Author: admin

Columns

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8.5″ x 11″
photographs and thread
2019
$90

This one is a bit of a litmus test: Do you see red columns on a blue background or blue columns on a red background? Cooler colors usually recede, which makes it fun to try to pull them into the foreground. But I’m not sure that making the wider blue portions had that effect. Either way, I enjoy how the different combinations of red paint and blue sky are all the same until you look more closely. Some are bigger or smaller, some are brighter or darker; there’s a whole world of differences if you stop and look for a while.

This is a theme that I come back to often in my work. Other photoquilts that are all the same until you stop and look for the differences: Wheels; You’re Not Going To Wear That, Are You?, and Les Portes De Montpellier

Rainbow #3

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8.5″ x 11″
2019
Not for sale

This third in my series of tiny rainbow photoquilts, this one follows a Bargello pattern, which bumps strips of differing widths up or down to create wave forms. The colored strips are from pictures of car roofs and hoods and the mostly-white strips are remnants from the photo printing process. These are some of the tiniest pieces of photo paper I’ve ever worked with.

Click on the links to see Rainbow #1 and Rainbow #2.

I Don’t Remember Anymore

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11″ x 9″
2019
$150

This is a piece I’ve been thinking about for a while. It’s an improvised composition of pieces of film-era photographs. Remember those? You’d snap off 24 photos, sometimes over weeks or even months, put them in an envelope, send them away for a week or two, and then pick them up only to find out how bad the lighting and composition really were. These photos are a nice metaphor for memory. Most of these pieces are poorly-focused, over- or under-exposed and feature minimally identifying parts of people and places that I don’t remember anymore.

Rainbow #2

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8″ x 10″
2019
Not for Sale / Private Collection

This is the second in a series of smaller rainbows I’m working on. The first was donated to the Ecole Kenwood Art Auction and was popular enough that I offered to make one for the second highest bidder as well. So, the school got double the donations, two people got a unique piece of art, and I discovered how popular rainbows are, which is fine with me because I love them too.

Improv Weave #2

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7.5″ x 10″
2019
$75

There is a lot more weaving in this second iteration than the first, and it’s also a bit more square. I like the areas with more open weaving where angles get looser and slightly more angular. I also can’t help but see R2D2 with this combination of colors. The variety of techniques is intriguing.

Improv Weave #1

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7″ x 9.5″
2018
$75

I had an idea to sew some strips to squares and then weave them. Then I went back to fill in with more weaving along with stitching to keep it together. I’ve used both the strips and the squares before, but the weaving is new. I like how the blocks of stitching complete the imperfect grid.

Rainbow #1

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rainbow 1

10″ x 7.5″
2018
Sold

This mini improv photoquilt was created for the silent auction at the Ecole Kenwood art show and sale where it was snapped up in a last-minute frenzy of bidding.

The rainbow is made from some of my favorite pieces to work with: photos of the colorful hoods, roofs, and trunks of hot rods and the white strips of photo paper that are cut from between photos when they are printed.  For this photoquilt, I started with a rainbow of seven colors and then gradually added the strips until I was happy with the balance and the spacing.  My original plan was to line the colors all up in parallel, but every time I laid them on my sewing table they all slid a little to one side or another and I found that I liked that arrangement better than the rigidity of the parallel structure, so I incorporated it into the final piece.

Because this piece was so popular at the auction, I’m currently working on more, one of which will be sold to the second highest bidder and those proceeds will also be donated to the school.

Driving to Where the Water Meets the Sky

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37″ x 42″
2018
Sold

This improvisational photoquilt went through several iterations before I was finally satisfied that it was complete.  I began by cutting some squares out of pieces of photos of the sky that I took for Treetops / Snowflakes.  Then I cut squares out of the squares and I noticed that by combining the squares and squares-in-squares from different photos of the sky, I could see how different the blues in each photo really were.  In fact, the blue of the sky at one end of a photo could be several shades different from the sky at the other end.  From there, I decided to see how it would look if I mixed in some red squares and I absolutely loved it — the colors vibrated next to each other.  As I began to experiment with other colors, I realized that I had almost the whole rainbow, so I filled in the gaps.  When I arranged the arc of the rainbow into a continuous ring, I knew I had it.

This photoquilt sparkles with the rainbow of color, the gloss of the prints, and the endless blue of the sky.  The squares remind me of bubbles bursting at the top of a freshly-poured glass of soda pop.  This will probably be the only photoquilt I ever describe as effervescent, but at least I can say I’ve made at least one.

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detail

Fade to Red

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15″ x 21″
2018
$250

This improvisational photoquilt combines a few pieces and parts that I’ve used before: the metallic red rectangles from Red Turn and the thin, mostly white strips that are leftover after photos are printed.  I previously used these strips in Persistence of Winter.

My focus with this photoquilt was balancing the red and the white.  The result is a bit like a photo that’s been zoomed in a thousand times so that each pixel, which had formed a perfect curve, begins to break down and dissolve.  The shapes have some order without seeming patterned, almost like residential plots in a sprawling suburban neighborhood.

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detail

Red Turn

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20″ x 22″
2018
$200

This photoquilt is a further exploration of improvisational quilting.  Here, I’ve taken a series of red photographs all from the hoods, roofs, and trunks of hot rods at various car shows, and cut them into squares and rectangles and further into circles.

The metallic shine of the paint creates surprising depth and the circles seem to start to make a pattern within the squares without ever completely resolving themselves.  This represents a fairly radical departure from traditional quilt patterns, which I find to be very compelling.