From the Shadows

These are the dark days & so when shadows happen there is excitement. Me & some special

photos. 

                        

In both cases the light is bouncing off apartment windows across the park from us. 

In the dark days the only sunlight we get is reflected.

Recently I saw this: What a profusion of shapes!

I seem to gravitate towards these... a special kind of 'selfie'.

I love this umbrella in a lunchtime garden in Kahalui.

 Interference patterns: fence, shadow, & sand ripples... also on Maui.

I love the distortion of glass, condensation, reflection, & shadow.

This wall sculpture in Mary Price's home is greatly enhanced by shadows during the day.

I love the ambiguity of some shadows......and the clarity of others.

 In our apartment this the best shadow wall.

When you see repeated shapes it means there is a pin-hole effect with light coming through trees. 

A paper-cutting artist's work threw wonderful shadows. Beautiful things make beautiful shadows.

                            I have taken many photos of glasses. Simple, ordinary & shapely.

The next one is super ambiguous.

Oh, my, I'm having trouble "reading"this photo. The arm clues me into the shadow on a white shirt.

From my garden looking into the living room. Shadows & reflections.

I have a transparent clock & transparent calendar. One rare day I saw this. I had to move fast, because shadows come & go!

Shadows have had life long fascination for me. In my thirties I published a book called Shadow Geometry. It's for kids & it's basically about projective geometry (though I never say that). The book is still sold in China-- it was translated. Twice a year I get a very small (or sometimes surprisingly large) royalty check.

That's it for now.

Textile work -- Rare Opportunity

I was going through my photos this morning, clearing out not-so-good-ones, & I came across my piano photos from my May trip to Nancy Crow's farm in Baltimore, Ohio.

What a rare opportunity it was.
Farms are great places for collections, detritus, and quirky finds.

The two piano frames were in the quirky zone.
I loved them.
Lines, shapes, textures, & all the nostalgia that abandonment evokes in me having to do with lost stories, lives gone by.

The amazing engineering of it! The tension....Upper strings starting to go...

 Corrosion & rust...That whole feeling that nature will overtake it...... & chaos is already starting... I was traveling with my really old friend Mary Beecher Price, so there was a serendipitous touch....

So I hung out with these two pianos quite a bit & applied cloth & then dye-wash to them to make prints of a sort.
The first tries were with unslashed cloth, but it was hard getting good string contact that way.

 So I then tried cutting into the cloth so cloth & strings made more contact...

 ... & enriching the colors...

This was before I washed the dye-stuff out but it is now dry. I took the cloth out yesterday & look forward to playing with them.

                                                             That's it for now.

Textile work -- The Migration of a Shape

Few years ago in Paia, on Maui, I saw the sculptures of a very fine sculptor named Pascal Pierme. He's from France & lives in the US.

I took some photos & then started working on his alluring shapes.

I made notes in my journal.

I still haven't done exactly what he did, but he got me started on a great trip. 

And I'm not done yet. 

I have enough now to sketch out various stations & stopovers.

Here are my first configurations. 

This is where it all led.  Above it is quilted by machine & I didn't like it, so I ripped all the stitching out & hand sewed it. It's a stunning example of the visual difference between machine & hand quilting.

Then I found these amazing silk plaid bias strips.  Experimentation began: I couldn't settle on something that I thought really worked....

 





This project was done last winter after my trip to Vermont.

I rather like the flatter look better, though maybe that's just a case of not-so-great photography or bad lighting!

Or it could be that my batting had too much loft & was too poofy.

This was an exercise started at Nancy Crow's class in May.

 I hand quilted it without batting, part way through didn't like it. I tore it out, machine-quilted it, & liked it way better.... oh, & I added low-loft batting into the sandwich of quilt front&back. You just can't get those fabulous lines with hand stitching. It's faster too.

When I do this kind of machine quilting I generally make stuff up as I go along. At the beginning a few lines get put in spaced throughout. These secure the basting. Then elaboration begins.

I'm kind of in love with the transition from this......to this, with slightly softened rectangles a la Pascal Pierme...

I also love my mother's Venetian scarf coming into play. What would she say?  She & her large shadows.

 I came home with from my May workshop with Nancy Crow with two large beginnings: one was in grey tones & one was in color. The righthand image is when I have started quilting the piece up.

 

 The color version went though a number of auditions too.
    

  
 This is it right now, on the frame. I am making decisions about thread colors, lines of stitching, & adding more softened rectangles quilted into the overall design. The blue shapes on the upper large brown shape shows where I am going to quilt in interior shapes the way I did with the large yellow shape.

  

Upstairs, on my work wall, is another piece-in-process.

The silks are the last scraps of my mother's scarf. I'm intrigued by the change of ground in the center. I was planning to put red where the white work wall is, but suddenly I think that white shape is just too much to give up.  I now have to work that thought out!

What a journey.

I've loved it, wrestled with it & am still not done with it.

I still want to get into the nesting idea.

That's it for now.