working on while working on

Though i have pulled old work to finish and am excited about that, i am still working on new work to keep the juices flowing, and prevent the stagnation that occurs for me when i work only on one work!

“HAHA HEEHEE HOHO” as the song goes.

The upcoming Leighton Art Centre exhibition is the “big piece” this year (so far). I got a bit bogged down with it and decided to forgo the “companion piece” (“Body of Water”). The figure has a bit of work on her which i am letting puzzle for awhile, but i decided the background she was on is perfect for the actual exhibit piece. (I can always make more blue fabric for her.)

This is the original inspiration:

I have gone many ways since seeing it last year, with copious notes, sketches and samplings.Riffing off your own work is hard enough, but to use someone else’s deliberately WITHOUT COPYING, is even more problematic. One does not wish to copy, emulate or reproduce, one wishes to “respond”. Blech. In the final analysis, it was the sketch of the parts that fired the stove:

I’m therefore pretending that the bare bones shapes are mine. How would i translate them into cloth and technique?

 

That blue background already has a vague moon shape in the form of a rusted ring. Play off that then.

I made fabrics deliberately for this work, drag ’em out.
The grevillea ecoprint perfectly reflects the batik cracks in the original Leighton cloth.

Looks a little dry though:

I used to paint, paint with paint, paint with dye. So paint with some dye:

Now it’s juicy. Picks up the colour again of the original.

I then got hung up on what stitch to use, what colour the stitching should be, where should i put the stitch………

Well, duh. Blue, on the blue sections, and teeny crackle effect as i did on “All Water Under the Bridge” in 2014:

For reference sake, those stitches are probably  30-40 per square inch. Using a 20wt cotton was more than myopic but the effect is fantastic.

Onwards and upwards. On March 12th, the participating artists are going out to the Centre again to again review the originals. Think i’ll take this moon piece with me, there’ll be some stitch done on it by then–not going to let the original scare me, just want to see how approximate my take is without being too much of an approximation!