Inspired by Modern Masters

I think it's really important for us creatives to look at the work of other artists that we admire. To get ideas and to just kind of reaffirm our interest in the arts. Whenever I am stuck and I can't, you know, I wanna go in my studio and work but can't figure out what I wanna do, I'll sit down with one of my favorite artists via a book and look at his work and usually I end up being inspired. I think it's important that we look away from our own genre. Instead of looking at other quilt artists' work, look at painters, or water colorists, or even sculptures to get inspired, so that we don't end up copying, we simply use what we see and what we like in what we see as a jumping off point sort of.

So, these are three pieces that are very much inspired by some of my favorite artists. And the first one here is Paul Klee, and one of the things I like about his work, and he was a painter, contemporary painter, who worked at the Bauhaus and was a teacher in the 20s and 30s all the way through the 50s. I liked his really soft color palette, and the way he used line, and he would use line in really interesting ways. And at the time that I made this, I really wanted to explore how the stitch line affected the work. So, I had seen this picture of his, this wonderful painting, and it was this painting that inspired this quilt.

The palette is similar but different, this one has mostly shades and mine has mostly tones. And this one has white lines scratched out of the paint, and mine does not have white lines, but it does have very similar lines. So, as I was creating, I simply stitched together various sizes of rectangles and squares, and then when I was done, I overlaid a bunch of stamps, so imprints of stamps with slightly darker colors, and that added another sense of line here, so we've got this grid that is present, and then occasionally we've got some circles, just to add some interest and break up that grid. Then afterwards, I decided that I was going to quilt it with a thread that you could see equally across the whole surface. So the color I chose was gold.

Because there really wasn't any gold in the piece. And so you can see that thread pretty much on every fabric. Normally when somebody would quilt something like this, if they were gonna quilt with straight lines, which is what I wanted to do to continue with the feeling of kind of modernistic abstract, normally you would quilt inside each of the blocks, and instead I wanted to have the feeling of this painting where the lines were not contained inside each block of color, they crossed over it, and so that's what I did. I simply started quilting straight lines, and just whenever I didn't wanna quilt in that direction anymore, I would change direction. But I didn't stay inside the pieced block.

When I was finished, I really, really like the piece, and it's been one of my favorites for a very long time. And it was the first in my series of paying homage to some of my favorite artists, and it's called Ode to Paul Klee. The next piece is a piece that is based on Joan Miro, and Miro is an artist whose work I actually hang some of his reproductions in my home. And one of my absolute favorites is this piece right here, and the thing I like about his work is how he has a fine black outline around so many things, and uses mostly pure hues and primary colors of red, yellow, and blue. So I wanted to explore that, and that led me to this piece.

This piece is a piece of white fabric, so I was starting with a blank canvas like a painter would do, and then I stitched down this black line, but it was a white line, it was rolled white fabric stitched during the quilting, and then I quilted the background with just a simple stipple, and each portion, I stitched differently, so these two are stitched like each other because they're the same type of unit with just straight lines about an eighth of an inch apart. This one I broke into three pieces with these lines, so I quilted each of the parts differently. And then the circles all have swirls in them, each one. And then I quilted the border. And you can see that it has a similarity, but it's certainly not a copy of the work, it's simply taking some of his elements and principles of design, and bringing them into my own work, and using this idea as a jumping off point.

It's a great exploration, and a great way to learn from other artists. The last one, I really like Piet Mondrian, and I like his work because of its simplicity of color, but it's always way too tight. So I was looking through this abstract book and saw this piece, and I love that it's very similar to Mondrian's but not quite so tight. We're still using the primary colors, but I really like the spaces between, these black lines in here. So I tried to figure out how I could achieve those black lines, and printed them on a piece of fabric and then went in and added the colors that I wanted to add, and I wanted to add those colors sparingly.

This had a lot more of the yellow, but I just wanted to kind of feel that creation of this portion right here. And I'll eventually quilt this, but it's just the beginning. So you can use this, these books, these - you can go to museums, you can go to libraries, and get inspired, keep a little notebook of things and ideas that you'd like to try. But it's a wonderful, wonderful way to grow.