Turning points in art

I've put a couple of pieces into more of a presentation mode, just to get them off my table and onto the wall at least for the moment.  I have some ideas about how to extend the motifs in them, which I'll get into.  The black and white drawing of the weed is like a drawing I made of the same thing, using a real life weed as a model, beautiful architecture.  The bird has other sorts of potential.

This selection includes a couple of works I made years and years ago, and I'm still fond of them, because they're among the few items I made just for me as a present.  Isabelle, every time I see the unicorn piece I think of you!  this is because I stitched it many years ago, one strand of floss, on 38 count silk gauze, using as my guide a picture of one of the unicorn tapestries that is still in France, in Cluny, I think. I left the background blank, because the silk gauze is beautiful in itself, no need to cover every part of it.  I know you treasure historic needlework, so I shot this image for you.

I realized that the needlework I've been doing this year is only one part of my art thinking.  I'm toying with image transfer -- came up in conversation recently, and I realized it could apply even here -- and with drawing the same image as in needlework, monotypes relating, and other ideas.  I think I see the seeds of a mixed media exhibit starting to fumble about in my mind, where several single media can work to portray the same motif.  The bird here in stitching, there in image transfer, there in drawing, there in monotype form, there in linocut, but all different, allowing for the different ways the medium works.

I've never seen the point of using one medium to imitate another -- no point in photographic realism in painting and drawing since the invention of the camera, after all, and stitched portraits are, well, same objection. But what's really important to me is to investigate what each medium itself can do, working on the same subject.  Anyway, I think that's the unfolding adventure for me this year.

But as we all know, woman proposes, Goddess disposes!