Failed series 2 -- layouts

Writing about series that were canceled early -- ideas that got the old college try but for some reason failed to jell.  This series started in my first workshop with Nancy Crow, in 2003.  We were strip-piecing, and this assignment was to make six strip-pieced panels, then cut and rearrange them into a composition.  I loved the finished top; it used some of my all-time favorite colors (that lavender has appeared in many, many pieces) and I thought the composition was successful.

Layout 1: Six-Column Format

I never quilted it, although I can't remember why; I think I got sidetracked into finishing my alphabet series for exhibit.  But after that show, I returned to the series and made two more pieces.

My thought here was to make several strip-pieced panels, then as I cut and rearranged them I made two compositions instead of one.  They were twins, of course, with the same fabrics and strip patterns, but had different characters.  They were the same size and intended to be displayed side-by-side, but as it turned out, one was accepted into a traveling exhibit and went away for a while.  Meanwhile, the other one was shown a few places and even won the top award at an all-mediums show in a museum.

Layout 2 and 3: Two-Page Spread, 2004

By this time I had attached a meaning to the series: newspaper layout.  I trained as a journalist and worked on a newspaper early in my career.  My father was a newspaper typographer and I grew up with thoughts of different layout patterns.

The artist statement I wrote for this series read: "These quilts are about newspapers.  From day to day the same stories keep reappearing – politics, war, weather, sports, scandal.  Today’s newspaper is different from yesterday’s in its details, but not in its recurring themes."

I spent some time with one of the books my father wrote about newspaper design, writing down several ideas that could constitute more quilts in the series.  For instance, "reverse pyramid" is a diagonal composition, describing how ads are placed at the bottom of the page, sloping up toward the top.  But somehow the list of titles and diagrams never got translated into fabric.  I got sidetracked into other series and priorities.

At first I thought I would be called back to the series after my father died, which happened in 2007.  But I wasn't.  In retrospect, I realize that the strip-piecing, a technique that I love and have taught in many workshops, is too closely associated with Nancy Crow, my friend and mentor.  While Nancy has been a huge influence on me, her gravitational pull is so strong that I have struggled to develop my own voice instead of succumbing to the easy temptation of working with strip-pieced panels.  I'm not sure I yet have the self-confidence to venture back into strip-pieced territory.

Bottom line: visually striking, emotionally and intellectually powerful, but too derivative to handle???

Zanesville Superlatives 1

Last week I was in Ohio for a family get-together and took a day trip to Zanesville to check out  Superlatives: Contemporary Ohio Quilts, with work by seven Ohio quilters. 

The big draw in this show is Nancy Crow, arguably the premier art quilter in the world, and she sent an interesting variety of work.  Two relatively recent pieced works from her current Constructions series, two screenprinted works (a technique she has recently learned and been experimenting with), and two relatively old pieces, one from her Chinese Souls series and this from her Color Blocks series.

Nancy Crow, Color Blocks #69, 1995

The work is spectacular, but I was a bit disappointed by the varying styles and series.  Not enough quantity or variety to constitute a retrospective, where you could trace the development of her ideas, yet not enough cohesiveness of the work on display. 

The exhibit catalog mentioned that one of its objectives was "to view quiltmakers as artists who may create many quilts.  Like painters or potters, most quilt artists change their style and practices to suit their evolving vision and skills."  Yet without artist statements, curator notes or other clues, it's hard for viewers to detect and appreciate the subtleties in such variety. 

I was surprised by one of the quilts displayed by Deborah Melton Anderson, another of the featured artists.

Deborah Melton Anderson, Imagining the Seasons, 2011  (detail)

The piece is constructed from many little folded "neckties" -- an adorable and appealing technique.  I had seen and enjoyed some of Deborah's necktie pieces several years ago at a gallery in Columbus and assumed that this work was from that vintage.  But no, this one was new, so I had little idea of how it fits into the "evolving vision" referenced in the catalog.

Deborah Melton Anderson, Hourglass II, 2005

Here's another of Deborah's quilts that I liked, using traditional block patterns.  But again, I couldn't tell how it fit into her "evolving vision," since it was made in 2005 and the quilt hanging next to it, with the same sensibility, was finished last year. 

A third artist in the show was Rebecca Cross, whose technique is to shape silk organza into elaborate pleats and protrusions while shibori dyeing.  Some of her organza extravaganzas are affixed to backings, others hang free-form and weightless in space. 

Rebecca Cross, Cleave, 2009  (detail below)

Rebecca Cross, Untitled Installation











I'll write tomorrow about other artists in the show.  It continues at the Zanesville Museum of Art through July 14.

Nancy Crow's show

Almost too late, I managed to transport my jet-lagged body to Auburn NY to see the huge Nancy Crow show at the Schweinfurth Memorial Art Gallery three days before it closed -- definitely worth the trip. You know that I consider Nancy to be my sensei, having taken 14 weeks of workshops with her over the last seven or eight years.  I had seen many of these quilts in person one place or another, and in fact three of them I saw intimately in progress because she asked me to machine-quilt them.  (Here's Constructions 91.) But it was stunning to see everything together, and beautifully displayed, representing some of her very old work and much of her very new.

I am sorry that the museum did not permit photography, because there were some glorious quilts -- 57 in all -- that you would love to see.  Check the link above and here and here for some pictures.  And I will provide links for other quilts that I talk about later.  Please do take the extra seconds to click on those links; the quilts are wonderful and well worth your time to have a look.

The show included five of Nancy's older quilts from the days when she was using templates and commercial fabrics.  You've probably seen pictures of these quilts, which were huge and spectacular and hit the art world with a smash because they referenced the traditions of quilting but looked like nothing ever seen before.  Nancy has written about her epiphany when she realized that improvisational cutting and composition beat the hell out of templates and advance planning, but I couldn't help but notice that some of her "template" quilts were actually straying toward improvisation.  For instance, on display was a double wedding ring quilt where the curves on the rings seemed definitely freehand and one of the four main motifs was considerably smaller than the other three.

Once Nancy made the big move to improvisational design, she started her vast "Constructions" series, inspired by the construction of the timber barn that now serves as the venue for her workshops.  I found it interesting, among other things, to see how long it took for her to abandon the traditional quilt practice of the border and binding.  Bindings were the first to be abandoned.  For a couple of years she put borders on everything; later she bordered two sides; finally she let the composition occupy the whole space of the quilt. Here's Constructions 17.

Perhaps my favorite quilt in the whole show is Constructions 65, a spare but complicated composition of three colors, which is obviously only one generation away from traditional quilt blocks.  Technically it's nine rail fence blocks, with blocks of horizontal stripes alternating with blocks of vertical stripes in a traditional nine-patch array.  Still has borders, but very modern borders that almost disappear because they're so well integrated into the composition.

Most recently Nancy's "Constructions" have featured mostly vertical bars, often overlaid by an X, a special shape that she drew extensively as a child.  Many of them are made in duplex format, where one horizontal composition is stacked on top of another one.  Several are in four-plex, where the composition has four separate sectors.  I am amused because those of us invited to participate in the Color Improvisations show Nancy curated were initially asked to make four-plex quilts; that request was later rescinded but not before many a quilt was made in that format.  It's a standard format that artists have used forever, and Nancy is clearly a master of it.

These pieces constitute the heart of the show, but there is also a significant presence of Nancy's whole-cloth or minimally pieced works using her own surface-designed fabrics.  A few years ago Nancy began experimenting with screen printing and monoprinting and made several quilts with these fabrics.  I think in these works she has come squarely to the same dilemma that many of the rest of us grapple with relation to surface design.  Namely, we make beautiful fabric, and then what?  Do we just turn it into a whole-cloth quilt, or does it demand something more, something to turn it from fabric into art?

I liked the quilts where Nancy cut into her screenprinted fabric and pieced it back together to give a bit more complexity.  I don't know whether she's still working in these series, although I know she continues to take the occasional workshop with surface-design artists.  Also have to give a big compliment to Sandy Ciolino, who magnificently machine-quilted one of the screenprinted quilts.

You still have till Sunday afternoon to see the show, if you're within driving distance of Auburn.  If not, eat your heart out.  Nancy Crow is the best of the best, and this show shows her work to its greatest advantage. 

Color Improvisations now on display in Germany

My husband and I have just gotten home from almost a month in Germany. The motivation was a combination of nostalgia (we lived there for three years when we were first married, many decades ago), family heritage (I found the villages where three of my great- and great-great-grandparents were born) and art (we spent a week in Berlin in which we visited 10 museums and the opera, and Nürnberg was no slouch either in the museum department, not to mention its magnificent churches).

And, oh yes, the reason we planned the trip in the first place, to attend the grand opening of Color Improvisations, a show curated by Nancy Crow that was designed to showcase machine-piecing. I was fortunate to have two quilts in the show; there were 26 artists in all, from North America and Europe.  And I'm really happy that I can finally show you my quilts; we've been under embargo all along and at last we can share them with our friends instead of just mysteriously bitching about how hard they were to make.

Crazed 8: Incarceration -- 79 x 82 -- Kathleen Loomis

Crazed 8: Incarceration -- detail

Fault Lines 3 -- 75 x 78 -- Kathleen Loomis

Fault Lines 3 -- detail

Fault Lines 3 -- back view (detail)

The show has been a l-o-n-g time in preparation. We were invited to participate more than two years ago, and Nancy looked at our quilts twice – first as pieced tops, then after quilting – to accept or decline them. We shipped our work several months ago for photography and finally the show opened on July 11 in Stuttgart.

All the quilts are huge (minimum size was 72 inches square) and approximately square, and almost all were machine-quilted as well as machine-pieced. Nancy told us to make sure the backs were beautiful, so they could be hung with both sides visible, but for space reasons only five could actually be displayed that way. I was very proud that both of my quilts were given the two-sided treatment!

Nancy said in her remarks that she looks upon machine-piecing as an endangered art, and I agree. It’s so easy these days to fuse or raw-edge applique rather than piece, and so many quilt artists are using surface design techniques rather than piecing to create images. In my own small local support group, for instance, five of the six of us are using surface design as their main technique. Sometimes I feel like an outsider at the meetings because I’m buying commercial solids (not even dyeing my own fabric!!) and not even trying the wonderful painting, dyeing, discharging and screenprinting techniques that my friends are using to such beautiful ends.

But I feel almost an obligation to keep piecing, swimming upstream against the trends in the fiber art world. Kind of like the last ten speakers of some obscure tongue, who need to keep talking lest their language become extinct. Wouldn’t they feel guilty if they lay on the couch watching reality TV while their heritage disappeared?

So meeting my fellow artists at the show was a heartening experience, because we all know what it’s like to buck the trends and remain faithful to a waning craft. There was some surface design in evidence – in particular, Bonnie Bucknam and Terry Jarrard-Dimond use their own masterly hand-dyed fabrics, and Cathy Shanahan and Sylvia Sutherland are dye-painting their fabric. But everybody was piecing at some place along the way.

Check out a bunch of photos from the opening.