Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Branching out to figure out where I am going

I have always been interested in art, and I love to make quilts and sew. So I have purchased two books that are work books in exploring techniques in quilt and fabric art using different. One is using different mediums to obtain the look you desire to achieve. The other which is the book I will start with is Art Quilt Workbook by Jane Davila and Elin Waterston. The first exercise is to write down 35 words, pick a work and make 3 quick drawings of the word. Well I tried but then my ever wondering mind stopped me cold. The first word I picked was quiet, well what exactly does quiet look like, and how does it differ from silence, and here is what I did.

Good Ole National Geographic! When I took art courses, I often used this magazine to find photos to use in various projects...I pulled out one of the hundred or so issues that we have stacked on a book shelf, and started flipping thru looking at the pictures until I found 2 pictures that made me "feel quiet" and I realized...at least to me ....quiet is a feeling...silent is the lack of sound (silent is also one of the words and I have no idea what to do for that)...I cut those pictures out and pasted them in my sketch book...one a picture of a mother polar bear padding across the ice with her two cubs...the white snow contrasting with the purple horizon..the other of aurora borealis draping over the hudson bay....I studied those pictures...and decided that "quiet" to me was nature with the absence of buildings, cars, and probably other humans for that matter. I know that the pictures where not "silent" there would have to be the noise of the ice shifting and of the bears padding across the ice with the mother bear sometimes directing her cubs...in the other there must be the sound of wind, the trees swaying back and forth, the water movements....after this study I was able to draw "quiet"...gazing at the stars in the wilderness, birds flying high in the sky, and the sun setting behind the mountains( which just made me realize the sun i drew is setting in front of the mountains!). The instructions for this first exercise said to just pick a word and quickly, without thinking, draw....I can't do that and this works better for me. Maybe because this is the first time I have thought about what a word looks like. But I can say that it is an exercise that makes me look at things more openly, so it works for me.

1 comment:

  1. Excellent! That's a hard exercise that many people (including me) struggle with. Now that you've done it your way, you can try the "no thinking" method again and see if you can make that work too. The important thing is to get the creative juices flowing, no matter how you get there.

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