Fun with art

Good news for art lovers who find it difficult to get to the museum!  Seems that during August, great art will be seen on 50,000 billboards across the U.S. in a project sponsored by five top museums and funded by the Outdoor Advertising Association of America.

And here's the best part -- you get to vote on which pieces will be shown.  And even better, you get to vote every day from now till May 7.  Maybe your choices tomorrow will be different; maybe you will be motivated to go check out an unfamiliar painting on the ballot; maybe you will find that a certain painting is calling to you louder and louder every day.

The voting site isn't totally user-friendly; you have to register first, set up a password, etc. etc. etc. You get to vote for ten different paintings each day, and after you click the "vote" button for one, the rest of them are shuffled on the page.  So you have to scroll up and down many times to find your place and be sure you haven't missed any.  But what the heck, you get to be looking at art all the while.

Read about the project here.

Vote here.

Yesterday I voted for Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Park No. 29 (1970), among others.

Any dumb thing can become a learning experience

So I have come up with a new way to justify (rationalize?) the time I waste on computer games.  One of my new favorite games has a feature where civilians can set up their own rules and format for the basic game, choosing among other things the colors and shapes of the icons that will populate the layout.  I have been fascinated to see the different palettes chosen, and to make artistic judgments about their choices.

What I've been reminded of is that for me, much of the pleasure of computer games has to do with the visual appeal of the interface -- the colors, the patterns, the way the pieces behave when you make your move.  And the joy of this particular game is that if a certain game has yucky colors I can close it down and find another one that is more attractive.

A parallel pleasure is in analyzing why certain choices of color and shape are attractive and why others aren't.  In a sense, the 8x8 layout of the game is much like a block-to-block quilt, and the color combinations that work in one might work (or not) in the other.  I realize that looking at the layout of a game board presents a similar challenge to what happens when a student shows up in a workshop with five or six fabrics that are supposed to go together.  Many times there's something just a bit off -- you know the whole thing doesn't work, but it can be hard to articulate just what's wrong or how to fix it.

So if you will indulge me, I'm going to write some posts about these color palettes and how I evaluate them from the artist's perspective.  It's good practice!  If you disagree with me -- and I'm sure you will -- please tell me what you think.

Many of these games have palettes with very similar values; restful and innocuous in a quilt, perhaps, but soporific in a computer game.  I'm surprised at how many of these monovalue palettes are pastels rather than mediums or darks.

I like this combination!  Maybe if the blue were a touch more subdued it would be perfect, but the two pinks go beautifully together and with the green (you rarely go wrong with complementary colors).  Give it an A.

Here's another one I like.  Even though the greens are a bit darker than the others, the overall impression is calm and pale.  The green triangles may be a bit too bright; maybe a pale blue or gray would work better.  I give it an A minus.

The green may be a bit too garish to go with the others, but it's not a fatal flaw.  Give it a B.

Saved from total medium-lightness by the slate blue, which nicely sets off the lighter colors.  Not sure the bright pink and lavender play well together with the peach. Maybe a B minus?

Here the overall value is medium.  My favorite of the four colors is the blue-green. The chartreuse stands out, not because it's the lightest (which it is) but because it's the brightest.  I think it would work better among its colleagues if it were keyed back to the olive tone in the first palette.  Maybe a C plus.

How many quilts have been made in this palette? It sets my teeth on edge, probably because of the purple, which seems too harsh for the pale pinks.  If you got rid of the purple and added a couple of warm pinks, as in the first two palettes, I'd like it a lot more.  Give it a C.

More palettes tomorrow.

Photo suite 119 -- precarious parking

From the archives -- River Maps

The same show that prompted me to unearth my Actuary's Map quilts called forth another series of map quilts, which I call River Maps.  I was experimenting with a new technique, affixing tiny bits of fabric to a quilt sandwich with a grid of stitching.  The first one I made was low-tech.  As I recall, I drew a grid of dots a half-inch apart, started stitching along the lines, and stuck a little bit of fabric (just under 1/2 inch square) at each dot with a tweezers so I could sew over it.

River Map 1: Jefferson County, 13 x 20", 2004, detail below

As you might imagine, this was time-consuming.  At each intersection I had to consult my diagram, find a piece of fabric the right color, put it in place, then hope it didn't blow, levitate or get pushed out of position before it got sewed down.  I decided I liked the process but it had to be streamlined in some way before I could do it again.

My next plan was to fuse the little bits of fabric to the backing fabric before I stitched.  But since I liked the effect with the edges of fabric fluttering in the breeze, I didn't want to simply slap fusible on the back of a big piece of fabric, then cut the little squares from it.  Instead, I cut tiny bits of fusible web, fused them to the center of the little bits of fabric, then fused the bits to the backing.

This turned out not only to be fiddly beyond belief, but very difficult.  I would lay out the squares onto the backing and try to fuse them down, but static electricity caused them to leap out of place and stick to one another instead of just lying there waiting to be ironed.  I tried spraying a teflon pressing sheet with Static Guard and putting that on top, but it helped only a little.  After I did a bit of the second quilt, I abandoned that idea.

River Map 3: The End of the Ohio, 20 x 29", 2004

Eventually I decided to glue each little fabric bit in place.  Again, I marked a grid on the backing fabric, put a drop of Elmer's Glue on each intersection with a toothpick applicator, then picked up each little square with a tweezers and pasted it in its place.  That worked pretty well, although a few pieces came unglued and went AWOL before they got sewed down.

The only problem was that it took forever.  After I made the River Map quilts I used the technique on a huge piece with over 8,000 little squares.  It took weeks of work to get the squares glued.  I would go into my studio in the morning, put on some nice music, and disappear into a zen state until it got dark.  My husband was away someplace and so I was not disturbed by suggestions that we should eat lunch or dinner.  I would glue squares for eight hours straight and realize that I had only done six inches or so.  The next day was more of the same.

I loved the effect but not the work, so the River Map series ended at three.  Too bad -- they were pretty flashy.

Sign of the week

From the archives -- The Actuary's Maps

I rarely make new pieces for a theme challenge, but when there's a call for entries and I just happen to have some nice appropriate work in the pile, I'll dust it off and send it in and see what happens.  Last week I dusted off two pieces in response to a call for art about maps and was reminded that I really liked the work.

The Actuary's Map 1, 2003, 30 x 31"

Two explanations are necessary to understand where these pieces come from.  First, the autobiographical narrative.  I've always been a math geek but for not-valid-in-hindsight reasons I switched my college major away from numbers to words.  But life sometimes gives you what you want and need even if you try hard to avoid it, and I ended up with the perfect job: writing about numbers.

For two decades I worked for a consulting firm that is the world's largest employer of actuaries, and I got to spend a lot of time with some of the most brilliant of them.  I speculated that people who work with numbers all day must see the world in a different light, quantifying things that the rest of us only observe.  I started making a long series of "actuary quilts" that had numbers printed on top of different compositions.

Second, the process narrative.  I had spent a lot of time with dye and discharge and made boxes full of beautiful, enigmatic fabrics that I was struggling to  use (aka the surface design dilemma).  These pieces were made from the legendary Walmart Black, a cotton that discharged to gray, beloved of many of us in those days before Springs Mills (Walmart's supplier) changed their formula and it started discharging to red.  I thought these pieces looked like maps.  Map 1 reminded me of barrier islands with narrow causeways; Map 2 looked like a huge factory complex, maybe next to an airport.

The Actuary's Map 2, 2004, 29 x 18"  (detail below)

The nifty hard-edge geometric marks on the maps came from the clothespins I used to wad up the fabric before it went into the bleach.

These two quilts were out and about in the day; one of them got a blue ribbon at the State Fair.  But then they went out of circulation and into The Box Under The Bed.  Maybe it's time to resurrect them, or maybe it's time to make some more in the same series.