A New Textile: Four Cylinders

 Four Cylinders, hand dyed wool on linen, 9 x 13 in.

With this work I've gone back to making illusionistic volumes, very simplified to be sure, but a gesture toward the three dimensional. The last piece I did with this with this idea was Wave, which I showed here. Since I compose most of my textiles with flat shapes, it's fun to occasionally play with illusion.

The dyeing process for making the value shifts across the volumes is a little complicated. I use a dip-dyeing method, dropping the fabric bit by bit into the dye so that one end stays light and the other is darker, with transitions in between. As you can see from the finished piece, the transitions are not perfectly smooth, but I don't mind the jumpy color.  I did have to go back and dye a little bit of darker yellow and salmon pink for the final two rows; the darks that I had were not dark enough. I also had to warm the lighter green, which was too cool, by re-dyeing it with a little yellow.

You can see the color variations in these details. I had envisaged the background, which I hooked in an overall pattern, as a gray color, settling back from the brighter volumes. The gray ended up with a lot of color in it––soft reddish and greenish––because rather than using a gray dye, I mixed a chromatic gray. Although it's a livelier color than I'd planned, I think it balances the three other color ranges pretty well. I'm happy with this piece, a jolly little four cylinder engine.