Instagram Challenge...for April

So far I have done 19 days.  Some of the themes has been 'How I got Started', 'Tools I Use',  'Studio Space', 'Courageous Moment',  and todays post is 'Newest Work'.  

It has been an interesting exploration of my artistic career over the past 25 or so years. Some of the photos (like the one below) are from the late 1990's.   

So you can see my work started out very simply. I was learning to draw, how to dye fabric, and how to create compositions.  This particular piece is at my parent's home.  My Dad actually complained about how bad the mosquitos were.  And, if you knew my Dad you would know that was highly unusual. He can be outside working in all kinds of conditions and with all kinds of bugs for hours on end.   So if my Dad was complaining it meant that the mosquitos were beyond intolerable.  So  I made a quilt for my first show and gave it to my Dad as a reminder of last time the mosquitos were abundant. 

This piece was later in my textile art career.  It is part of a 5 part series called "She's Coming Undone" that I did .  This one represents the period of time in which she is starting to heal, she is looking towards the new possibilities of life though her feet are still on the path she was on...she is at a crossroad and she has some decisions to make.  Does she continue on the same path that brought her to this point of crisis in the first place or does she follow the rainbow hopeful new path that is unknown and veiled and somewhat frightening?  Change for human beings is really hard.  We like to understand what to expect even if it is difficult and repetitive and we don't want to be working so hard to alter our perceptions and ways of reacting.  I know people who continued to smoke even after a cancer diagnosis, or remarried a person who was comfortably like the one before, or whatever the crisis was whether it be health, relationship, work related by continuing on in similar ways so as to be comfortable and not do the intense work of change.  But what if there is small changes that can bring sufficiently new ways of perceiving the world in ways that are helpful and can provide a enough of a deviation not to fall back completely into what precipitated the crisis in the first place. 

Yes I spent a lot of time creating work that looked at various life difficulties with my art quilts.  I loved the challenge of these works.  

Above was my last art quilt that I created in 2013.  You can see the influence of learning how to paint had created an impact to my quilting work.   I now understood how to build layers of value from dark to light to create the illusion of form.  Fabric that looks like plastic bags...that was a challenge to create and  I think I did pretty well. :)

I hope you will stop by Instagram (Click HERE) and check out the April challenge days.  I still have 11 more days to go.  

Thanks for stopping by on this sunny spring day.   For those who celebrate Easter I wish you a Happy Easter!