Saturday, June 18, 2016

Caste-Outcast

This artwork was begun some time ago. It was based on a novel, The God of Small Things, about fraternal twins growing up in India. They were born into an upper level caste. The boy should have thrived. The girl would have a harder time doing so. Because of life events, the opposite occurred.

I have symbolized the girl as a flower within the triangle which is rising. The boy is symbolized with a graphic from the flag of India but he is diminishing. I always loved the graphic look to this art work but felt it could be stronger. This year I approached it once again and added corded outlines to the outside of the triangles to further define the shapes and then added an extensive amount of quilting which adds a third dimension. I love it to bits now.


Enjoy it as well and do leave comments. I love the dialog!

Sunday, June 12, 2016

An Urban Conversation

The MIX exhibit for this year is called Urban PDX. After photographing the city, I chose to work with two bridges: the 1930's built St Johns bridge and the newly introduced Tillicum Crossing. Our task was to create one large piece, with dimensions of 30x40 inches in portrait orientation and one piece that is 8x20 Inches.

For the large piece, I knew that I did not want to have a typical colored sky. I love this piece of discharged cloth  that to me resembles a sky at sunset and so the background is whole cloth. I chose to give the St Johns bridge elder statesman status and feature it very boldly. The new younger sister is juxtaposed across. She is created with a contemporary floral and a black and white graphic print. I don't usually put borders on art work but the sunset needed to be reigned in. This piece is named
An Urban Conversation.

For the smaller piece, I stepped out of the box completely. This bridge backdrop was created on my IPad with a photography app that distorted the bridge. It was then taken into Photoshop where the orange colorations were created and grunged. This was printed on my home printer and the black bridge was appliqued on top. I love working this way.