I’d been working on this improvisational photoquilt off and on for a while. In fine quilting tradition, it combines scraps from previous hotrod, griege, and eigengrau photoquilts in a pattern that I made up as I went along. The result looks a little like a bar graph and a little like a flower patch.
Sometimes I find decision making — how many pieces? light or dark? longer or shorter? move up or down? — to be an almost overwhelming obstacle, but it feels good to push through it.
After completing Eigengrau Study #1, I wanted to continue working with these prints. Here, I have used many of the same prints as well as some darker blacks and a handful of gold sparkles. Some of the darkest pieces include dark rays of light — almost reverse shadows — and other faint shapes. Overall, the effect is similar to I Don’t Remember Anymore, which includes photos that are mostly, but not completely, flat areas of colors. This is a quality of photographic prints that I plan to continue to explore.
detail
I should also note that my friend Matt taught me this fold pattern on a recent visit. He folded a piece of paper into a fan, turned it several degrees and folded it again, then spent a few minutes pushing and pulling it into this pattern. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. My photoquilts fold on their seams very easily, so this fold wasn’t too difficult. In person, the piece has an almost organic quality as it expands and contracts, which is hard to fully appreciate in photographs.
Eigengrau is the color you see when there is no light. It’s not quite black (hexadec: #16161d). These photos were taken of a black wall in my house, but clearly my camera didn’t process them as black, exactly. Thinking about how I use photos in my work and how the lens in my camera is similar to, but different from, the lenses in my eyes, led me to thinking about this color. Making something “black” black is a bit of a fool’s errand, so Drunkard’s Path seemed a reasonable pattern for these photos. I’m looking forward to trying some others as well.
