Saturday, April 4, 2015

More Eliizabeth Busch class 04-04-15

 
My friend Deb Mackay from San Diego was in Elizabeth's class and has agreed to let me put an image of her design board on this blog. One of Deb's pieces was the "winner" as far as multiple guesses about what she was trying to express in her work.
 
The small six pieces at top left are exercises done in class - sort of a loosening up before tackling our two main pieces which could be anything up to 24". 
 
The top piece is JOY which only one person misidentified as Anger.
The bottom piece had at least one vote for each of the six words
(Joy, Anger, Hot, Cold, Chaos, Sadness) except for Joy!
What Deb intended was Sadness.  The three panels are interesting individually.  On the left is a piece painted with ProChem transparent paints on canvas, in the middle is a print of fish heads Deb had done at Spoonflower and on the right is one of her great marbled pieces which has been dipped several times. 
 
I'll see if I can convince others to share their work.
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Elizabeth Busch class at Empty Spools 03-29-15


Here is my not very good attempt to explain the class with Elizabeth A. Busch.  The title of the class is “Enriching a Surface From Within: Creating Small Works”.    I found it fascinating and difficult, but I think it did indeed enrich my work in the class.  Now to carry it forward. 
Elizabeth Busch is from Maine and teaches more art than quilt.  I have long admired her quilts and added one to TCQC last fall - it is the cover quilt on the Visions 2014 biennial catalog, "The Sky's The Limit" 

The class is about learning to see what is inside you and put that into your quilts.  We did many small exercises and created two small quilt tops, each expressing one of six emotions/sensations - Joy, Sadness, Hot, Cold, Chaos, Anger - using color, value and line.  I worked on Sadness (thinking of it as depression) and Hot. I started three or four pieces, but some didn’t work and I went “back to the drawing board”.  Elizabeth suggested we start with a fabric that we liked a lot and I did so for both of my final quilts.  On the last day we went around the room and wrote down what we saw in each person's two quilts.  It was an eye opener - only one class member truly expressed the emotions Joy and Chaos which we all guess correctly.  Some quilts, including one of mine, expressed four different words to different class members.  I can show images of my two pieces, neither of which are completed, but as a class the decision was made to not put each other's work online.  So, I will have to ask permission of individual class members for possible posting later.
My first piece is "Sadness", but others saw it as chaos, cold and anger, although several saw it as sadness.   I had started quilting on it.
 
"Sadness"  8"W x16"L
 
This is the bottom portion, it is a piece I painted in Elizabeth's class last October in San Diego.  It is on un-gessoed canvas and I moved the paint around with a plastic scraper to get the pattern. But the black on white piece in the middle was the "favorite" I started with.
 
"Hot"  18"W x 12" 
This is "HOT" which most people identified as I intended, but one person though it said "sad" and two thought it conveyed anger.
The true color is not so pink - more red/orange/yellow.
My intention is to stitch over the black lines with black threads, possibly using perle cotton to give some dimension. 
 
In keeping with Elizabeth's suggestion to start with a fabric we like, I started with this scrap from the painting class in San Diego.  I pulled it from the trash and have had it hanging on a design board ever since.  It is about 6" wide.  the dots were created by putting a bumpy shelf liner under the canvas before painting and the lines were created  using the edge of a credit card to pile up the paint.   A fun and intriguing process.
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Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Busy, Busy, Busy 03-31-15

I haven't finished unpacking and putting away things from my trip to Empty Spools.  Other obligations demand my time.  I finished a little abstract quilt for the Visions Art Museum challenge which I need to turn in tomorrow.   And the rest of my day has  been spent at the computer working on the Surfside Quilters Guild newsletter which needs to be posted this week.  I had thought I would work on it at Asilomar, but too many other things going on.  Too much FUN! 

I also have to meet the every-ten-days-deadline for Elizabeth Barton's online Master class which is a real stretch for me - both the  projects and the deadlines.  For these first three months I have been the last one to send her my pictures on each deadline evening. Our April project is about Color - hope I can figure it out and get it in on time.

Rocky Surf in Monterey Bay
 

Monday, March 30, 2015

Dining at Il Vecchio in Pacific Grove 03-30-15

One of my favorite restaurants in Pacific Grove, CA., is Il Vecchio, and this year I had dinner there twice.  Five of us enjoyed the following dishes on Wednesday.

 Pasta Carbonara  (my choice on Thursday evening)
 
Cannelloni

Polenta with Ragu

Mussels and Sea Bass  (my choice on Wednesday evening)
 
After such delicious food we decided that a Ghirardelli hot fudge sundae would be the perfect ending, but when we arrived there at 8:05pm, we found it had closed at 8pm!  The only other ice cream place I know is the Baskin Robbins in Monterey, so we went there.  Not quite the same, but it was ice cream and satisfied us, somewhat.
 
It turned into "dueling cell phone cameras" and we had a silly time among the teeny boppers and the hand holding couples.   Even our teacher Elizabeth  Busch joined in. 
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Sunday, March 29, 2015

Quilt by Mary Pal is part of TCQC 03-29-15

This portrait study of Jane Goodall by Mary Pal was part of SAQA's 2011 online auction.  Mary Pal has invented her unique technique using gauze and a stiffener to define the features in her portraits. Being an admirer of Jane I was immediately drawn to this quilt.   
 
"Jane Goodall -  Portrait Study" 12" x 12" Mary Pal - Ottawa, Ontario, Canada 2011
Cheesecloth, PVA adhesive, buckram.  FMQ using monofilament thread.

The cheesecloth is layered to make more solid areas.

This close-up is of the fingers..

Nice printed label with the original photo, but no contact for the artist. 
 
On the back you can see how sparse the actual quilting is.