Conversational Composition Stage Six

You can read about my design contributions to Terry Jarrard-Dimond’s Compositional Conversation project over here on Terry’s blog today.  The photo above is the “final composition” I mailed off to Fulvia Luciano last Tuesday. Rather than pile-on some additional fabric figures, I ended up really thinking about the formal elements of the composition, and how I might use the existing elements to create support and structure for the eight artists to come.  I found it very difficult not to “resolve” the design, and thus made imperfection and lack of resolution one of my goals.  Not as easy as it sounds.  I hope at least I contributed some structure to the ground.  We’ll see if any of this remains eight weeks down the road.

My experience as an artist participant in the Compositional Conversation project has proven to be much richer than I had expected at the onset of the project.  The hands-on design part was fun of course.  But reading Terry’s blog with the artists’ excellent descriptions of their design processes, conversing with artists and readers via the comments, and having e-mail access to this talented group have given me so much to think about. Great food to bring into the studio and feed my art life.

A nicely packaged bundle arrived in the mail for me yesterday containing something special. This week it is my turn in the fantastic group art project, Compositional Conversation.  Compositional Conversation is the brain-child of Terry Jarrard-Dimond, an award winning artist who creates moving and muscular textile constructions in her South Carolina studio. Terry blogs about her life as an artist here.

I met Terry a few years back in Ohio at Nancy Crow’s Art Barn.  Terry was downstairs doing a master class/independent study thing with Kathy Loomis under Nancy Crow’s brilliant and exacting eye.  Meanwhile I was upstairs with 19 other students trying to get my head wrapped around the notion of line, and shape and gesture in Nancy’s week long Curves and Circles class. Having the two master quilters working in the Barn was amazing.  And I think it had the effect of raising everybody’s game that week.  Some wonderful work was created in an extremely special environment.  I have stayed in touch with Terry and several of the other artists I met that week, and gleefully celebrate from afar their many artistic accomplishments since our first introduction. Several of these artists are taking part of Compositional Conversation.

The participating artists are: Rebecca Howdeshell, Beth Carney, Shelley Baird, Gayle Vickery Pritchard , Judi Hurwitt, Leslie Bixel, Fulvia Luciano, Marcia DeCamp, Marina Kamenskaya, Paula Swett, Valerie Goodwin, Kathy Loomis, Leslie Riley, and Terry Jarrard-Dimond.

Terry set some ground rules for the project, and started it off by choosing a background and adding an element to the composition.  The composition then goes to spend a week with each artist who will shape the composition in some way. Each week Terry documents the conversation between the artists, and posts photos of the current state of the work, thoughts and process notes from that week’s artist, along with a mini artist’s profile. We are on week 5 now, and I have too say it has been not only fun, but incredibly eye-opening to get a view into the design approaches of these working artists.  Read all about Compositional Conversation on its very own blog. The project will continue into November of this year.

   This is my cat.

This is my cat on Spoonflower.

Even though I worked at Adobe for over 20 years, I am not a Photoshop expert. I can tell you a whole bunch about the technology inside the software, but I am like most folks who own Photoshop or Photoshop Elements and use it occasionally rather than daily.  I know how to do a few things well, but am generally lost when it comes to doing any task besides those few things.  I use Photoshop to prepare photos for the web or to print.  I do not use it as a graphics art tool very frequently.

So when it came to creating some sample files for printing onto fabric, I knew it would be best to consult an expert.  I pulled out my dog eared copy of Design Essentials by Luanne Seymour and thumbed through, looking for an easy and fun technique.  Luanne Seymour is a great designer, teacher, author, and quilter.  When we worked together at Adobe she gave me a copy of the first edition of Design Essentials with the inscription “Show me what you create”.  Needless to say, Design Essentials is one of my go to resources for Photoshop and Illustrator techniques.  I located her straightforward step-by-step instructions for “Warhol-style images” and presto, I transformed my cat into a pop-art portrait.   

The posterize technique is a good one for textile printing because it results in distinct shapes of flat solid colors. You can easily execute this sort of thing with traditional textile silkscreening methods, so I wanted to have a sense of what a digitally printed textile would look like.  I think it came out great. This method is much faster than making screens, getting out the paints and squeegees, etc. and not nearly so messy.  Not that I object to messy when it comes to art.

I recommend Luanne’s book, but there are other great tutorial resources for posterizing in Photoshop on the web too. Here’s one. Try it out. 

Wouldn’t it be great to have a quilt made with brightly colored pop-art images of your pets or your kids? Maybe gerber daisies? There are so many ideas for projects using this technique and printing the results to fabric.