Photo suite 153 -- kids in transit

Rome

Chartres

London

Quirigua, Guatemala

Antarctica

Louisville

Bad ideas in baby fashion

Found these yarns in the clearance bin last week and wondered who had the brilliant idea to dress babies in camo -- particularly pink camo. Although maybe a pink camo sweater would complement the pink gun that you'll no doubt want to get her for her third or fourth birthday.

Besides, the color combinations are ugly, if you want my professional opinion.

For feminine weaponware, perhaps you would prefer this camo colorway, which has its own trademarked name: Muddy Girl Camouflage.

Remembering Lynn

One of the people in my piecing class at the Crow Barn last month was Betty Goodwin, whom I have known for several years.  Even if you don't know her, you may know of her as the donor of a major prize at Quilt National, the Lynn Goodwin Borgman Award for Surface Design. Lynn was Betty's daughter, an avid quilter, and the two had frequently attended workshops and quilt shows together, enjoying the opportunity to spend time together without the distractions of family and chores.

Lynn Borgman














Lynn died unexpectedly in 1999 after supposedly routine outpatient surgery and it was left to Betty to deal with her fabric stash.  A lot was given away but Betty kept some things, including many, many yards of the old Pointillist Palette fabrics in every colorway that had been produced.

She brought some of them to our workshop, wondering if maybe she could use them after all those years.  Well, why not?  What better way to remember your loved one than to  bring her into the room with you as you work with her fabric.

Betty used the pointillist fabric for this exercise in fine line piecing, and it proved to be an interesting experiment in value contrast.  Notice how the fine lines pop out in some places and disappear in others.  She also achieved a nice effect by cutting the center panel out of the piecing and flipping it around.

Before her death, Lynn had been planning to attend a workshop that required a lot of strips, so she had methodically cut them to size and packed them in storage boxes.  Betty had kept those too and brought them along.

She sliced the strips even narrower to use as fine lines in the piecing.  Here is the composition in progress; the print strips made beautiful delicate lines to set off the solid color blocks.

Here's Betty with her work for the week:

It's always energizing to have the spirit of someone else in the room while you're making art, one reason why I love to work with other people's leftovers.  Although none of the rest of us had the pleasure of knowing Lynn, we felt her presence and love with us in the room.

Perfect copies -- but are they art?

Much discussion in quilt/art circles recently regarding two prizewinning quilts at the big Houston show this year.

Virginia Greaves, Worry, 2014

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, 1936

You probably recognize the image as the famous photo taken in California by Dorothea Lange, documenting the travails of migrant workers during the drought of the Dust Bowl.  That photo was black and white, while Greaves has imagined it in color and executed it in machine applique.

On the Quiltart email list, typical for listserv discussions, the focus started on a nitpick: was it a copyright violation to appropriate the Lange image.  (Apparently it's in the public domain, since Lange was working for the U.S. government.) But it quickly moved to a  discussion of whether it's a Good Thing to copy somebody else's photo(or even your own photo) to make your own artwork.

Somebody pointed out another big winner at Houston, ironically in the category of "innovative artistry," which was a replica of a painting.

Maria Landi and Maria Lucia Azara, Summer Wind

Anna Bocek, La Playa series









When this quilt was first discussed on the list, one commenter put the subject to rest by suggesting that the show entry form should require that the artist has gotten permission to use any text or imagery.  This strikes me as a solution to the wrong problem.  Among other things, it would forever rule out quotations from the Bible or Shakespeare, not to mention remixes of Vermeer or Picasso.  And I think the point is not whether you have somebody's permission to work from their original, but whether you should.

So is it a Good Thing to copy somebody else's photo or painting?  And then is it a Good Thing to enter it as your own work in a big show?

One Quiltart reader said "to present it as a faithful reproduction but in fabric is a form of cheating.  In my opinion there is little difference in this than using a commercial pattern.  This is not the same as inspiration.  I can download most any image from the net and with Photoshop turn it into a pattern of any size."  Similarly, a bunch of art quilters with whom I shared a meal the weekend the Houston winners were announced thought that Photoshop-enabled translation of photos into quilts was nothing more than "paint by numbers."

But other readers defended the practice.  One wrote: "I liken rendering a photograph in a different medium (such as fiber) no different than a singer covering a brilliant old song.  Even if the rhythm and lyrics are the same, even if the very same instruments and arrangements are used, it's a new artistic work.  It's an homage to the original."

One wrote:  "So what if these quilters use photographs taken by others?  Have you honestly tried to render an image in fabric?  It takes an artist's eye to translate the spirit of the photo into another medium."

Someone else wrote:  "Ginny Greaves' quilt based on the Lange photograph seems to me to be in the tradition of artists who are influenced and inspired by other artists' works.  Translating a photograph into an entirely different medium, such as fabric, seems sufficiently different to make it unique."

But another reader wrote:  "Simply interpreting it in the fabric medium doesn't really bring anything new to it.  They don't sing with a distinctive style of the quilt artist.  They are just copies.  And I simply do not understand making art, copied from someone else's photo, that you wish to look just like the original!  That story has been told!"

Another:  "Copying a photo slavishly is NOT a particularly creative endeavor, especially when the goal is to make it exactly like someone else's original.  In the case of fabric medium, it is a very clever and dedicated workmanship issue to get it perfect.  But NOT a personal expression of a creative fiber artist."

Which leads to a final question, is it a Good Thing for the judges to give a big prize to a quilt that reproduces somebody else's image?  Arguably the Houston judges didn't know that Landi and Azara's quilt was so closely based on a painting, although the signage says "original design inspired by a painting by Anna Bocek."  But the judges would have had to have lived all their lives in an aluminum-foil-lined box to not recognize the Migrant Mother as a copy of Dorothea Lange's famous photo.

One of the Quiltart readers wrote: "at the risk of sounding testy, what about the word "Original" do the judges and jurors not understand?"

Someone else:  "How can fiber art ever be taken seriously if blatant copy work is what is rewarded at our top shows?"  Another responded: "We often gripe about quilts not being taken seriously as an art medium and being excluded from 'art' shows, and this is one of the reasons why.  It's not just about copyright and legalities, and it's not just about quilt show rules -- even though both of those things matter.  It's about raising the conceptual and emotional level of the work itself and pushing past the quilt world's emphasis on a certain type of technique."

Another:  "I was shocked... that these quilts... were even accepted.  In my opinion, composition is one of the most important parts that make a successful work of art.  When an image is copied exactly, you are using the original artist's composing ability."

Somebody else:  "Art quilts should be original work that comes from the mind of the creator. Variations of things where the artist has incorporated her own interpretation would be acceptable as long as... you can actually see the artist's fancy has taken some flight.  An exact replication, regardless of how it is technically achieved should not be part of the art quilt vocabulary.  I am not a fan of most things from photos.  I can understand using a photo as a jumping off point but where is the vision, creative spirit, and color sense in copying something in front of you?"

Another wrote:  "I find it embarrassing for the artist to simply lift the image -- verbatim so to speak -- and present it in a major show....  What were the judges thinking? ... I know some may think I'm an art snob... but we can't have it both ways.  Is artquilting an artform or a nice hobby?"

The opposing viewpoint:  "All I'm saying is, if it transports out of your daily grind, it if challenges you creatively, who are we to judge the arty-ness of a piece?"

The response:  "The jurors SHOULD be judging the "arty-ness" of the piece.  This is important to those of us committed to making ART from fabric... Yet the big awards are still going to copies and Hallmark card compositions as long as they are brilliantly constructed."

What do you think?


Check out the whole roster of Houston winners here.

This is cross-posted to Ragged Cloth Cafe, a blog about art.

Photo suite 152 -- more cars with names

Sign of the week

Q = A = Q 9 -- a trend toward abstraction?

Yesterday I wrote about representational imagery in the Q=A=Q show at the Schweinfurth Art Center in Auburn NY.  Shortly after the show opened I exchanged emails with Patty Kennedy-Zafred, who had a quilt in the show but had not been able to attend the reception.

She wrote me:  "It appears that a large portion of the pieces chosen were abstract, color/design study, a trend I'm seeing more and more.  Do you think that is just coincidence, a trend in the art quilt movement, jurors' preferences?"  She said she thinks the same was true of other recent major art quilt shows.

I don't know whether the preponderance of abstract works is really a trend, but it was true in Q=A=Q this year.  And as both a Q=A=Q juror and an interested observer of the art quilt scene, I think that's probably a good thing.

In my experience, the great majority of representational imagery to be found in quilts is decoration rather than art.  Flowers, birds, rose-covered cottages, snowscapes, mountain sunsets.  For the non-traditionalist, puppies, fish, kids playing (extra points if your own kids or grandkids or puppy).  For the very adventurous, render your puppy in purple instead of his natural brown and white!  Many of the quilts featuring such decorative images are very pleasant, but I have a hard time thinking they belong in a high-end show of quilts as art.

What makes it art, in my mind, is a concept, an intention, a message, something more than "it's pretty."  (And I'm not just describing quilts; there are plenty of paintings that stop at "it's pretty," and while you might enjoy them on your bedroom wall they probably don't deserve space in a museum.)

Also in my experience, most representational imagery in the quilt world tends toward the highly realistic end of the spectrum.  The more it looks like a photo, the more it's likely to be the viewers' choice.  Unfortunately, fabric isn't a medium particularly conducive to photorealism.  Sure, you can painstakingly render your photo in pixelated form, find fabrics of the appropriate value and hue, and   applique them for a startling resemblance to the original picture, but aside from the technical gee-whiz of the transformation, this process generally leaves me cold.  I'm usually not sure why the artist did it, or whether the resulting quilt is a step up or a step down, artistically,  from the original image.

Many quilt artists paint directly onto the cloth, then finish it by quilting and maybe elaborate thread painting.  I tend to like this kind of work, provided it isn't just sentimental flowers and mountain sunsets, although there's still the lingering question, if she wanted to paint this picture why did she render it as a quilt instead of on a stretched canvas.  Other artists accomplish painterly effects with fabric collage, a technique I love.  For some reason, I don't often wonder if she wanted to do a collage why did she render it as a quilt instead of as paper pasted on a support.

Patricia Kennedy-Zafred, Sand and Sea: The Children of the Canneries

Of course, if you want photorealism, you can simply print your photo onto the fabric.  Sometimes this works brilliantly, as in Patty's Q=A=Q piece shown above.  She has taken historic photos from the Library of Congress, reproduced them on fabric, overlaid them with text describing the subjects, and enhanced the photos with dye and ink.  The result is clearly her own work, incorporating comment and context, and not just a rendering of the original photo.

But too frequently quiltmakers stop after they print the photo onto the fabric.  I've seen too many photos just plopped into the middle of a quilt, perhaps with some handlettered identification.  I won't jury that kind of work into a museum show because it doesn't seem to have a purpose.

A Toronto curator was recently quoted in connection with the World of Threads exhibit as saying, "It is essential for artists working in fibre to push the boundaries.  Think long and hard about what the conventions and cliches are of your media and process.  Why does it have to be that way?  Do other people find what you are making meaningful?  Does it communicate to them?"

Too many representational quilts are "conventions and cliches," in my opinion, largely because of subject matter but also because of technique.  I guess a lot of abstract quilts are also cliches, but in general I think the quilt format is more friendly to abstraction than to representation.  That's probably because of the predominance of geometric and abstract blocks in traditional quilts, a heritage that is hard to escape.

What do you think?

Q = A = Q 8 -- representation

So far in my discussion of Q=A=Q at the Schweinfurth I have not showed you much in the way of representational imagery.  In fact, there was not much in the way of representational imagery in the show -- less than one-quarter of the works chosen.

Pamela Allen, Kissing in Public, 54 x 36"

I liked the style -- stylized without being cutesy -- and the palette, composition and craft were all up to speed.  A nice use of commercial fabrics, and elaborate quilting in the sky.

Margaret Abramshe, Synchronized in the Sea of Love, 49 x 40"

Mostly done by phototransfer, this quilt relies on three repeated motifs -- girls in bathing caps, swimming girls, and fish -- for a narrative with a bit of mystery.  Every now and then symmetrical is the way to go for tying disparate elements together, and this composition works well.

Daniela Arnoldi and Marco Sarzi-Sartori, Venice Lagoon,   (detail below)

This cityscape is made from fabrics and trims of many different materials, densely layered on to create painterly texture and depth. In the photo it may look a bit heavy-handed, but in person it's stunning.  

Shawn Quinlan, The New American Heritage, 63 x 51"  (detail below)

Shawn must have the world's greatest collection of novelty prints, which he deploys in his never-ending series of quilts making snarky comments on politics and culture.  Here he cut up a vintage wall hanging and tea towels as well as other fabrics for images of Washington, Lincoln, Uncle Sam and other American icons.

Paula Kovarik, Memory's Playground, 27 x 55"  (detail below)

And finally, here's a masterpiece of drawing, an extended stream-of-consciousness doodle in free-motion machine stitching on a vintage tablecloth.  I don't know what the elephant has to do with the starfish or the hippo or the fork or the genie's lamp, but I love the way the line covers the whole surface, punctuated by areas of dense pastel filling stitches.  As a finishing touch, the long threads between little star points are allowed to float over the top of the drawing.

Q = A = Q 7 -- maps

Valerie Goodwin, my fellow juror for Q=A=Q at the Schweinfurth Art Center, is an architect, and her work often looks like maps or site plans.  My work could often be accused of resembling aerial landscapes or city grid plans.  So obviously you have two people who love maps and plans.

But we couldn't have populated a show with a whole lot of maps unless they had been submitted for our consideration.  Perhaps it's something in the water -- or perhaps a bunch of artists decided to be oh-so-clever and enter map quilts thinking they'd appeal to the jurors.  Whatever -- it worked.  We included several such quilts in the show.

I've already written about Beth Miller's map, which won the award for best handwork, but here are the rest.

Alicia Merrett, Mayfair 1761, 62 x 52" (detail below)

Everything but the fused lettering is machine-pieced or machine-appliqued in this view of central London, an accurate replica of an 18th-century map. The cheery color scheme and jaunty quilting gave it a modern air.

Isabel Downs, Urban Life #2, Mosaic map of Madaba, Jordan (6th century CE), 25 x 38" (detail below)

Another faithful replica of an ancient map, except this one is mosaic, perfectly translated into fabric with raw-edge applique.  I liked the casual stitched line, meandering across the tesserae with the occasional loop and curlicue.

Sally Dutko, Blue Collar City, 52 x 36"  (detail below)

Here's an imaginary map, or rather an abstraction of a map. The artist says "the river and bridges remind me of Pittsburgh, but it could be one of many placed where industry has flourished."  The worn denim, frayed cotton and loose thread ends convey a hard-worked Rust Belt vibe: a great use of materials to reinforce meaning.

Margaret Abramshe, The Boy and the Butterfly Effect, 49 x 27" (detail below)

This quilt uses an actual map of Arctic Russia, a silk scarf issued to wartime Navy aviators in case they were shot down and had to make their way across unfamiliar geography.  The quilt is a collage of vintage images; I liked their juxtaposition  into a narrative, and how the quilting echoes the latitude and longitude lines of the map.

Several other works in the show had map-like auras, but that's probably always true of intricately pieced quilts.  We loved them all.  The show remains up at the Schweinfurth, in Auburn NY, through January 4.  Make a visit if you can!

Working on ornaments again!

This used to be a cross-stitch linen tablecloth, pre-printed with a design for embroidery.  Then somebody started embroidering, and it was a half-finished cross-stitch tablecloth. Then that person got tired of embroidering, or walked in front of a bus, and the tablecloth made its way to one of the various grab bags that I have been the recipient of. Then it sat in my studio for a while.

But now it's happy; I have cut out the middle, unembroidered part and it has found its new life as the material for my 2014 Christmas ornaments.  Yes, I'm sewing on them (not giving away too much of the secret) and the linen is getting all limp and delicious in my hands.

Perhaps you have been reading this blog long enough to know that every year I do Christmas ornaments for a lot of friends and family -- this year the list is just over 50.

In a good year I might be pretty much finished in September; in a bad year I might be madly sewing the last ones the week before Christmas.  I guess this is a medium-bad year, with plenty of work yet to go and already halfway through November.  But I have little on the calendar in the next couple of weeks, and a bunch of new trash TV on my DVR, so I don't feel frantic.  Yet.

As I have in previous years, I'm going to have an ornament giveaway for blog readers, so leave a comment between now and Friday and I'll choose at least one winner, maybe more if I pick up speed toward the end of the project.

Photo suite 151 -- out the window

Sign of the week

Q = A = Q 6 -- still more pieced quilts

A handful of pieced quilts that I particularly liked at Q=A=Q, today focusing on bright colors.

Brenda Gael Smith, Desert Tracks: Not Terra Nullius, 22 x 43"

The title refers to the concept of terra nullius, land belonging to nobody, which European settlers used to rationalize their takeover of native terrain around the world.  Brenda, who lives in Australia, uses hand-dyed fabrics to reproduce the glowing red desert colors of aboriginal lands.  I liked the simple motif of interlocking spines, elegant in its simplicity.

Helene Davis, Flags 3, 37 x 41"

Helene is known for her hand-dyed fabrics and this quilt shows off the richness and subtlety of her palette.  I like the contrast between the clear reds and blues and the dusty grays and greens.  Isn't it nice how simply putting a "field" into the corner of some stripes is enough to turn them into a flag?  I suppose that effect is not as strong for viewers outside the U.S. whose own flags have other patterns.

Ruan Robertson, Opposites Attract, 41 x 47"

Small bits of fabric, sewed together without a clear pattern, mostly arrange themselves into light and dark areas, but in the center they turn to confetti.  The reds, concentrated at left center, and the handful of blues accent the overall square-in-a-square arrangement.  Calm and exciting at the same time.

Heather Pregger, Tuning Fork #11, 72 x 54"



















The twin sister to this quilt appeared in Form Not Function last summer, and it might be worth a couple of clicks (here) to compare and contrast.  This one has red forks on a background of gray; the other one had gray forks on a background of red.  An excellent case study in exploring many permutations of a motif; I love seeing shapes in many different sizes used together.

Denise Roberts, Exchanges #10, 61 x 91"

I think she must have constructed several pieced panels, then sliced and recombined them several times to come up with the complex overall design -- but I can't tell from looking at the quilt which piece used to be next to which other one.  It's always good to leave your viewers guessing!  I like the exuberant colors, the bold design and the irregular curves.

A back story: seven years ago Denise and I worked for a week in the downstairs studio of the Crow Barn, each of us busy with our own compositions but enjoying the companionship of somebody else sewing madly on the other side of the room.  She tells me that I am responsible for naming the series of quilts she began during that week and has now taken to number 10.  I wish I remembered that conversation, but am certainly willing to take credit for whatever small part I played in setting her on this fruitful path.