Living This Creative Life

I have two favorite quotes. The first one is by Emile Zola, "If you asked me what I came into this world to do, I would tell you that I came to live out loud". I don't know who the second one is by, but it goes like this, "If you're not living on the edge then you might as well jump". Both of these sentiments sum up my personal philosophy of this experience we call life on earth. Enjoy!

Wednesday, June 19, 2013


Art Every Day, Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Good Afternoon,
Here is today's new piece.  It was my goal to see if I could coax the black, yellow green and white fabrics in the negative space to look like an integrated background while using some remnants of hand painted fabrics as focal points and adding highlights of strips in blue and red thus repeating all of the colors in the painted pieces.
I'm rather please with the piece and surprised by a few things too.  Look how much wider the painted square looks than the long painted strip.  Yet, I cut the square right off the top of the strip.  This is because of their backgrounds.  The white is expanding the square whereas the black is shrinking the strip. I'm also surprised by how bright and bossy the blue/red horizontal strips became after I quilted all of the horizontal stripes in the background.  What pleases me most is how integrated the background became after I quilted in using one color of thread, bright blue, on all three colors of fabric.  The white is trying like mad to come forward and it does look a little closer than the green and black, but it's still sitting behind everything else.
I WIN! I can control color, even bold white, with quilting.... and you can too.

Till tomorrow,
Heather 

1 comment:

me said...

It's so fun to see how you unified such a bold background of black, yellow green, and white by quilting it small in one color.

And it really does push that white to the background which I know is so hard to do! There are distinct layers in here, providing great depth and dimension.

I love how the square of painted fabric just floats seemingly higher than everything else and seems bigger than the strip it was cut off of- yet it isn't. I am continually fascinated by these "trompe l'oeil" effects you show us!

I particularly love your use of color and repetition of it in this. Its overall look is SO pleasing to me which naturally leads me to believe that you must have used pretty near the perfect balance of each of the colors- at least to my eye.

There is wonderful visual texture from the horizontal, tight quilting, the little dots in the yellow green fabric, the spatters and swaths and blocks on the painted fabric, and the frayed edges lying against the painted batting.

Great balance, nice variety in switching colors of the horizontal strips, and intriguing to look at close up and from far away.