I’ve been working on this quilt for some while, and it’s gone through several transformations. We had a mocking bird in here which is now slated for a later flight, somewhere else. And we’ve added lizards and subtracted lizards. All the way through, it’s been a stumbly path.
But each quilt needs to build a path for your eye. It’s more obvious with elongated quilts, but if you want movement in your work, you need to help the eye move.
What makes your eye move? Usually the small things: rocks, bugs, a strand of yarn over the piece, leaves. In this case, it’s bugs and owls. What makes the owls seem to move? The turn of their heads. What makes the owls heads move? What they’re looking at, of course.
It helps that the owls are darling. I’ve been in love with them since I stitched them in. But I found the path of the whole piece depended on what they were looking at.
It’s not an exact science, but we look where the owls are looking. It all turns on the turn of the heads.
Yesterday I gave a lecture on the Visual Path at the Peoria Art Guild. The best thing about lectures is that they help you think about what you do without thinking. I know that a major component of my design decisions is largely about making work move. Lectures give you a reason to think it through so you can talk about it.
Every artist has conundrums they are trying to solve within their work. For myself, making movement is one of those. If I’m filling the world with images of birds, bugs, lizards and frogs, I would hope that they would be breathing, living, moving birds, lizards and bugs. So how do I do that?
Here’s a section of my lecture with some of the rules I’ve decided help me.
These rules may seem silly or simple. But I use them every day. If I want to make things move, I can tilt them, change the size dimensions, create the illusion that they’re falling, or put them in a progressively larger or smaller conga line. All of those are cheap tricks. But they work.
That got me thinking, how many artists have rules they’ve made for themselves that help them to do what they want with their art? And what happens when we break those rules? Are we reminded why we thought to do that in the first place? Or are we liberated by realizing that rule isn’t all that ironclad?
The very cool thing about all this is that no one gets to apply those rules to us as artists except ourselves. It’s not so much a box we’re stuck in as a useful gridwork we can choose to use, or not.
My visual path pieces always make me think about how to make my eye travel through my whole quilt, just for fun. So if I were to bend my rules a bit, what would that look like? Each quilt is an answer to a question that I haven’t figured out just yet.
Two dimensional art is by nature static. It’s a flat image on a wall. So how do we make the image move? How do we make a two dimensional thing take flight?
There are several good tricks. Movement can be crafted in several small design decisions that convince our eye that the picture is in movement. This quilt I’ve been working on has a number of these features.
I was delighted when I saw a picture of a caterpillar perched on a fiddle head fern. I imagined a mob of caterpillars on the move, looking for lunch.
I started this quilt with some good movement in the fern heads themselves.
The Stems thrust upwards and the curved fern heads move at a spiral angle. Anything headed at an angle as if it’s falling is already in motion.
embroidery backembroidery front
I embroidered a number of caterpillars so I’d have some choices in color and shapes
I placed them several times, looking for the right flow.
This is the one I liked best. I went off the edge with my butterflies.
I like the flow, but it also works because of the interactions of the caterpillars. The angles of the bugs also suggest movement.
Finally I supplied lunch. It doesn’t really add that much to the movement, but the leaves with bites out of them makes me smile.
So to add movement to your art:
Put things at an angle
Go off the edge
Place elements where they interact together.
Put things into a path through the quilt.
The purpose of that movement is to send the eye through the journey of the visual path, to experience each part of the quilt through movement across it.
I’ve been working on The Garth for a while now. A garth is an open air garden in a church. This one is my memory of Capestrano where there are roses and lizards throughout the garden.
I’ve gotten the lizard embroidered, used a rubbed piece of fabric that looks like mosaic. A couple of weeks ago, I added in roses.
It’s all well and good to plop an image in the center of a piece. But If you’re trying to build a visual path for the eye to travel, that won’t work. The eye needs a pathway. It needs to be led through the piece.
How do we do that? It helps that the lizard is off center. The roses are a start. But it helps that start to use small elements to build a path for the eye through your quilt.
I made a batch of butterflies to interview. I really couldn’t tell which ones were going to do what I wanted. I tried the green ones, the orange ones, and an orange one with small stones.
The pathway between the orange butterflies and the stones move this in a path I like alot.
I drew the path so you can see it. The lizard and the roses are very pretty, but the butterflies and stones build the path so your eye can take it all in.
I’m fascinated with the concept of the visual path, and I keep working towards building them within my works. It depends not only on the major imagery, but on the small details that place us on the path.
This is another modified blog from almost ten years ago. It’s still an interesting story. And an interesting way to think about how we design our art.
It’ss almost impossible to talk about our art without talking about the art that comes before us. Before we talk about design, it’s worth saying that there are many different design aesthetics. It’s not that a design is good or bad necessarily. It’s designed to be part of the statement. The notions that fuel our art choices are a statement loud and clear past subject matter and past our technical handling of fabric and thread.
As quilters, a lot of us have backed into art by accident. We started with squares and one day found ourselves with an odd quilt that somehow was an art quilt. Maybe it had too much orange in it or you found yourself like me, embroidering frogs and bugs into the borders. There’s a tender soft spot in most quilter’s artistic persona. The part that said that you should have gone to art school or studied water color. So our first designs spring out of a personal view. Later, as we become more facile, we realize that the choices in design are a huge statement all their own.
My first artistic love was the impressionists. I grew up near Chicago, and there was a pilgrimage every year to the Art Institute. I strolled through the halls looking for paintings like old friends. Since they were my first real introduction to art, they felt bland to me. Safe. Something soft and soothing out of my childhood.You know it’s become mainstream when you see it on a birthday cake. This astonishing cake is by Megpi, a pastry chef in Silver Lake. California. You can see her work if you follow the link to Flickr.
impressionist cake, a photo by megpi on Flickr Since you can buy Van Gogh’s work on umbrellas and coffee cups, it’s easy to miss the point that he was a raving revolutionary in his time. His work nauseated the current critics, got him hospitalized, was refused for all the important salon shows, and the subject of ridicule in the press. Time and familiarity have made him a lionized artist, but that was not who he was when he began.
I was immediately in love when I discovered Japanese prints. It was a while before I realized why. The Impressionists took much of their new artistic vision from the prints out of Japan. The first prints that came out of Japan hugely influenced them as beginning artists.
In contrast, this is a painting called Nocturne from around 1825 by Turner. Turner would have represented the design aesthetics from the early 19th century, that Van Gogh and the other impressionists and Post Expressionists blew out of the water.
Early 19th Century Western art was about permanence. It honored stability. It was a world of people in their proper places, forever and ever. It used Greek and Roman scenes and portraits of nobility as an way of saying we had an eternal understanding of a changeless world.
Japanese art was about the moment. It moved. It created a path for the eye to follow. It went off the page. The impressionists saw it, fell in love with the concept and incorporated it into the designing of their art. The movement is called Japanisme. It was in my humble opinion, the beginning of modern art. And changed us all.
Myself, I cherish movement. I plot my quilts to travel from one side to another, taking the eye on a journey across the surface. The visual path and vertical path quilts I’ve been exploring are all about the traveling eye.
The decisions behind design are the most telling. Without a word they say so much about what we create, what we find important, and what we value. The way we structure our art is at least half the story we have to tell.
I’ve spent the last year rebuilding my body of work. When I married Don, I had perhaps maybe 40-50 quilts in house depending on how old the quilts are you are showing. For the first three years my occupation here was mostly in figuring out how to live around another human being. Then I had knees redone. Three actually. You can need to have to have a knee done twice. Don gave me his house as a studio a year and a half ago. All of a sudden I’m working again on a daily basis. It’s good for me. It’s good for my heart and soul.
So I’ve been experimenting for my own pleasure, but I’ve also been working towards having enough work to show. I don’t intend to teach on the road again, but I do love showing my work. And since it doesn’t necessarily fit into the standard quilt show, I’ve always sought out sole artist shows.
That means having a full body of work. Your standard one person quilt show in a small gallery is probably 12-20 quilts depending on the size of the gallery and the size of the quilts.
Five years of not producing work doesn’t sound like the quilts would disappear. But they did. Some sold. Some got given. We went from around 50 to 15.
The size of an art quilt is about the space it fills. If it’s in a large gallery or show, it needs to be the size of God’s underwear. If it’s for a small space, it needs to fill the space appropriately to make itself known. It should at either size, change the energy of the space by it’s presence.
So this last year and a half has been a building up of work. I love doing the little pieces. They’re light and fun and full of experimentation. I’ve always loved them.
Lady Mantis 2
Floral Arrangement 25
Very Brave Little Bugs
I’ve always loved doing the visual paths. They’re elongated universes designed to take your eye through a trip They make a huge statement without being huge and they fill a space in a unique way.
Lily Pond
Mother Toad
Stag Party 2
But big quilts. Big quilts take for ever. Big quilts are always a huge risk. They are hard , hard work. And they’re made to be show stoppers. As in, if you want a show, be prepared to make a mountain of these. Or your sort of stopped.
They usually take 9 months to a year, although I don’t work on them constantly. If they are disappointing when you finish, it’s a huge loss of time and energy.
I’ve never found that I could take a small design and blow it up large. The space fills in differently if you do that, and it’s hard to make something that’s interesting both as close up and at a distance.
Obviously it’s a matter of balance. Most people have a size in their head that is comfortable, and that’s as big or small as they go. But it’s worth working past your comfort.
Does size matter? Yes and no. Size makes impact. It makes a statement. It makes legend work.
But small work, intricate work makes a small space resonate with it’s energy. It’s worth doing it all, as best as you can. The stretch either way is good for you.
I’m obsessed with thread shading. I want images to be as 3-d as possible. To do that I shade with as many colors as I can. With regular #40 embroidery thread, I can use almost an infinite number of colors to shade an image. Particularly for a larger image. It’s a pretty large paint box. And you can use them all.
With heavy weight bobbin threads, there’s just not that much space in an image to shade. So this is my answer. Instead of adding more and more colors, I dye the thread so that it’s got a range of color within each thread.
Most commercially dyed thread comes in one of two styles. Either they mix a dark color with a number of lighter shades ending in white. Or they do the rainbow either in pastels or brights. The rainbow color ones work for stippling. They don’t shade well at all. The ones with dark to white leave a white area I really don’t like.
Most images can be zoned in dark, medium and light areas. They also can be zoned into different colors, like the spots and the frog’s body.
Dyeing threads to shade images can be set up the same way. You can dye a shader, a shocker and a smoother. The shader thread is the color of your image darker than you want the whole image to be. Add in a dark shading color like dark brown, purple, green or blue, or it’s complement, plus 4-6 dark shades of the whole color. The shocker is a medium range of 5-6 colors with a shocking color mixed into it. Usually a bright complementer color works best as a shocker. The smoother is a color that is a bright highlighter shade that fills in the image and finishes in the shaded image.
The range of colors gives you at least a 15-18 color range in a small bobbin work image. Other colors can be added. There are no rules, but here are some color ranges that work well.
Shader: Dark orange, yellows and reds, and browns
Shocker: Yellows and two purples
Smoother: Yellows and oranges
Shader: Dark purples, blues and greys
Shocker: Medium greys and teals
Smoother: Medium to light purples
Shader: Teals, and oranges
Shocker: Yellows and teals
Smoother: Yellows, and oranges
You get the idea. Dye the thread to do your shading for you.As you fill in the stitching with rhythmic motions, the shading progresses across the image. All you have to do for thread like that is dye for it.
We’ve talked about how elongated quilts are already in motion, just because of their shape. But how do you make a square quilt move? One easy way to do it is to design a moving shape inside the square
All Time is Spiral in a Garden
A spiral is a visually moving shape that fits easily into a square.
Flying Rose
Here the rose is constructed out of spiral shapes of sheers, twisted in among each other.
Even just a thin spiral vine can energize this group of dragonflies.
Silent Splendor
Sometimes the spiral is in the stitching.
Sometimes it’s in a leaf.
Moth Mandela
Sometimes it’s just ordered shapes.
But a spiral anywhere will help carry the viewer’s eye across the surface of the quilt.
You’ll remember in blog post Don’t Be Square, we introduced visual paths. Visual paths are a designed pathway through your quilt to guide the eye across the surface. A vertical visual path works differently than a horizontal one. Horizontal visual paths pull your eye across the width of your quilt.
A vertical visual path almost always draws your eyes up through the piece? Why? Largely because of the shape of the quilt and the fact that we usually follow things from the bottom up when we look at them. These dynamic dimensions already launch the viewers eyes up the quilt.
But good planning and design help as well. If we place similar objects along the pathway, the eye will also follow those, just like stepping stones. The flowers aren’t big, but the direct your eye through the piece effortlessly.
I favor ‘s’ shapes for the visual pathway. But other shapes work as well. Any direction that pulls the eye makes the whole surface of your work pop as your eye travels through. The squirrel himself makes the visual path here, and he’s traveling straight down. Either way, it makes the eye move.
Stems on the flowers, and the blooms themselves start the eye down to find the turtle. Whatever direction your path goes and whatever stepping stone you use, it makes the dynamics of your quilt work to show off every wonderful detail.
So don’t be square! Play with elongated shapes, and see where your visual path takes you!
