Found poetry 57

Form, Not Function 3 -- more prizes

Rounding out the list of money prizewinners at FNF:

Margaret Black, Curb Appeal 6, 89 x 82" 

If you like obsessive piecing, you'll love this quilt!  It kind of reminds me of my own fine-line piecing, with lots of small bits surrounded and joined by very skinny strips, but Black's is less controlled, more improvisational than my own.  I spent a lot of time in front of this quilt trying to discern a pattern to the color concentrations.  And as an obsessive piecer myself, I went into zen state trying to figure out the order in which she sewed it all together!  Almost everything in the quilt is solid color, except for one or two commercial prints and a couple of batiks that read as stripes. 

Kathy Nida, Womanscape, 82 x 54" (detail below)

Nida's work, familiar to anybody who has attended a major quilt show in the last decade, features her trademark angst-ridden women with visible innards, plus a host of tiny details that make total sense only to a surrealist mind.  Figuring out what this quilt is about is more difficult than I have found in many other Nida quilts; it seems to have many themes, including pollution, patriotism, rape, feminism, contraception, pregnancy and windbag politicians.  And I'm sure I missed some.

I didn't inspect every seam in the quilt, but it's largely if not entirely done with raw-edge applique, zigzag stitched with invisible thread.

Deborah Hyde, Persephone (Jenn), 48 x 77" (detail below)

The image is entirely made up of pieced squares of commercial fabrics, cut to one inch, stitched to a half inch.  She has carefully chosen colors to create a pixelated image, but it's even better than pixels -- when she needs a color change in the middle of a tiny square, she fussy-cuts one from a printed fabric to get, for instance, a red lip divided diagonally from a dark green shadow.  Everything is done in piecing except a bit of dark threadwork on the eyelashes, brows and very fine lines of the face.

But wait, there's more!  Under the picture is a traditional Around The World quilt pattern, executed subtly in different colors of the same value.  Having once composed a fussy-cut graphic quilt of half-inch squares myself, I can testify to the tedious difficulty of getting all those squares mapped out, cut and kept in the right position as they're sewed.  This is a tour de force of piecing.

Form, Not Function 2 -- the big prizes

The two big prizes in FNF, right after best in show, went to two of the biggest quilts in the room.

Arturo Alonzo Sandoval, Pattern Fusion No. 18: Motherboard 9, 84 x 97" (detail below)

This quilt is hard to photograph because it's made of shiny plastics: microfilm, mylar, holographic film and I don't know what all else.  But in person it shines and glows and blinks and changes color as you move past it and the light hits a new angle.  Zigzag stitched on an industrial machine in a very large studio, the quilt is perfectly flat and industrial-looking, more like a machine-made flat surface than a quilt.  It's spectacular, and when you get up close you can see that the microfilms show newspaper pages from the past.
    

Emily Bellinger, S h a t t e r e d  (detail below)

As I wrote last week, this quilt has many, many, many pieces.  Each one is made of subtly different shades and patterns of mattress ticking, then finished with a traditional half-inch binding.

The artist statement explains: "Made to look like shattered glass, the work is crafted from traditional mattress ticking fabric to convey the intimacy that once was, the fragility of human connections, and the emotional impact of ending a relationship.... every time the quilts are installed, the layout and scale change.  This speaks to the varying ways in which individuals enter and leave our lives." 

Two big quilts, each with big impact and presence!

"Demo in Austin 2019 2"

I bought an interesting looking oil lamp from an antique store of somewhere a long time ago. Finally I got a chance to paint it. Here it comes.

I put everything I know about being a studio concept artist in my self study, online class subscriptions. schoolism.com/instructors.php?id=3010 And you can switch at any time in our list of hugely impressive instructors (Craig Mullins etc.) The sale is on!