Jazzy Blue Notes Dancing in a Garden of Harmony

Jazzy Blue Notes… was accepted into the companion exhibit of Sacred Threads in 2022.Below is the dedication for this piece.

The exhibit Harmony offered artists across the world a chance to “Harmonize” their thoughts and feelings and come together in an exhibit in our nation’s capital. As we all know, we have had quite a few years recently of not being in harmony. We may not totally agree with each other, we may not “harmonize” over everything, but hopefully we can learn to appreciate each other’s cultures more, work WITH each other and help our noble experiment of a democratic nation prosper, grow, improve, and not fail. 

This piece evolved over time. I wanted a happy piece, dynamic and full of energy. The foundation pieced triangles began to dance across and around the piece. To me, the word harmony has great references to music. The blue triangles became blue notes of jazz, and thus the title. There are a lot of floral prints used in the piece, and I create a lot of “garden quilts”, so it also made sense to see this harmonic pink and blue partnership in a garden – dancing harmoniously with each other. It is a quilt which states – “dance with each other – enjoy each other”.

 The artist:My high “fiber” diet consists of beautiful cotton fabrics and different weights of sewing thread. I grew up in Urbana, Illinois, the child of two artist parents.   From a very early age I found cloth, thread and needle the best way for me to work creatively. The credit for loving fabric, and the ease with which I work with it, goes to my Lithuanian great grandparents who were an itinerant tailor and seamstress who took their family from wealthy Russian house to wealthy Russian house sewing the clothes for the families. When Czar Nicholas was going to conscript my great grandfather into the Russian Army, he said, “the Czar is not my ruler”, and was able to come to the United States. The rest of the family, including my grandmother, followed about four years later.

I love working with lots of color in a monochromatic format that is then often placed with another group of monochromatic fabrics. The mixing of so much color comes from looking at the Impressionist paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago, (which we visited many, many times throughout my childhood). My artwork is a partnership between the fabric, thread, and myself to create art quilts which are built on the traditions of quilt creation, but which also enrich and extend those traditions to make modern, contemporary artistic statements.