January 16 – Sunrise, Sunset

Today I get to share the Santa Fe inspired pieces with you.  All 3 of the pieces in this series are felted and hanging on my studio wall.

Work always seems so crude to me at this point.  Unpressed, without the adornment of stitching or beading, no frames.  None of the subtle details that enhance a piece of work. Rather like what I see in the mirror each morning when I arise. I’m sure you know what I mean: hair uncombed, no earrings, etc.

However, what is strong in these 3 pieces, even at this point, are the colors.  It is fascinating to me as I pay more attention to the sun at each end of it’s daily course the huge differences in palette and color placement that nature creates.  So much depends on exactly which moment one looks at.  Everything changes within seconds.  It is miraculous. My intent was to capture some of that in these pieces.

Before we look at each piece more carefully I’d like to share with you a few of the sunrise pictures I took when in Santa Fe. These serve as my inspiration and my starting point.  Then I move on from there, changing… tweaking….  In this series I also used some photographs I’d collected from magazines and calendars to guide me with color combinations and placements.  No piece is an exact replica of any photo.  Each is a synthesis of many.

Now let’s look at my pieces in a little more detail. I showed the background fabric and the start of the lilac layout in my last post (January 6), but I’ll repeat it here.

Yep, there’s a blue one and a pink one and a yellow one.

I started with the lilac palette on the blue background, and here it is with the wools layed out.

In the foreground I tried to capture that special yellow-beige color of the sand and grasses of New Mexico. It always evokes feelings of dry and thirsty for me.  And mystery. In contrast, the vibrancy of the colors of the sunrise seem even more resplendent.  See the sun peeking out as it rises?

More and more I find myself blending colors with my hand carders.  It lends a richer and more true feel, especially to landscapes.  After all, if you examine any color in nature carefully it’s very hard to find a pure hue.  What with natural variation and shadows….

And now silk to represent the mountains in the middle ground, and trees and shrubs in the foreground — felting finished.

Next I worked on the pink.  This time I managed to get a few more pictures during the laying out process.  Unlike the last one, there’s no picture of just the wool layout, but there are pictures of each stage of imagery on top of the wool.  First just the mountains.  Then the addition of trees and shrubs.

Some of the trees are silk, some pre-felts.  A pre-felt is a partially felted piece of wool.  Usually it is dry (or needle) felted, not wet felted.  I like to use pre-felts for the different texture it lends, and also the sharp edges of an image.

Here is the last piece, the yellow one. Layed out and ready to go.

Now, felted and hanging on the wall.

I will admit, I am partial to this one.  It is the brightness of the sun — how it just seems to reach out and grab me — that seems so special.

I currently have no less than 15 pieces hanging on the walls of my studio, waiting to be stitched, beaded and framed.  I have made a commitment to myself to spend these last weeks of January at the sewing machine, or with an embroidery hoop, or at my framing table in order to finish everything up before adding new works.  BUT….this past week I went snow shoeing at a nearby park where the stones and snow in the river called out to me.  I’ve got this piece in my head which I’ve been carrying around since then. How am I going to contain it for 2 or more weeks?

As I sit at my desk, typing away, I can see that all my bird feeders are empty.  With two and a half feet of snow on the ground my birds need some easy access food. I wonder if they consider my feeders “fast food” like MacDonalds or Pizza Hut?  Time to go.

Advertisement