Ripples

 

About a month ago I showed you this.

I continued playing with my leftover blocks and got this. I like it a lot. I should be working on the student bird quilt, but this is on the design wall, and lately the step stool and I haven't been on good terms, so I am going to finish this first.

I've decided to use creams as side triangles on this quilt, and I have been cutting them from the leftover pieces from the Allegretto quilt.

I cut out a bunch of side triangles and threw them up on the wall. Like I've said before, once I get the pieces on the design wall is just a starting point. As an example, the arrangement above is light on the top and dark on the bottom. That will change too.

This is a scrap slab quilt. If you want to make one you can get my tutorial here, at my Etsy shop.

The Painting Finds a Home

I knew I wanted to hang the painting where I could see it often. That meant the studio, but wall space in my house is extremely limited, and free wall space in the studio is nonexistent.

So I put it here, on the frame between the two windows to the bedroom. Since I'm most often in the sewing studio, it's perfect.

Salida Art Walk

While in Colorado, we went to the Salida Art Walk, a big yearly event. We went to Colorado when we did specifically so we could attend this event. Turns out it was the same weekend as the Vermont Quilt Festival. Oh well, I guess I'll go to Vermont next year.

Salida has some of the coolest buildings!

 
Since it's not considered proper to photograph the insides of galleries, I can't show you much about the places my Mom and I visited, but I can show you various photos I took of things I saw in Salida.

Sometimes the most interesting things are not part of the main event. My Mom and I were crossing a side street, and I looked down the street and saw this barn.

Looking down another alley, I saw this building, covered in advertising. This is the kind of thing you have to notice and photograph. Once I saw this building, I kept my eye out for other buildings with painted advertisements on them. I saw many others afterward, but I would have missed them all had this one not caught my attention.

This mountain (with the S for Salida) is where they shoot off the annual Fourth of July fireworks. Many shops had cowboy boots on the counters with a sign asking for donations for the annual fireworks. I should have taken a photo of those too.  (Missed opportunity!)

The very first day we went to Salida, my Mom and I walked into this gallery and I fell in love with one of the small paintings. They were 8 inches square, and only 98USD each. I looked and looked, but left the shop empty handed. It was, after all, the first day and the first shop.

The next morning I texted my pal Julie. "There's a small painting I like that I'd buy if I could find a place to hang it in my house."

"Buy the painting, you'll find a wall," she texted back immediately. So when we got to Salida that morning I made a beeline for the gallery (Bork & Watkins Gallery) and bought the painting. I asked them to keep it for me so I wouldn't have to lug it around all day.

We had great sandwiches at Sweetie's, then kept wandering.

I was really happy and we walked around some more. Then my Mom and I walked into a gallery where the majority of paintings were of majestic horses. The artist, Katie Maher, was working, and my mother and she got to chatting. I wandered around until I saw this:

Oh my goodness, it reminded me so much of my cat Millie. I picked it up from where it was leaning against a wall and brought it over to show my Mom.

This is Millie. You can see how she resembles the cat in the painting.

"Oh Lynne, you have to get this," she said without any prompting whatsoever. I had already had the same thought, so I bought it, and then told Katie the story of how I came to adopt Millie.

We had a great conversation, then went out to visit other shops and galleries. We stopped for ice cream, I bought some earrings, and then decided we'd seen everything and it was time for a rest and dinner.  We walked back to the gallery where I had bought my painting, and this was the first time I got to see it close up.

My painting is by Michael Clark, and I love the "painterly-ness" of it. I love the impressionistic, free movement of the brushstrokes. What had at first appeared to be a house when looked at from a distance suddenly became a barn.

What are the odds?

I Am a Painter at Heart

The CEO of my company thinks I make quilts, but forgets I am an Artist at heart. He keeps telling me that when I retire I'm going to make quilts, which I find hilarious.

Why?

Because he's never asked. That's his assumption based on what he knows. He's wrong.

What I truly love, almost more than anything else, is pushing paint around with a brush. Oil paint. The kind that takes a half hour to set up, and a half hour to clean up, and demands its own ventilated space. Which I stopped doing because I didn't have the space, and I had an inquisitive cat who kept walking across my palette. You think I'm joking?

That was Gizzy, the cat who came before.

Anyway, the painting at the top of this post is an unfinished one of mine from probably 25 years ago.  Why post it now?

Because I have to remind myself sometimes, that at heart, I am an Artist first, quilter second. I don't draw because I have arthritis in my hand, but I really can draw. And just because I don't have the time or the space or the ventilation, I don't paint, but it doesn't mean I don't know how. I'm pretty good at that too. Knowing how to draw and how to paint really helps me in my quiltmaking, and not just in the ways you think (knowing color and value, etc.).

It's knowing when it's not working, when it needs to be scrapped and begun again. Or ripped out and redone. It's NOT working when it's not working and THINKING about what's WRONG and how to make it RIGHT. It's being PERSISTENT, and STUBBORN and not being afraid of what anybody else thinks. It's knowing when it's GOOD and to LEAVE IT ALONE and not overwork it (the top of the chair), and when it's beyond work, like the left side of the towel.

My problem in the painting above, since I know you are wondering, is that at the time I couldn't decide what it was. I was trying to paint using two techniques that didn't really go together - alla prima painting (all at once) and glazing (layers of thin transparent colors to build up a rich tone.) I'll leave you to figure out which parts are which, and which areas "work" and which don't. Parts of the painting are really terrific, the others, not so much.

It hangs in my living room because I like it, despite its faults.

Another Blast From The Past

Since I'm staying at my sister's house until the electricity is restored in mine, I can't play with fabric. 

However.

  I painted this oil painting of a colored beach towel hanging on a wall in 1987. It's about 28" x 40". My sister bought it and it hangs in her house.

Here's a detail.

It's fun to revisit artwork you did 24 years ago.

**Update

There are now about 89,000 homes without power in NH. (On Thursday the number was 200,000.) Mine is one of them. This is the fourth largest power outage in NH ever. They expect to have all power restored by the end of the day on Monday. I sure do hope mine is connected before then.  

Millie and I are fine.