There are several June Underwood quilts in the Collection as I admire her art. She is now doing more painting than quilt making and I also admire her paintings. However, some years ago I decided that I would only collect quilts to hang on my walls, therefore I can only admire her paintings in photographs. As the years go by, one realizes that there is finite time and space and limitations are necessary.
"Farmland" June Underwood 2005 43"W x 36"L
Whole cloth quilt. Hand dyed cotton, painted, machine quilted.
I never asked June why she named this quilt "Farmland" - it must remind her of the autumn colors of grasses. Maybe she will add a comment! The machine quilting makes this piece quite elegant.
However, regardless of how June viewed the design, I think it works better upside down! I do hang quilts different ways and it always helps me see something new and interesting. This one revealed a different feeling, so I usually hang it "my way". Once I decided I prefer it with a different orientation I put another sleeve on so it can be hung either way.
When I look at the quilt in this orientation I see the black areas as trees and it makes me think of farmland that has been allowed to go fallow so long that clumps of trees begin to grow and fill it in - eventually it becomes a woodland again. Some viewers have commented that upside down gives the quilt a less ominous feeling. I suppose this is partially because we humans view the earth as dark and the sky as light - reversing these views might be threatening to some.
5 comments:
I am looking at as a view from an airplane with the sections of farmland one might see with various manmade and geoforms. I do agree that it is more appealing hung with the dark side on the bottom and I am sure it is because I want the sunnyside up!! Thanks for showing this. I had never seen it.
I have only a few minutes, but I have to respond instantly (while husband paces) to Del's comments. It made me laugh that she hung it upside down. I can see the logic and understand why it might make sense. But it's really a reflection of an early scene in my life, when I looked out over a sea of grain or hay (the golden color) toward the Susquehanna River, which was deep dark tree-lined swampy area. We had always been warned to stay away from it (and I had spent many hours exploring the swamp that it sometimes filled) but it always seemed a bit dangerous to me. So at dinner, I could watch the westering sun hit the golden fields, beyond which lay this black mysterious tempting place. A metaphor for lots of things, I suspect.
Sometimes they burn the weeds or old crops off the fields. This is how I saw this...
Very interesting! Knowing the Artist's true reason does not change the image you have planted with your 'upsidedown' view!!
Meggie's comment resounds with me -- often an artist's comment will change the view, but here, both things work (well, they work for me, at least). I'm having a nostalgic day, photographing school bus stops. That was another of my formative experiences, along with skunk cabbage and glens of violets lurking in the swamps near the river. This was in the 1950's, when I know my parents fear of the river was not that we would drown (we were all good swimmers) but that we would catch something very nasty from the water itself (or maybe sink into the muck and never be seen again. The Susquehanna has greatly improved since the clean water act of the 1960's. People may even swim in it now.
So the deep dark of the trees held some deep dark of humanities, umm, excesses.
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