More Dottie Moore

Dottie had requested that we bring five items of inspiration to the workshop. I brought only the thought that had possessed me since the moment I read that requirement ... "Sea (see?) of green." I hadn't a clue how that was going to be manifested. Would it be water? trees? what?

After a morning of experiencing various exercises to hone our intuitive powers, the time came to work with a chosen inspiration. However, something tangible was required ... not just a thought. My friend Gayle had brought a handful of photos and offered me a choice of them. I chose one with a "sea of green" trees across a river.

Dottie gave us a few moments to study our piece. Then she instructed us to write down our initial thoughts about what we envisioned in our finished piece. I wrote abstract, orts, threads, and painted fabrics.

She then gave us two minutes to make a quick sketch.

My sketch featured the elements where the darkest values would be placed. I rarely make drawings. When I do, it's a value sketch. The placement of values affects all other organizational principles: dominance, pattern, and rhythm.

Another zinger to boost our intuitve powers was for each of us to pick a packet of Dottie's 8"sqaures of hand-painted fabrics out of a pile. This was much like choosing a fortune cookie. We were to use these as the main fabrics for our inspiration piece. Mine had a perfect piece of shaded blues for my background plus there were some greens and a green gold. Exactly what I needed! There was also a purple that ended up with Gayle for her piece.

When the workshop ended at 3:00 I had gotten this far. It was frustrating that I hadn't taken fabrics that were suitable for tree trunks and limbs. The dogwood blossoms are the triangle points made by pinking shears that I cut off fabric samples which Gayle had brought.

I got some "viewing distance" on this piece during our critique session. It's difficult to really see what's going on in a piece when it's directly under your nose. (In my studio I look through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars to get far enough away.) I saw that the darker tree branches and trunks were very much missing. I also determined that a touch of color was needed in order to draw my eyes to the bank across the river (my pre-determined focal point). Aha! A few young red dogwood branches would get me over there.

When I got home all that was added, plus more leaves and blossoms. The photo is cropped to where I think the finished edges will be. Most likely, I'll couch yarn around the outside to soften those edges. That will make a nice transition to the sun printed/hand-painted background I think it will end up attached to.

The layered finish will be yet another influence from Dottie. Most of her pieces are "layered quilts". There will be a smaller piece with finished edges (or then again, left raw and open) quilted onto a larger background quilt ... or two. This presentation contributes to the many layers of meanings and symbols within her art. My intent is for it to extend the "forestry" beyond the less than 8" square scene ... to be a unique frame. I won't be able to work on it again until after I get to Michigan. I'll keep you posted.

Dottie Moore Workshop

I had the pleasure of "playing" with Dottie Moore during a workshop in Athens, Tennessee on Saturday. The objective of the class was ways to get to the point of making intuitive designs, which is how I already work. I just wanted to have a day in the presense of this wonderful woman and her creative energy and enthusiasm.

She led us through numerous exercises to aid making design decisions ... breathing, physical movement, self exploration, gestures with pencil on paper, as well as actually stitching on fabric. One assignment was to make a tree.

I searched through my fabrics and found what I thought would be a good background on which to applique a tree. I was looking for something with horizontal ground lines and some upright shaded areas that would add depth to a stand of trees. In the process of cutting that piece, I noticed that my tree was already there ... hiding in what I had intended to be the foreground. Rotate the picture a 1/4 turn and you'll see what I thought I was after. I outlined this ghost of a tree and filled it with bark-like stitches with one of the few variegated threads I had taken to the workshop. Then I saw a stand of cyprus trees in the background.

When I showed it to my husband that evening he observed that it looked like the tree we had been fascinated with in Hawaii earlier in the year. The Mindango Gum tree looks like an artist has colored it with oil pastels. So intuitively I had begun working on a piece about that tree which I thought was a project way far into my future. I plan to finish it this summer using my ortwork technique to make a tropical garden.

A bit more about Dottie. I had first met her three years ago at a quilt symposium, "Wild by Design", at the University of Nebraska. She presented a paper about her compact disc book, Lives in Process: Creativity in the Second Fifty Years. She had traveled across the country interviewing women who were 50 and older who testified that life and creativity intensifies with age. I saw her again a year later at her solo exhibition and lecture at the university in Crossville, Tennessee.

I'm so pleased to have gotten to spend a whole day plus the dinner hour with her. Tomorrow I'll post about the other piece begun in that workshop.

Aquamarine

Here's a fun quilt after the seriousness of the quilt themes in my previous postings. This one was just "playing." It was the first of several quilts made using a "trick" that I'd picked up from Simply Quilts. I don't recall who draws a shape and cuts it apart into templates with each piece getting a different fabric. I watched that at 1:00, marched into my studio and drew the fish, and then finished this piece by the time I went to bed. FUN!
"Aquamarine" - 24"x20" - 2003

Description: A flight of fancy under the sea surface spawned by my snorkeling experiences in the South Seas, Hawaii, and the Caribbean. There is much beauty in places we don't know and sometimes cannot even imagine.


Technique: I use a collage technique that I call "ortwork". It involves arranging bits and pieces of fabric and threads (the British term for these scraps is "orts") over a background that is layered on top of batting and a backing fabric. Tulle netting is laid over the collage to trap the "orts". Machine quilting holds all the layers together. Yarns are couched to the surface with machine zig zag stitches.

Materials: cotton fabric; cotton, metallic and polyester threads; oil pastels, yarn, wool roving, tulle, glitter glue. cotton batting

Exhibitions: 2004 Dogwood Arts Quilt Show - Knoxville, Tennessee
awarded Honorable Mention

It was gifted to friends in Hawaii.

Through the Door

"Through the Door" wall quilt's theme is in the same vein as the quilts featured in my previous two postings. It was made near the end of my mother's life. She was bed ridden and tethered to an oxygen machine. Her circumstances got me to thinking about being "trapped" by illness and limited mobility.

"Through the Door" - 26"x20 - 2002 (flowers were cut out from decorator fabric samples)
Looking through the doorway of a stark room that has an old worn chair ...

into a room filled with warmth and beauty.

I had previously made Mama a large wall quilt (36"x48") that featured a huge bouquet of flowers. Here too, the "sun filled room" is beyond the doorway.

Doors / Another Grief Quilt

This powerful piece "happened" at the end of the summer in 2000. My first inclination was to title it "At Death's Door". That made my husband cringe, so it's called just "Doors".

"Doors" - 35"x19"- 2000

I say that the piece "happened" because I had no intention of starting anything new at the time. There had been one paint rag among five that had been created during the summer's projects that had gotten my attention. Every time I picked it up there was one area I focused on. I knew that I'd have to do something with it sometime. Then there was one small stray book of decorator fabric that had gotten left behind that I found when looking for something else. Thumbing through it, I thought some of the solids or even plaids would be interesting to combine with that "paint rag".

Then there was my frame of mind. Three friends, my brother-in-law, and my daughter-in-law's grandmother had died within the previous months. Also, I had just completed a commissioned memorial quilt and Bill Moyer's series about the end of life and dying had just been on TV.

When I looked at the one area of the paint rag that always drew my focus, I couldn't decide where to cut it ... so I didn't. The whole piece was put on the design board. From there on, putting the composition together was like working a Ouija board. It was as if I were observing it happen. There were previously unnoticed lines on the paint rag that dictated the placement of the three whole pieces of fabric samples. Right away I saw these as doors and knew they had to do with the afterlife.

To counterbalance the doors, windows were needed. Originally, I cut seven ... thinking in terms of "7 deadly sins". It didn't take long for me to realize that only three were to be used and they were to represent the trinity.

The foreground was the area that had always drawn my attention and it required something more. Immediately, I thought of the scraps from my tunic vest (same ones used earlier in "Taken By Storm"). These would add texture and even more dimension to the piece. As I was digging through my scrap bag for these, the tulle pieces from David Walker caught my attention ... there was a circle of white and a ring of black just waiting for a place to be put. I knew the strips from my tunic needed to reflect the angle of the line that had established the placement of the doors. However, they looked so stark. The whole thing needed to be framed with something. The dark frame made the interior "light up" and it became a doorway around the piece. I angled the one side to give another visual clue to that mysteriousness of this piece ... the other clue is the unusual proportion of width to height.

The fabrics for the three doors were each woven with different colors for the warp and weft. This gave the effect of their not being solid ... they could be passed through. To accentuate this illusion, seed stitching with multiple colors of single ply floss that matched the value of each door was done.

The terrain of life that leads to death's door is not smooth. Is this door a passage? What is this next door full of colored light? Is it purgatory? Is it the place of reincarnation? Will passing through the last door make one whole and full of light? Is that the trinity casting light over all? ... the past, the present, and future?