate portraits.

Deborah Hyde, Monkeys In My Hair (Evie), detail below

Deborah is another repeater, in both appearance and technique, having been in FNF in 2019, 2017 and 2016.  All of her quilts are pieced from tiny squares of fussy-cut print fabrics, about a half-inch apiece.  This year she's added little cartoony critters,  including monkeys, in and around the little girl's hair, emphasized with a bit of hand stitching.

Finally, my favorite of the realistic portraits is this tour-de-force of hand stitching.

Shin-hee Chin, The Evening Hour of a Hermit, details below

The painterly strokes of this stunning image are made from long strands of perle cotton, stitches that are interlaced in deep tangles of thread that only occasionally go through to the back layer of the quilt.

Faces also came in other varieties than super-realistic; I'll show you some of them in another post.

Form Not Function 3 -- bindings

Ingrid Lincoln left a comment on my last blog post: "I know these are photos so I may not be seeing everything, but it appears these quilts do not have the usual bindings.  Are bindings out for art quilts?"

Good eye, Ingrid!  You're right that none of the quilts I've shown so far have bindings.  And after I read the comment, I looked through all my photos and discovered that not a single quilt in FNF has a traditional binding.  Last year, only three out of 17 had bindings.  Not sure I'd say they're "out," but I think it's safe to say that bindings are not the standard finish for art quilts these days.   

Lee Sproull, Archilinea, detail

Why is that?  I've delivered many rants on this subject, so I have thought it through.  In my opinion, contemporary quilters who want their work to be seen as art feel a need to distance themselves from traditional quilts.  Although we love the format and the feel of quilts, we don't want people to immediately see our work as something their grandmother would have made and put on the bed.  One way to sever ties with tradition is to omit the binding.

In addition, omitting the binding mirrors a trend in contemporary painting in which traditional frames are no longer necessary.  Painters often feel that frames, especially the elaborate models that surround so many older works, are too constraining.  They hold the picture in, instead of letting it breathe freely and occupy its own space confidently.  Go to a gallery or contemporary museum and many, if not most of the paintings will be unframed.  

Bobbe Nolan, Flyover 10 -- Dancing in the Rainbow Mountains, detail

If you don't finish a quilt with a traditional binding, you can either leave the edges raw or overcast (don't shudder -- sometimes that looks just fine) or use a facing, a strip of fabric applied much like a binding but turned entirely to the back so it's invisible.  Facings are especially useful for quilts with jagged, irregular edges.  (Here's my tutorial on how to make perfect facings without lumpy corners, and how to face a curved edge.)

I'm a bit conflicted about bindings.  I usually go with facings because of wanting to look less like quilts, more like art.  But bindings are easier to do, way less fiddly, even with mitered corners.  They lie flatter because there's less bulk. In a few situations you want that crisp narrow contrast edge for artistic value. And in others, you can make the binding into a non-event by matching the color of the adjacent piecing.   (Here's my tutorial on how to make perfect bindings: part 1, cutting; part 2, sewing; part 3, folding and stitching.)

I advise my students to learn both methods of finishing, and choose the one that seems to work best for the situation.  

Form, Not Function 2 -- more abstraction

Three of the top four winners at this year's FNF were abstract quilts, and there were several more that caught my eye.

Margaret Black, Curb Appeal 20

Margaret has been a repeated winner in the big quilt shows, including best of show at Quilt National four years ago.  As you can tell by the title, she's played this tune before -- lots of black and white, especially in narrow "ladders" punctuating neighborhoods of various colors.  Intricate piecing of small bits, spots of brilliant color popping out from the overall picture.  I'm always intrigued by trying to note how and whether artists with long series try something new.  What I see new in piece #20 compared to #6 and #7 in past FNF shows are the long striped panels in neutrals, especially prominent in the northwest and southeast corners.  

Denise Roberts, MITOTE #12

Denise is another quilt all-star, a regular at all the big shows and having won the Quilts Japan Prize at Quilt National four years ago.  She's been using the same sinuous curve piecing for some time, but this year it's a much more complex composition than she has done before.  The different colored curves stay neatly in their layers, the palest colors on top and the darkest far away.

Daren Redman, Feel Like Dancing

Daren's is the cheeriest of the bunch, with large shapes in bright, clear colors.  It's a kind of sampler of different ways to pep up a skinny vertical rectangle with some sort of contrast pattern.  A very close look reveals that she apparently quilted the piece in sections, then invisibly joined the panels -- a beautifully executed trick.

I'll show more quilts from FNF in subsequent posts.  Meanwhile, the show is on display at the Carnegie Center for Art and History in New Albany IN through July 17, and I know you would like it if you were to visit. 

Happy birthday!

Today is my father's 108th birthday, although he did not live to blow out the candles.  He died in 2007 but every year on his birthday I like to do a little something to remember him.  Nine years ago I wrote this blog post, which if you even read it to begin with have probably forgotten, so I won't feel guilty reprinting it now. 

Since this blog is mainly about art, I'll take this opportunity to reminisce a bit about how my father taught me about art.  Although he and my mother were both only one generation from pretty damn poor and uneducated, out of the blue they both developed a love of art that was quite unexpected in the dark days of the depression.  Dad began to acquire art as a very young man and was quite proud of his growing collection.  Indeed, buying art was one of the most important activities of his life, a passion he instilled in his children as well.

Among his World War II souvenirs was this lovely watercolor of Weilburg, Germany, which he purchased from an impoverished German artist he ran into on his military rounds.  The purchase price, modest though it was for Dad, allowed the artist and his family to buy food for several weeks.

Shortly after the war, Dad was asked to judge an art contest for his local museum.  His honorarium consisted of the second-place winner, this gorgeous picture of Saginaw, Michigan, with the Saginaw River in the foreground.  The steeple at the right was the church where my parents were married and my sister and I were baptized.

When I was about 10, Dad took me on a Christmas shopping mission -- we went to an art fair and bought a painting that was supposed to be a secret gift for my mother.  It showed up under the tree with an envelope reading "A surprise for Vi!"  But when she opened the card, it said "The surprise is that this painting is for Kathy!"  It was the first piece of art that was mine alone, and the first of dozens, if not hundreds, that Dad gave to me.

All three of these paintings now hang in my home and whenever I see them -- wherever I turn -- I am reminded of how my father opened my eyes and my world to art.  A favorite family activity was to hit an art fair (the Cheap Art Fair was the best of all) and buy a bunch of new stuff.  We shopped at the low end of the food chain but managed to find plenty of lovely things.  The occasional dud didn't cause all that much financial regret, and probably made some artist quite happy.

After my parents died, my sibs and I divvied up the artwork, a process that began long before our parents' demise, has taken years to accomplish and still isn't complete.  I'm now trying to pass some of the art along to succeeding generations, continuing Dad's legacy, passing down both the tangible and the ineffable.

Edmund Arnold and Baby Kathy

So Happy Birthday, Dad!  You're here in every room of the house, living on in the art.

Form Not Function 1 -- the big winners

I missed the opening of Form, Not Function, the juried quilt show at the Carnegie Center in New Albany IN, but finally made it over to visit.  It's a striking show, nicely hung, with not a dud in the place.  Three of the four big winners were large abstract quilts, but in three quite different flavors of abstraction.

Best in Show: Karen Schulz, Objects in This Mirror 

Karen has been in the top tier of the art/quilt circuit for several years, winning best in show at Quilt National twice and jurying this year's QN.  Her spare and powerful composition uses a technique that always intrigues me, juxtaposing seemingly unrelated parts to make a surprisingly coherent whole.  Here her various techniques include piecing, couching and painting with both dye and acrylic.

 

Kerri Green, Graded Discourse

This cheerful quilt features bright solid colors, overlapping shapes and elegantly pieced curves in a Venn diagram sort of composition.  An arc of black and white gives a punch of pizzazz in the corner.

Sue Cortese, Kumo II -- Relationship  

The pale starburst in the top left quadrant of the quilt is shibori dyed; the striped arms of the larger, darker star are partly dyed and partly pieced.  The white background has subtle touches of pale blue and the occasional dark quilting thread.  It's dramatic but calm , enlivened by complex quilting lines that change direction as they encounter invisible tentacles radiating out from the center.

I liked all three of these a lot.  A whole lot!  I'll tell you about some of the other quilts in the show in later posts.  The show continues at the Carnegie through July 17, and as the old Michelin guides used to say, it's not only "worth a detour" but "worth a trip."

Blogger makes itself more difficult -- again

Those of you who write blogs as well as read them have probably shared my frustration with the "new improved" Blogger interface.  For the last year or so, since their last "improvement," it has taken twice as many clicks, or maybe more, to do things that we used to be able to do much more efficiently.  For instance, when I am told on my Reading List page that Uta Lenk has a new blog post, and I click on it, I no longer am taken to her blog.  Instead, I get a message that says: 

What is this nanny warning supposed to save me from?  Would it be so awful if I clicked on Uta's blog when I didn't really mean to?  And then when I got there and realized I didn't want to be there, I could hit the back button?  Why require two clicks when one used to do the trick? 

I have to wonder whether Google has decided that blogs are obsolete, and therefore not worth supporting in the style that we have become accustomed to.   (Blogger is still a pretty decent platform, but it used to be much better, for most of the 12 years I have had my blog.)  I might even think that they're trying to get us to abandon our blogs and switch over to Instagram -- except that Instagram is owned by Facebook. 

So here's the latest development:  Google is discontinuing the Feedburner feature that allows readers to get blogs delivered straight to their email rather than navigating to the internet page.  I think that a lot more of my readers use email delivery than do it the old-fashioned way, so this is a problem.  I would be upset, and I hope you might be too, if suddenly you simply didn't receive your blog and didn't know how to remedy the situation.

I wonder whether other blog owners have made a decision about how to replace Feedburner.  I've received solicitations from an outfit called follow.it, but wonder if there's another alternative that might be better.  Rather than go down the frustrating rabbit hole of internet research, which will certainly reveal that every conceivable competitor is FABULOUS, I will call for help and see if any of you have experience and advice in this area.  Thank you!!