Tag Archives: Barron storey

All tied up

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I  happily work on six, seven pieces at a time and then ALL OF A SUDDEN, the need to finish something becomes urgent.

I am the same way with housework… looking with neutral disregard at piles of clutter everywhere until one day, I CAN’T STAND THEM ANYMORE.

This piece was a dream-sketch quilt and it is taking waaaaaaaaaay too long to complete — as are my three Easter Cross quilts, a poppy piece, and a pillow commission.  So forget about the torture depicted in the piece.  The thing torturing me right now is the unfinished state of things.

(but I have been all tied up — kids on break, garden attention-grabbing — just in the last few days I removed the dead inkberry, attended two track meets,

potted up a bunch of sedum, raked the side beds, planted some basil seeds, used garbage-snagged pieces of glass (– someone’s old fridge components picked up yesterday –) to make a casual cold frame,  swept the side porch and readied it for summer morning reading, swept the bluestone, got the houseplants outdoors, grocery shopped twice, cleared up the south bed, made the garage passable again by moving shit around, started a new compost heap)…

During the construction of this quilt, which I am calling “Witness”, the artist Barron Storey — whose work I really love — started a “women and ropes” series.  My “ropes” look more like threads, and lack the paralyzing tension that I had hoped to depict, but this quilt is, nevertheless of a “woman and ropes”. The cloaked witness is partially shown here:

On a lighter note, I am finding this business of having middle-aged eyes is adding a new dimension to design — the looking with glasses on, the looking with glasses off — something I never knew about because I had never worn glasses until middle age.  Last night I noticed that the batik of the Witness’s face, if you blur your eyes, really looks like a face.  I like it when things like that happen.

Congruence

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I wasn’t planning on picking a word for 2010, but I just did — congruence…

Lining up with oneself.  Lining purpose up with essence.

True congruence would be enlightenment.  I’ll aim a little lower.

Beginning with what I hope to be an extended LOOK AT WORDS, the shape of them, the feel of them, I wondered what it would feel like to take a rant page (the black ink) and weave in questions designed to encourage release — like, “Could you let this go”, “would you?” , and “when?” (from “The Sedona Method“) (the magenta).

What I found —

  • ribbons this narrow obscured too much of the text for what I was after.  I have since added vertical lines of machine-quilting and plan to add some hand-stitching tonight… perhaps a lot, given that the words aren’t really legible anyway.
  • I don’t have the right pens yet.  A medium sharpie bleeds too much, and the pigment pen isn’t fat enough.  Also, for this to be effective for how I want to work, I have to be able to write FASTER — which might require securing the fabric to a surface and acquiring different markers.  Any recommendations?
  • the Ott light reads as REGULAR fluorescent and not HOT fluorescent  on my camera’s manual setting– which explains difference in pix.

What I wondered —

  • what it would look like if I pressed the strips first,
  • or made them irregular in width,
  • or turned them into bindings first, like this project
  • does making a cloth piece out of the words/feelings I wish to release by definition mean I’m holding on to them?

An exquisite woven cloth with quilted center, here.

Here are some words on paper that I love and here.

June 2009 Catch Up

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8 x 10" quilt

8 x 10" quilt

Three weeks of kids swapping colds, strep… and the end of school have created a lag, here.  Will catch up in small posts.

First, I have been cleaning the studio with a fury.  Eight bags of fabric were picked up by garbage truck yesterday.  Sometimes, you have to be ruthless.  I was ruthless this week (previous clearings involved diligent emails to local art teachers, costume designers, former sewing students, etc.).

Second, I am finding all kinds of stuff as I go — unfinished quilts that I completely forgot about, for instance.

Third, it is no accident that I am showing up here, now, after the SUN FINALLY CAME OUT.  The same three weeks that my boys were competing for the couch and asking for cups of tea, it was cloudy.  No sun.  “Dimmest June Since 1903” (or something), said The Boston Globe.

The little piece above was composed with fragments from a larger village quilt from a Martha’s Vineyard series.  It features a tiny, blurry photoshopped image of my son Danny bodysurfing in one of those indoor pools with a wave machine.  It is technically NOT a quilt, because the pieced section is stitched to felt, without a layer of batting.  The whole thing is stapled to a small wooden frame and probably could use another frame to finish it and hide a little of the purple.

Recently discovered —

The Barron Storey journals.  Worth a visit…