GRIDS/ARRAYS-- a standard "quilty" form

I am at a stage in my life where I review where the road has taken me.  Looking back at past blogs I realized that I haven't "covered" ones that are/were important to me.

So here is a batch of quilts I haven't "made public" in this particular way. I can't remember what I called this.     

                                                                                   & a detail with truer green color

I called this Winter Apples. I copied the form from an image of a beautiful African textile piece. And I wound up donating it to a young boy whose house had burned down in a summer fire in the interior of B.C. I loved the apple print border.

This next one has some "raw" appliqué. Little patches are added to the quilt top where the raw edges are visible. Conventially unconventional! Looking back, I don't recall what inspired this work, but I know it was done when I was experimenting with dyeing cloth.

I called this next one Summer Confetti. It was an incredible labor of love-- those borders!! It wound up being given to a couple getting married. That was very sweet to me. The confetti is in a very loose array.

Teapots with Music

Red Transparent Circles, a 3 x 3 array.

More Circles, this one Circles in Colors my Mother Loved

Red Circles

Up-Country Circles

A very recent circle quilt, Marimekko & Other Echoes.

Eleven Suits on a Green Field  

 I know, 11 is a prime number & doesn't lend itself well to an array! It's fudged.

 

Black Confetti

This quilt was part of a series of 4 in black, brown, tans & white, & is another confetti array.

Rose Lattice

I thought of this one as being a vivid mix of masculine & feminine.

For a project in art education at UBC I did some leafy projects.

Here's one, Spring Leaves. As I revisit it now I see the springs read way more clearly than the leaves!! The array is also mixed up a bit. The columns are truer than the rows.

Similarly Oak Leaves... same abandoning of formal arrays.

  Button Quilt was a small wall piece with hand-made paper from Paper Ya in Vancouver & shell buttons.

And other quilts based on  Paper Ya sheets.

The one below was treated with oilstick lines in red.

This one was with my home-made paper & hand dyed cloth. 

I called it The Coming of Aging.

     

That's it for now.

June, Chesterman Beach

 Windblown George ... & I ...

with Karl Thompson ...& his wife Sarah...

.....all went for a week's stay on Chesterman Beach on the out coast of Vancouver Island. It rained most of the time, but we managed to have a great time & get outside quite a bit.

I had a few bird encounters, starting with a stately Raven.

The 2nd morning I found a hermit thrush that knocked themselves out of this world, alas.  

And a small flock of sanderlings with some semipalmated sandpipers, but I only succeeded with one photo. (The trials of a new camera!)

There were California gulls galore & enough eagles to satisfy, but not for me to bother with a photograph.

I developed some pet rocks! Really. I visited them each day.

Another bunch of visual friends I made was with clusters, one of irresistible delicacy to me..

A beach can be a place of minimalism & I fell under the spell of marks in the sand...again...

I have no idea what creature or event made these marks.

But these arcs did reveal themselves.

I found a snail,  black bean sized, that made these strange circles.

This sand reminds me of some cloth I like with sateen stripes.

Intense fog. 

I knew where the ocean was. The wave sounds were very clear. But I wasn't sure how to angle my walk to hit the woods where our lodgings were. I knew I wouldn't get lost, but I thought about it a lot. The tide was way out, so there was a lot of beach.

There are lots of marvelous things to see out on the outer beach of Vancouver Island. Being brought up on the Atlantic Coast where the "outer beach" meant Cape Cod's easternmost shores I find the far west coast beaches just as sublime, but in different ways.

There were many profiles to capture, but this one with the eagle's nest [lump-in-tree] I particularly loved. These are not seen on Cape Cod. The east coast is not treed like this!

We experienced quite a lot of rain while we were there, so before or after any walks on the beach we could look up into our wet skylight windows to see the trees. I loved the distortions.

Like some Japanese gardener aficionado I was completely captivated on the beach by these large rocks in sand with water.

Rain & fog contributed to a collection of shots of what I called 'gradations of grey'.

Then there were 'special collections'.

My first special one was what I called The Dumped Pocketful. Clearly someone had been collecting & then thought better of it. Sea glass, shells, the lot!

Then spaghetti kelp rolled on a log.

 Other collections: textures & repeats. 

Urchins & ferns &.

frayed cedar wood ends!

 

Rain forrest

A marvelous singularity was found.

A natural knot, I thought of it.

And when we got back to Vancouver, our last night with Karl & Sarah after a great meal.

As ever, that's it for now.

Such a rich trip.