Red Bars, hand dyed wool on linen; 4 pieces, each 6 x 6 inches.
My idea for this quartet came from a photo I took this summer for my painting; a thick bar alongside a curved hose:
I liked the idea of the wide flat form interacting with a narrow curve, so I did a few thumbnails. At first I thought of using strong colors similar to the ones in the photo, but then decided to be a little silly and go with pink as the background color. I chose to make the piece of multiple panels in order to have a rhythm move from one to the next: a flowing line, a staccato bounce of dark shapes. The color of the rectangles was a little difficult: Red Bars started out as Blue Bars, but after I hooked one panel I realized that blue didn't work at all; it look saccharine sweet. So I looked through my piles of dyed fabric remnants to find another color and the grayed red looked perfect to me.
Another decision was how to make the curving line: should it be a color, or something more subtle? I liked the idea of the line being less insistent, hardly there, so...
..what I did was hook the curved line and cut the tops of the loops, which gives the appearance of a line running through a field, like the path of a deer cutting through high grass.
Philip Guston, Untitled (Light Bulb), oil on panel, 12 x 14 inches. (1969-1973)
As I was working on this piece, I kept thinking of Philip Guston, whose paintings, both the abstract and the later great figurative works, included brilliant explorations of the impossible colors red and pink. Blood and flesh=life; and thumbing the nose at "good taste".
Love the integrity.
ReplyDeletethanks, Martyn!
ReplyDeleteI like those lines you cut through. Sculpture.
ReplyDeleteLike everyting, including the photo and how you got from there to here. "Like a deer running through high grass." Or perhaps one of many animals curving through soft snow.
ReplyDeletethanks, Helen. I always feel a bit like I'm doing low relief sculpture when I work on textiles.
ReplyDeleteJulie, I think of deer as I see their paths through the grass, many of them weaving through the apple orchard as they come to eat the fallen apples.