Next artist to inspire us ... Hundertwasser.

As I have already mentioned, our machine embroidery group at the Embroiderers Guild, Victoria, is working on a small A5 piece each month, inspired by a different artist.
I thought I would love this month, it being Hundertwasser but I have actually found it a bit difficult.

He has the most amazing colours, brush strokes, hidden faces, immediately-identifiable trees, etc. But I was just replicating his work, which I had promised myself I would try not to do.

So I waited a couple of weeks. In the midst of other things, I have been playing around with trying to do some collages. I found a visual diary that I had used before, for a tapestry based on the theme of My Place.

I realised that I might be able to adapt it to this challenge. So I got out my tiny pieces of scraps of fabric and fiddled around with them.  Eventually I laid them out according to a map of the local area.
I have used images of Darebin Parklands before (a lot, actually).

 

Here is the piece in its infant stage. It wasn't particularly reminding me of Hundertwasser. Then I came across a tiny scrap of fabric with some circles that reminded me of his trees. After much searching (thank goodness I did some sorting a little while ago) I found a larger scrap and could cut out some little pieces that I thought would do the trick.

Now I have finished, it is not something that you will say "Oh, that looks like it is inspired by Hundertwasser" but I know that it is. And now you do too, because you have read this!

You  can see the little trees cut out and put in the park area. 

New Friends and encouraging each other

I have been fortunate to have met some lovely ladies recently and we are starting to meet regularly to show and tell our textile work and to encourage each other to keep working.
We formalised it a little bit this week and actually had an exercise to do.  There was no pressure to participate we had said that we might bring some textile work to do in case we didn't all feel like participating. In the end, we all did the activity.

It was taken from a Sandra Meech book.  Between the five of us, we actually had three of her books,
 Creative Quilts, Connecting Art to Stitch and Connecting Design to Stitch.  We used Connecting Art to Stitch.

The activity involved using a famous painting and then choosing a small part as the beginning of our own designs.  The two artists we chose were Klimt and Hundertwasser. Collage was the medium suggested.

Then out came the papers.  Collage is not something I would usually choose to do, so it was well outside my comfort zone.  I didn't come up with anything wonderful but there were small parts that might be good to develop further.

The colourful table.

It was good to have the set activity - I would never sit down and do a design exercise by myself, despite having several books of design exercises.  I keep hoping that having the books will make me either do it or be good at it.  (If this process worked, I would have been the best poetry teacher ever!)

Having said that I would never sit down and do such a design activity by myself, I am now occasionally thinking about the part of the design that I liked (like might be too strong a word but it will do for now) and how I might use it.  I don't even know what medium I would use, so it is at a very early stage at present. At least I am thinking.

Those L-shaped pieces of cardboard are very useful for isolating small parts of the image and seeing possibilities in the bigger mess.