Featured Site: Lisa Call Contemporary Quilts
No, you haven't just taken a cyberspace detour. This is the drawing site. But I just love these pieces, and they have a certain drawing quality - at least in reproduction, looking rather like pastels or colored pencils. If any of the postmodern art theory we read at uni had sunk in, I might manage a suitably academic comment about the relevance of the medium, or... nope, sorry. Nothing. I just like them. As I write, I'm looking at a page of quilts simply titled 'Structures' and numbered. Number 35 has subtle pastel shade like patchwork fields, and the lines evoke at once furrows, fenceposts and the long lines of country roads on a map. Perhaps I've been in the bush too long: they all have an element of the aerial view, fields of yellow canola, or burnt, or ploughed red earth.
I enjoy images which see traditional craft techniques employed in a fine art context. Sometimes the border between the two gets a bit blurred, and so much the better. Ula Einstein is a contemporary artist whose drawing mediums include fire, knives and thread. Though she's in no danger of being called a crafter, with her work including paintings and assemblages. Artist and illustrator chaco kato, with drawings like "once, there was a flower on the hill", creates a lyrical line in her stitching that somehow reminds me of a Michael Leunig cartoon.
All this fabric makes me want to go get the sewing machine out. If I can remember how to thread it.....
Before you start drawing with thread on fabric, you'll need to:
Learn how to Cut Patchwork Shapes
Figure out How to Operate a Sewing Machine
or maybe just Thread a Needle
Comments
When you look at thumbnail images of the works by quilter Deidre Scherer you could easily think they were paintings. She uses thread and fabric instead of paper and pen/paint. Her “still lifes” such as the Cut Apple on White definitely borrow more from art history than quilting history.
In her FAQ she says: “Drawing is the foundation of all my work: not only pencils, but also scissors and sewing machine are drawing tools.”
Risky taking that sort of realist approach in the fabric medium – it can so easily come of as kitsch. I’m not sure why. Its almost as if there is a pressure there to assert the (post)modernity of the work; with quietly abstract work like Call’s, the artist has a bit of an advantage. When you’re dealing in portraiture and still life, you’re already in the dangerous ground of ‘domestic art’.
Thank you much for the kind words about my work.
I’m currently working on another series that is directly inspired by drawing, specifically cross hatching and shading lines used in drawings. This is fairly new work so I don’t have my thoughts on it worked out yet but I’m having great fun making drawn lines with fabric.
You can see a few of the pieces in these blog posts:
Markings #1
Markings #2
Markings #3