penny-studionotes-2

Back on April 23rd I promised posts on three projects in progress. Other things in life have held back progress on the third project, and I wanted to be closer to completion before writing about it. With the backing for this piece now being dyed, I'm ready to describe it. A detail shot is above, and below is what the full top looks like, laid out on the floor, edges not yet trimmed; it's about 52x67."  This piece is in memory of my mother, Helen Schine Gold, a kind of color portrait of her and my feelings about her. I started thinking about doing a quilt in memory of her many years ago (she died in 2003, a year before Jeremy), and started actively working on it in about 2010. The initial thinking was something that would convey the comfort of my mother's presence and of her care and concern for me, embodied in this story:  When I was a sophomore in college, I came down with a serious case of mononucleosis, and wasn't eating. My mother flew to Chicago from New Have...

Back in 2013, I made a small quilt,  "Homage to Ellsworth Kelly," working from his paintings of colorful squares. You can see an example of one of Kelly's such paintings in the top row of the stamps put out not long ago by USPS--wish I had purchased more! After studying a number of Kelly's  paintings of squares , I decided to use multiple bright colors, along with both white and black, and to place the squares so that value contrasts dominate, but to also have some places where two adjacent squares are close in value. Here's the quilt I made, 36"x36." For quite a while, I've had a photocopied image of another piece by Kelly on my bulletin board, "Brushstrokes Cut into Forty-Nine Squares and Arranged by Chance."  Recently it occurred to me that I had on hand some fabric that might work well for a quilt based on this idea. I had dyed a couple of yards of cotton/linen blend in dark charcoal, but it came out less mottled than I wanted it, so ha...

I'm working on three different projects at the moment, and thought I'd give you a look at each one, over a few posts.  This first one was the last begun but the first finished. I was thinking I would intersperse working on it with the others, but it created such a mess that it took over the studio, so I just kept at it until it was done. This is from a pattern by Rachel Hauser of Stitched in Color , "Confetti." For a background fabric, I dyed some Nature's Way muslin in a pale gray that I like very much. (The color shows a little better in the detail shots below.) I have made two "confetti" quilts long before I saw this pattern, with both of mine done improvisationally. The first was a wedding quilt made for a friend , and the second used the same idea to make "If Only," a wedding quilt for Jeremy . In contrast, Rachel Hauser's pattern utilizes paperpiecing, which pre-determines the position of scraps. I don't think I'd ever do this...

This project started a couple of years ago, when I began writing down sentences that have been stuck in my mind for a long time. "You're the one who goes away" was first on the list, but there are another dozen or so, words spoken to me that continue to have a place in my psychic geography. My first thought of how to give them a life in art was to combine them with a line drawing of an object, with the sentence below. For "You're the one who goes away," the object would have been the rolling laptop bag. But some of the sentences didn't have an obvious image associated with them, and I decided that it was the words themselves that were key--that the words themselves needed to be the whole composition. I've used words/text in other pieces in my body of work on Loss. I stamped a narrative in " Accident ." I did a large screen-printed version of the same narrative in " Accident II. " I wrote out my many regrets on the back of " R...

An explanation of " Words Spoken " When my son Jeremy was growing up, he had a talent for remembering things that David and I had forgotten, so we would sometimes call him "The Rememberer." And David had a talent for finding things that Jeremy or I had mislaid, so we would sometimes call him "The Finder." At one point, I asked the two of them, "If Jeremy's the rememberer, and David is the Finder, what would a nickname be for me?" Jeremy answered, "You're the one who goes away." Of course this phrase has been with me ever since. In the morass of guilt that any parent carries after the death of their child, these words are an unchanging catalyst that over and over again, across the sixteen years since Jeremy's death, precipitates my sense of failure and loss.  And why this nickname? It was true that my job involved some travel, a night or two or three away from time to time, attending a conference or giving a guest lecture som...

Here is the difficult piece that I have held back. It is intended as the first in a series.   It is hand-stitching on linen, 42 x 14", stretched over a wooden frame. A detail to give you a better sense of the texture. I will let this stand on its own for a day or two, and then post something more about the work.

Although I haven't posted since August of last year, I've been thinking about posting. I've even started a half-dozen posts, all still waiting to be finished or discarded. And wondered why I wasn't finishing any of them. I think it's because I've been holding back on writing publicly about a difficult piece. Nothing to do but to go ahead and write it. But to warm up, I'll write about a couple of simpler pieces I've finished in the last few months. Simpler in the sense that there's no complex emotion behind these quilts, just a love of shape and color, and enjoyment of the design challenge of coming up with a pleasing whole. The quilt below began about a year and a half ago when I happened to have out on the table some blue/turquoise/teal batiks from my stash. These are all leftovers from making Shelter . The fabrics looked lovely gathered together. I cut some up into half-square triangles, liked how they looked, and cut up the rest of the fabric into...