Cubist Explorations

Picasso...what images do you think of? Crazy heads with eyes in different planes going in all directions? People who are goofy-looking rectangles?
I admit, that's what I think of...and women with breasts pointing in directions Mother Nature never intended...

But we have been exploring Cubism in this week's lesson, with Pamela Allen's guidance. There is a huge variety of artwork out there exploring the concept of time and movement...

We started making basic shapes, making positive/negative images, fracturing them...

and developing them into a composition using all our previous lessons of the elements of art.

I started with the ubiquitous daisy shape common to quilters, okay, a little wonky daisy...

that has exploded into a wild garden!

I also tried a generic coffee mug

put in some contrasting backgrounds, an outline suggesting a cup...

and worked that fabric sketch into a piece I like very much, which reminds me of a collage. Wanna cuppa?

This has been so much fun. I would never in my dreams have thought I could do something like this! And I have enough handwork to stitch down to last me a very long time!

Garden Quilt Departure

Here is an update on one of my Pamela Allen online class projects. The subject of Lesson 2 in About Style was gardens and foliage. We were to try to create new shapes, imaginative flowers, a variety of foliage, as in the flower/tree sketches I posted here.

Then, the assignment was to create a garden composition. I put some flowers together, and tried to think of a focus for the piece. It hit me that I would like to set my "garden" in the landscape of our mountain cabin. Then, I thought I could put my "late" dog, Maggy, somewhere in the garden as a bit of memorial.

So, I started out with these exuberant flowers and rhododendrons on the right, a blackberry bush, and Maggy sitting at the base of a pine tree and looking at the raccoon she had "treed." No, don't squint, the raccoon was not in this scene yet.

Pamela loved the right side of the composition, but thought Maggy looked like a rodent, and the muted color of the tree and the background was too confusing.

By then I really wanted to make this a story quilt featuring Maggy and the raccoon, so I decided to go much more vertical.


I changed the boring pine trunk to a gnarly, twisted mountain tree, put in a raccoon with personality and lots more colors of foliage in the tree. This one got the nod from Pamela, and I have started stitching down all these pieces with hand embroidery.

Not exactly what I would call a garden quilt, but Pamela says that was just a starting idea that we could take in any direction we chose.