Abstract  Thoughts Through Visual Expression

So what are abstract thoughts through visual expression?In the case of my quilts, at least, they are quilts that actually begin by following a very old quilting tradition – use the scraps, don’t throw them away. To the right is the beginning of a piece in which I just was sewing all the blue extra pieces together and then cutting it back up and then hanging the strips on the wall to see how I wanted to arrange them. I have foamcore on my design walls so I can pin fabric to the wall and think about if I like where it is and what it is doing. As you look at the next few pieces you will see things that perchance I did not, and I may have seen things you did not. That is OK. That is part of the abstract idea – we don’t all have to see the same thing. 

When I was a child we would go up to Chicago often. And we always had to go to the Art Institute. My mother took art classes there as a high school student, and we just always found ourselves wandering the galleries looking at our favorites. (Primarily the Impressionists and post-Impressionists). When you go to an art museum with a painter (my mom) you do not necessarily look at paintings from afar. No, because if you get close to them you can see more “how they put the paint on the canvas”. 

When looking at these paintings, one is doing some of the color mixing with their eyes, as there can be bits of color next to each other – affecting the look of each. The pointillists carried this to the extreme, but the point is that one color affects how the color next to it appears to the eye. One could liken this to the idea of pixels – little pieces of color next to each other. 

While studying weaving, and fiber art in general, i read in one of the first fiber art books that Jack lenore Larsen stated that if you wanted the red in fabric to be more vibrant put one red warp thread next to an orange thread. That has stuck with me even though I no longer weave. The idea/principle works for fabric in quilts as well.