Merry Christmas

hope you have a lot of music around!

Not in my backyard...

So the Western media have been hyping about how oh-so-many people were so excited/upset/afraid because of the misunderstood Mayan calendar. Calling for a new time, not the end of the world, but supposedly people were still afraid that the world would end. Preparing to survive. (Who would want to survive the real end of the world anyway - only to die a few weeks or months later either of starvation or some radiation sickness, and not having had power in between to run one's sewing machine? No treadle machine in my family anymore...)

Well, the end of the world didn’t happen in my backyard – which looked like this early this morning:

Snow-covered art 

Snow sculpture

Waiting to be fed...

Waiting for warmer times: our magnolia

left-overs, now meant as bird food

Entrance to paradise, on warmer days

Play of Lines?

yet another snow sculpture

manifest drizzle

Unfortunately it has been drizzle-raining all day, so not much of this beauty will remain to give us a White Christmas. But I managed to scavenge two boxes of snow for a bit of snow-dyeing.

And today is winter solstice - and how is this for a bit of numerology: the sun turned around at twelve minutes after noon. Which looks like this: 12.12.2012 12:12.

A good occasion to pay a visit to Daily Oak at exactly this moment, the beginning of new and lighter times:

Daily Oak, perspective a, 12.12.2012, 12:12

Daily Oak, perspective b, 12.12.2012, 12:12

Here comes the sun? It will.

Colour of the month

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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. 

"Color Improvisation" and Nancy Crow's Self-Portraits opened in Neumünster

My trip to Neumünster was strenuous and not without delays, but I won’t go into that. The textile museum Tuch + Technik  is a wonderful presentation of the history and development of spinning, weaving, in combination with the local history of Neumünster, which was once called the “Sheffield of Schleswig-Holstein”. And it is a wonderful venue for the many large quilts of “Color Improvisation”.

View over the museum hall when entering

Two of Marina Kamenskaya's four quilts

Randa Stewens, Uta Lenk,
and Kathy Loomis in the background

Bonnie Bucknam

Nancy Cordry, and Leslie Riley in the background

Uta Lenk, Jayne Willoughby Scott,
and Cathy Shanahan in the background

Some of the quilts are hung on a system that makes it possible for the viewers to take closer looks at the back sides. Which definitely give very interesting sights with some of the quilts, e.g. this one by Jayne Willoughby Scott. Seeing the quilting pattern on the back side certainly adds to the pleasure of having seen the front!

Jayne Willoughby Scott, back of "Nightdrawing 14"

Jayne Willoughby Scott, Nightdrawing 14

The second part of the exhibition is dedicated to the newest quilts by Nancy Crow, who has started on a completely new path a little more than a year ago, when she began making mono-prints.

As I already mentioned in my last post, Nancy Crow’s name is presented prominently on the front of the flyer, suggesting that this is the more important part of the exhibition. The same was true for the opening speech by Claire Benn, http://www.committedtocloth.com/ who had flown in from London to open the exhibit on Nancy’s behalf. She barely mentioned the other fifty quilts that were hanging throughout the museum.

Because I had written an article on this ‚coming exhibition’ for the journal of the German Patchworkgilde in September, for which I had received pictures of Nancy’s quilts, I knew sort of what to expect in terms of different style of quilts and color.

However, when I recall what I learned in Nancy’s classes about colors, design, composition and unity of the whole arrangement, I admit that I was not terribly impressed with some of these quilts.

I admire the guts that Nancy has to be starting on such a completely new venture by taking on a new technique, and I am convinced that it will be very interesting to follow her development. Claire Benn said in her speech: „And then I tell my students ‚now get to work, and do at least a hundred of these.’ Nancy is exceptional in that she did.“

But even a well-known artist perhaps need not exhibit all of these hundred first attempts as accomplished pieces of art. Of these four quilts in the picture, the one in the lower right hand corner carries the number 97.

Nancy Crow, Self-Portraits

While I was looking at the exhibit, it was the only one that I really found worth looking at in more detail, and that I could relate to in some manner. With most of the others I did not connect easily. When looking at the picture now, I do think the two white and black ones are also worth looking at, this seems to be an effect of the zooming onto picture size, though, they certainly did not appear clear or understandable to me when I was standing in front of them. 

It will be interesting to see numbers 100 and up, because I am sure Nancy has a lot to say through printing.

The exhibit is on until March 10, 2013, and the museum is within walking distance of the train station in Neumünster.

Color Improvisations in Neumünster

I have packed my bag and am planning to hop onto the train early tomorrow morning to attend the opening of  the double show of Color Improvisations and fifteen quilts by Nancy Crow in Neumünster, north of Hamburg.

There has been a bit of a discussion on the Contemporary Group of QGBI's yahoo list about the recent showings of this exhibition in London (badly hung) and Dublin (wonderfully hung) and how the advertisement with a provenance of the name "Nancy Crow" had influenced visitors' expectations.
Margaret Cooter commented on this on her blog with some interesting thoughts, weighing carefully between the arguments for either side.
It is an interesting topic. I don't know how the advertisement for the two shows in England and Ireland was constructed. But when I received my invitation for the opening at the Tuch + Technik Museum, I of course immediately noticed that the quilt on the front of the flyer was one of the three quilts by Bonnie Bucknam in the show, while the prominently displayed name was that of Nancy Crow.

Now I happen to know some things about how the show came about, and how difficult it was to find appropriate places to show it - 50 large quilts need some space, after all! - because Nancy Crow's original intention was to show it only in art museums. As a matter of fact, it was my suggestion to Ginie Curtze to try at Tuch + Technik that secured this last stop in Europe before the show is supposed to go overseas.
I think it is quite justifiable to combine these two shows, especially since they are closely connected through the person of Nancy Crow - she is the initiator and curator of Color Improvisations, which shows quilts by her students from several countries, and of course she is a famous quilter herself. If museums and organizers of shows demand some additional attraction that will catch people's attention after Color Improvisations has been traveling for more than two years, that is quite understandable and acceptable. It's just a case of negligent editing that the flyer combines Bonnie's quilt with Nancy's name.
Does the name of the artist affect a viewer's perception of a piece of art? Of course it does - but that does not necessarily mean that this will be the same in every viewer. I openly admit that I was not terribly impressed with Mona Lisa when I saw the painting in the Louvre - no matter who painted it, and how many people think differently. On the other hand, I was really impressed with several of the works I saw in the Global Paper exhibition in Deggendorf, that I went to without knowing more about it than that it was supposed to be an interesting exhibit, and although I really only knew three of the names of artists on display (and one of the three turned out to be a doppelgänger). One of my most favorite quilts was made by an anonymous slave. All it requires is to keep an open mind. Great names may promise great stuff,
but no-names can certainly create great stuff as well.
In any case, I am looking forward to my trip. Let's just hope German Railways can cope with the fact that it is snowing...

Christmas Special at justcolours.de

The newest selection of hand-dyed fabrics is finished and has been shipped to my customers.

Fabric-club selection for November 2012

For the whole of next week (until December 8th), I am offering a Christmas Special for anybody:

• If you order a package of Fat Quarters, you get the subscription price  even if you are not a subscriber (yet).
• If you sign up as a new subscriber for one year, you will receive half a meter of fabric as a welcome gift.
• Either of these offers is valid independently from the other. Offers expire on Sunday, December 8, midnight Standard European Time.
• Payment is possible by PayPal.
• Shipment after the payment has arrived.
• Check it out here.