The challenge of challenges 3

I don't have good photographs to illustrate my very early experience with challenges and theme shows, but many of them were big helps to my artistic progress.  For instance, a challenge was my first entree into having my work displayed in public.  At the time (early 1990s) I had just discovered quilt shows and learned that you generally had to have photographs made for jurying.  This was more than I could cope with, but when my local fabric store decided to sponsor a fabric challenge with our local quilt show, I was delighted to realize that I didn't have to submit photos, just bring the quilt to the store at the appointed time.

You would buy a half yard of the theme fabric and it had to constitute at least 50% of the face of the finished quilt.  The first year I participated I won a judge's choice award (the prize: $0 and a cute little certificate, which I framed and hung in the bathroom for some years until its next paint job).  The third year, my quilt was really fine -- it still hangs in my living room.  (Some day I should resew the sleeve so the top edge isn't wavy.)

Spiral Nebula

I also participated in several challenges on the Quiltart list, which was one of the first and most vibrant of the online communities for quilts as art.  Our shows were virtual (which made me learn how to con my children into taking digital photos for me, since I didn't have a digital camera at the time).

This challenge was to illustrate an aphorism from Ben Franklin.  I like the quilt, but it was truly one-off.  It's one of only two or three representational quilts I've ever made, and the only element that has any relationship to anything else I've ever done was the use of words printed from my collection of antique wood type.  The cow came from a cheater cloth but Tim was entirely my own design; since I can't draw I was particularly proud of how he came out.  The cow's ear and tail are three-dimensional.

Ben on Tim

The quilt reads:  Tim was so learned, that he could name a horse in nine languages.  So ignorant, that he bought a cow to ride on.

the nine words for horse: hast, cheval, kon, pferd, hevonen, hest, equus, paard, caballo

Here's another one from the Quiltart list.  The challenge was to use only pink, black and white.  (I even dispensed with the white.)  I had been wanting to make a quilt with narrow pieced stripes, and when the challenge was announced I decided I might as well make it in pink and black instead of any two other colors.  The quilt subsequently was shown in an exhibit at a brick-and-mortar museum and won a prize.

Landscape 1: Pink on Black














You may notice a new twist in my description of how this last quilt came to be: for the first time, I responded to a challenge with something that was already on my to-do list.  I was beginning to decide that in a challenge, I shouldn't stray too far from my preexisting body of work.  I think that was a critical step in my journey as an artist, and I'll write more about that next week.




Update: I've linked this post to Nina-Marie Sayre's blog -- visit her to see what other fiber artists are up to this week.

Sign of the week

The challenge of challenges 2

For many years the American Quilter's Society has sponsored an annual contest, "New Twists on an Old Favorite," in which they specify a traditional quilt block and invite people to do variations.  In 1999, the first year I participated, I made a quilt from the Kaleidoscope block.

KALEIDOSCOPE

The Hubble Space Kaleidoscope, 1999

I apologize for the lousy image, digitized from a slide.  The black-on-black is difficult to photograph and some day I should probably reshoot it.  Every piece of fabric is a print with a black background; it's enhanced with lots of shiny threads as quilting and couching, and a bunch of subtle embellishments such as beads and turquoise bits.

 It was magnificent, one of the best five quilts I've ever made.  I entered the contest with high hopes, but the quilt wasn't accepted.  (When I saw the exhibit of quilts that were accepted, I was annoyed.  About half the quilts were indeed twists on the traditional Kaleidoscope block, but the other half weren't.  Instead they were 10-segment designs resembling the patterns you see in a kaleidoscope.  Yes, they both have the K-word in common, but only half fit the contest rules.)

I was unhappy, but fortunately the rejection came a couple of days before the deadline to enter the regular AQS show in Paducah, so I sent my slides off to that bunch of jurors.  The quilt was accepted and won a $1,000 prize.

BEAR PAW

The next year, the traditional block in the AQS contest was Bear Paw.  I liked my last year's black-on-black "space quilt" so much that I decided to make another space quilt for the contest.  Again, I found lots of prints with black backgrounds and enhanced them with metallic threads in quilting and couching.  But as the quilt neared completion I got cold feet.  I convinced myself that either this quilt wouldn't be accepted, or if it was, the exhibit would be tainted as it had been the previous year with quilts that didn't even follow the rules.  So I didn't enter.  However, the quilt was pretty damn spectacular.

Ursa Major, 2000

Although my record in the exhibit was now 0 for 2, I had two magnificent quilts to show for my efforts.

Apparently not remembering the first part of that sentence, the following year the block was Seven Sisters and I made a third space quilt.  Again, every fabric in the quilt was on a black background.  But reason prevailed after I had finished the top but not started quilting it.  At that point I decided that the New Twist contest was not for me.

I had only been rejected once, but I had been closely watching the quilts that were accepted and decided that the jurors' ideas of what fit in their show was different from my ideas of what I wanted to make.  I suspect this assessment was half truth, half rationalization.  But in any case, I couldn't summon up the energy to finish the third space quilt in time for the deadline.  Nor have I finished it since, even though I think it had promise.

I think I had realized that what I could do and what I should do were two different things.

The challenge of challenges 1

A popular trope in the quilt/art world is to organize challenge or theme projects.  Participants must submit quilts that fit a given theme, a given size or shape, a given color scheme, a given fabric, a given subject, or combinations and permutations of the above.  Such projects are often fun for all concerned.  Participants often find that making work in response to a challenge sparks their creativity and fosters cameraderie.  Viewers often enjoy the exhibit because it's fun to see how different people responded to the same rules.  Organizers often find that the exhibit is attractive and easy to hang, especially with a size or shape constraint.

I used to love challenge projects, and participated in many of them.

In 1997 Quilter's Newsletter Magazine sponsored an exhibit called "Rhapsody of Roses."  The rule: you had to have at least one rose on the quilt.  I was determined to enter the contest, but worried about how my work would stack up against the others to be juried in.  I anticipated miles and miles of beautiful roses, and I just don't do beautiful.  So I decided to be in contrast to the beautiful roses, and focus on thorns.

Rose Among Thorns, 1997

I drew three different thorn blocks on the computer and printed them out for paper foundation piecing.  The blocks were irregular quadrilaterals, which will tesselate to cover the surface.  The colors aren't very true in this photo -- digitized from the original slide -- but the thorns were all gray or brown, against green backgrounds.  One pink rose lurked in the bottom corner of the quilt.

I was thrilled to get into the exhibit, and mystified to win a prize for "Best Interpretation of Theme."  I still don't understand whether the award came from the quilt or the artist statement, in which I said something sappy about the rose that struggles against adversity being sweeter or more beautiful than the one that has no troubles.

Some time in the mid-90s I took a workshop with Margaret Miller, a quiltmaker whose work I have always admired because she provides plans rather than patterns; no two students will ever make the same quilt under her guidance.  After the great success of her first plan, "Strips That Sizzle," she was experimenting with a new plan, "Easy Pieces," in which you construct a block out of several wedge-shaped strips, then combine blocks in different patterns.  At the end of the workshop she invited us to make quilts using this plan and send her photos that she could use in a book.

I made a couple of quilts, one of which did appear in the book.  This was a breakthrough project for me, the first time I had ever quilted a piece of this size (about twin-bed size).

Blue Ridge Mountains (detail below)

Later this week I'll tell you about some other challenge quilts I made.

 

Photo suite 49 -- under the tree

The typographic observer 10

Typographic observers often refine their eye by hand-setting type, a process in which you have to read in mirror image.  But some words require little translation.