Contemporary Paint Studio Week 9: Coming Together ( and importance of Catenary)

A much more productive time in week 9 of  Contemporary Painting Studio  thanks to  thinking about what I wanted to concentrate on in the last couple of sessions and some  prep work during the week.  I was particularly pleased with the 2 Journal Quilts I produced (above)

My prep work included   taking a high res photo of the finished A3 painting that I was reasonably happy with and printing it out  on my A4 inkjet printer using 'poster' settings   at 3x3 and 2x2 sizes  in order to have the scaled up marks to work from 

The 3 x 3 pinned up on the screen was very helpful for working on my large scale  newspaper collage . I used burnt umber /ultramarine glazes to make greys , it's still a  bit heavy - one of the problems with working on a textured surface and I need to pay attention to the edges of shapes. 

The  section of old quilt I'd primed with gesso  was even more textured  so I worked with it, simplifying the shapes from the 2 x2 print. Again a limited palette of Paynes grey, raw sienna , burnt umber and ultramarine  with some white reintroduced in areas.  

The first item on my 'to-do' list was to prime the quilted collages I'd prepared during the week with diluted acrylic medium so that my paint glazes wouldn't  bleed/sink into the fabric. 

I'd printed out photos of 2 collages onto Jacquard Inkjet Cotton sheets ( 2 x 1 poster setting stitched together) attached to linen tablecloth with bondaweb then quilted with horizontal wavy lines. 

It took a couple of hours  to dry ( I'd do it before class another time!) 

For painting I used  Winsor and Newton transparent acrylic paints in Raw Sienna, Burnt Umber and Ultramarine   mixed with gloss medium/Golden soft gel and diluted with water  and applied with dry brush . I loved how  the brushmarks were retained.

I had a question from one of the other artists  in the class who paints with oils why I was using my own W& N acrylic paints rather than the acrylics supplied . Apart from being better quality ,  highly pigmented   and truly transparent ( which is the effect I wanted  to achieve) , the main reason is having  a lot of experience painting with W&N watercolours, I'm used to the colours and colour mixing . Every paint brand has it's own characteristics - I also use Liquitex heavy body  for impasto  and Golden  fluid  for  textiles. 

Jasper John Catenary (Jacob's Ladder) 

Earlier in the week I'd finally made it to the Jasper Johns exhibition at the RA.  I  was  pleased to see  more of his joint project with Samuel Beckett  which had been one of the highlights of the print exhibition at the British Museum and like Olga, appreciated his more recent, personal work  over the  targets and numbers ( while noting the use of collage....)  

Catenary 

I was particularly struck by the particular curves of his 'Catenary' series  and started seeing them everywhere and realising that a lot of work I admire contains similar shapes.  

Susie Koren View Seven 

Dorothy Caldwell

 I realised that  there's a similar curve in this painting and that  one of the reasons the largest collaged painting isn't working yet is because the curve is wrong.  So I knew what I had to do in my final painting session . 

Latest Stitching

Last week I was on retreat with 10 fellow CQ members at Rydal Hall in Cumbria. Excellent company as always ,  and as usual I did some  walking, sketching and hand stitching. Among the projects I had taken along with me was a  12 inch square I'd put together for SAQA Benefit Auction  using leftover from my 'Fleet Mudflats' quilt. Only 3 years late....  This one was sold  for quite a bit of money so hoping this indigo piece will  do well too 

And while I was in 'stitch everything to death'  mode, I finished my February Journal quilt also based on  Chesil Beach and the Fleet lagoon at Ferrybridge . I like putting together collaged compositions as reminders of places I've been - I'm now  stitching into a moody Rydal inspired piece.

49 Quilts

 

This morning  Sue came round to help me pack up my quilts. I started with covering the  bed with hand quilted  'Medieval Tile Quilt' that took me 7 years  to make!   Then   brought quilts together from the Georgian mahogany chest they're normally stored in and those draped over the bannisters from hanging on the walls and lay them on the bed to sort by size and type.  I cut 'noodles' to size  while Sue ripped strips of old sheet and then rolled  and tied them in  3's and 4's.  The largest quilts were refolded and placed in pillowcases. Next step will be matching the rolls with storage bags or wrapping them in  pillow cases  and sheets ( run out of time to make more bags and my machines are now packed up anyway). I ordered some metre high cardboard boxes for transporting them. 

There's 49 quilts here - not counting the 9 that are currently away from home for exhibitions(Cwilt Cymru and International Threads)  and the 220ish Journal Quilts in  2 very large plastic boxes....
That's an awful lot  of investment of time  ( at least half are hand stitched) but I've enjoyed every minute.

 

A creative weekend and strange plant memories

 

At last, some creative time squeezed in this weekend!  Sue  and I had scheduled a 'play date' for Sunday afternoon to look at the results of  our rust dyeing  workshop with Alice Fox and to  do some sewing. So  Saturday was spent assembling bits to work on including some Journal Quilts ( more on that in another post)   and finally getting round to trimming down and facing the first challenge  for 'International Threads' group. I'm embarrassed to say that we're now   on our  fifth ( although I've completed others in between)
It has been almost finished for a long time.  A wholecloth piece of Japanese silk shibori  layered over an African damask ,  it's been a labour of love, hand stitched  using a variety  of loops and other stitches  trying out techniques from Helen Parrott's book. It's accompanied  me on several train journeys, the format of 40 x 80 cm being a good travel piece to work on.
It looks quite sinister and plant-like  reminding me of the carrion flower so I'm calling it 'Red Stapelia' .

At one time in the  small glasshouse at work  where we  had plants that had originally been grown in the lab, there was an enormous Stapelia that took up most of a bench, very  ' Little Shop Of Horrors' .  The smell was something else.... It even had a proper engraved  label which besides  the accession number and  family, genus, species details also bore the  plants name :' Cedric the Poo Plant'. Alas Cedric is no more, removed when the  glasshouse changed use many years ago

Book Wraps from Scraps

'Field Notebook'

 

The muse is in hiding at the moment - after  working on 4 pieces concurrently earlier in the year, now I've completed them , I'm still deciding what to do next. Not that I'm short of ideas - thinking about  my replenished  indigo stash  I've bought Anne Woringers book   but meanwhile like Linda, if in doubt , make a book wrap! After the success of the sale of 'Little Gems'  at the Festival of Quilts a few years ago, CQ is  heading up next years Tombola, this time of bookwraps. As this is something I've been thinking of for a while  for my own sketchbooks, it seems a good  time to try out some ideas. The prototype above needs some tweaking, particularly the tie closure and it's a bit of a tight fit for the Seawhite 'starter' sketchbooks I'm  fond of using but it's a good use  of  an acrylic painted piece that didn't really work 

 

 I save all the offcuts when I trim my quilts  but it's a while since I've used any ( for this  Journal Quilt from 2008 below) so I've accumulated several baskets worth!  I've been having productive  fun trimming them down and sewing them together with zigzag.

 This is my favourite piece so far - it will make a good matching sketchbook cover to go with my sketching bag and camera case ( also made by recycling a failed project - the acrylic paint gives extra water resistant coating.

Circle Journal Quilts

February's Journal Quilt on the theme of circles: Critically Endangered Ascension Island Fern growing in vitro in Petri dishes in the lab. Photoshop manipulated photographs printed on cotton.

 

I don't know why it should come as a surprise to me what a difference quilting makes - that is after all why I love to work with textiles. But when I looked at the before and after photos after putting my new Pfaff GrandQuilter through it's paces it really was quite shocking! It also made me realise that what I thought was a relatively simple piece was actually too busy. Back to the drawing board to simplify for March.

Quilting made quite a lot of difference to these 2 recycled samples of failed 'Pearls, Pearls, Pearls' piece.

Thanks for all your lovely  comments about my new website. I was aware that the blog link on the home page didn't work - fixing it involves writing html rather than just using a template, something I've very little practice in. Unfortunately although the link now works , it's invisible, being white on white!! Quite how that happened I have yet to resolve.....

Recycling Rejects

 Remember this? Experiments on the theme 'Pearls, Pearls, Pearls ' which didn't lead anywhere apart from some cogitating about my design processes and preferences.
Looking through my box of rejects I wondered whether I could resurrect it into a journal quilt (or 2) on the circle theme.

 So I've chopped  it up, rearranged components and put to mellow on the design wall. I'm thinking of quilting around some of the pearl shapes  in the overlays and cutting back the organza to reveal what's underneath.

I  haven't forgotten about the Petri dishes - I chose composition 'g' from my paper collages and constructed it in fabric. Now I need to see whether stitch will unite the elements -or not. In any case  it will be interesting to use it as a stepping off point for abstraction and see where it takes me.

Meanwhile Ian is continuing to ask 'What about the Weir?'

More Circle Compositions

 E

 F

G

Thanks for your useful comments on my choice for circle compositions. I did go away and print some more and try overlapping some of the circles ( E and F above- ignore the red pin!). Then I asked Ian for his opinion - he said A because of the tonal range and suggestion of circles, that it was the most abstract. 

So modifications of that and D to produce G. 

Think I'll leave them on the design wall to mellow for a while a la EB .  Off to Box Hill again tomorrow - weather forecast looks set to blow the cobwebs away.

Box Hill

 The rain held off and we finally made it to Box Hill to begin building our walking stamina for Crete in April. A combination of the 'Short Walk' and 'Nature Walk' brought us to my favourite bit of chalk grassland  with views over the ridge we'd puffed up and distant vistas of Surrey vines.

 This spot has provided inspiration for a couple of Journal Quilts - in March 2005, and later in the season October 2008.

 Although I'd brought sketching materials, it was  too cold to draw so concentrated on taking photos.

 A few whimsical like the Tower with a quiff and the moss bird

But mainly rather blurry closeups of textures and shapes (the light levels were low)
I loved the white swirls of old-mans beard against the dark branches.
Then cheeks glowing back to London for a £6.95 veggie curry  buffet at Ravi Shanker's on Drummond Street. Now I'm ready for a bath and early night.