Opening in Neumünster, reactions

In a personal mail regarding my post about the opening in Neumünster, Claire Benn pointed out to me that she was merely asked to open Nancy’s exhibit Monoprinting, and that is what she did. She was not asked to talk about Color Improvisations.

Claire then clarified for my benefit that Nancy only considered 25 of her 100+ attempts worthy of putting forward to stitch and ultimately showing them, and was not displaying each and any of the first attempts at a new technique as accomplished pieces of art.

She also criticized my choice of language in saying “I was not terribly impressed” as too subjective, I should rather have said “I did not like them” and told the readers why, thus being more objective in my criticism.

Well, I wasn’t trying to be objective, that's not what I intend to do with this blog, I was stating a very subjective point of view. 

But I would like to go into just a bit more detail about what I was trying to say:

• I love Nancy Crow, I admire her work.
• I think her personal insistence on bringing art quilts to attention can not be overvalued, and it is due to her doing to a large extent that we all can do what we are doing today, because she has given artquilts an importance.
• I have taken several classes with her, I have learned immensely from her, and I am deeply grateful for how she has kept pushing me in my development as a quilter. (In which I still consider myself a learning person.) She is a tough teacher, and I would not want her differently, even if some of the things she says about one’s work might hurt at that point. Most of the times she’s right.
• I also feel deeply honoured to be part of the exhibition Color Improvisations.
• I wrote the announcement article for the German Guild’s journal on this exhibition, and I was very curious and excited about seeing this new work by her. So let me here re-state the choice of language that Claire criticized me for when I mentioned ‘not being terribly impressed’: I was not as impressed as I would have wanted, or expected to be. I didn’t not like them, and therefore I did not want to say that. But I personally could not connect to these compositions. Knowing the high standards Nancy uses in her classes, I was expecting to be more overwhelmed.

But I did say that I am looking forward to numbers 100 and up, because I think Nancy will have a lot to say in mono-printing.

As Gail and Kit have put it in their comments to my other post: this new direction of Nancy’s is interesting, but/and it takes getting used to. And perhaps – hopefully, soon! – there will be a piece in this series of which I will be able to say: Wow, personally and subjectively speaking, I am terribly impressed and completely overwhelmed.