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| Fifty Years On , art-quilt 22"x36" |
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| Philboy, art-quilt | 31"x45" |
While I think it's fair to say I
became an artist with my first set of finger paints, I know that my love
of writing was born as a young girl when I wrote my first poem.
Writing is as much a part of my creative life as imagery will ever be.
That is probably why I am happiest when I find a way to combine the
two. When commissioning a family piece think about combining words and
imagery. Because I spend a lot of time with talking with those clients
wanting to tell a family story with their photographs, I am able to
assist with phrases or words that might be relevant to the piece. But
just as often words, phrases or some times commentaries (as in the above
piece) come to me while I am working on the imagery. To the left is a
childhood photo of my husband Phil that I fell in love with it the first
time I saw it. When I got into art quilting, and more specifically
following my American Family Album series, I knew I wanted to do a piece
based around this photo. As I worked to restore and digitally alter
the tiny black and white snapshot his grandmother had taken of him
outside their New England home, the stories I had heard of his childhood
reverberated inside me. Happy, sad, proud and shameful stories, not
unlike those most of us know, surfaced in my memory. Phil had overcome
much in his young life and as he got older he dedicated his life to the
betterment of others. The phrase in this art-quilt reads: "Who we become is indelibly written upon the slate of our childhood."
These words filled my mind as I worked, and I knew they belonged in the
design. I also knew that the message conveyed a deeper truth than met
the eye.... that no matter the circumstances we are born into, choice in
the way they shape our lives is always ours.
Another commission piece I worked on was for a friend whose daughter was
going off to college. The mother wanted her to realize that the most
important thing was where the journey, not the degree, would take her.
Filled with imagery and a phrase that kept this awareness in her
daughters mind, this piece hung in her room until she graduated and now
serves as a continued reminder from her mom for the rest of her life.
The piece above was done
to commemorate my fiftieth birthday. Along with a childhood photo and
expansive imagery I incorporated a favorite quote from Carl Jung, whose
work was a huge influence on my life. It reads, "Who looks outside
dreams. Who looks inside awakens." The inner journey has always been
most important to me and because I have spent so much time in
introspective work I like to express those discoveries in a lot of my
artwork. In a future post I'll share some whimsical ways I do this and
introduce a completely different way that I use photo imagery in my
art-quilts.
