Saturday, September 6, 2014

Following the path of the wilderness piece staggering on

So yesterday I was out playing music, and poking about in a friend's art studio, she and I being old accomplices in art and music, and today I realized a few more stages of the wilderness piece. 

No obvious path between yesterday and today, but the ways of art are mysterious when they're not totally baffling.  I think I got in the zone just musing about all the incoming stimuli.

So I thought at first, and this was after seeing that wonderful book recommended by Magpie of Mumblings fame, of  Annemieke Mein, whose mixed media wildlife pieces involve drawing and stitching and all kinds of great stuff, where was I, oh yes, I thought hm, why not treat that freeform crochet piece you saw a while back as a kind of soft stencil?  draw through it? no, better yet, stencil with liquid copper acrylic through it using a sponge brush.



So I tried that, with the crochet still pinned to the muslin.  Then before I removed it, I thought, ah, better yet, a monotype taken off the piece right now, onto this piece of black satin.  Which I did. 


And the copper on black piece has real possibilities, which the copper on muslin piece probably doesn't.  It goes that way. Then I unpinned the crochet stencil and rested it on a new piece of muslin.


And took a look at the stencil attempt on the muslin





probably a nonstarter.

And the paint now drying a bit, I rested the crochet stencil on the silk dyed background and I like the mixture of copper and green a lot more as a natural background for my bees and butterflies and other animals.



It will be stretched out a lot more than this, once dry, and I hope the stretching cracks the paint here and there to add to the interest.

So this is where we currently are! one current piece underway, one nonstarter, and one future piece ready for further attention to be paid.  So it turns out not to be true that I finish one piece at a time, after all. There are always other pieces at work somewhere, but I hadn't noticed them so much. And I seem to have backed my way into the studio again.

3 comments:

  1. Enjoying watching your thought progress on this piece which is looking really great. Amazes me that in all this welter of musing you remember your camera and take pics for us!

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  2. Glad you were able to locate a copy of that book. It, and Jan Messent's 'Celtic,Viking & Anglo-Saxon Embroidery', are my favourites of all time. If you haven't seen the Celtic one, I highly recommend it. I like the black and copper combination as well as the last photo. Perhaps cutting up the nonstarter and reassembling it with something else might work?

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  3. using the crochet piece has worked wonders on the fabrics, such imagination to have tried this tchnique

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Thank you so much for commenting! it means a lot to me to know you're out there and reading and enjoying.