Buttons&Beads&Quilts!

Air is a very ephemeral quality that artists have tried to capture in their works over the years. Claude Monet, the French artist, did a famous series of paintings of what could have been a rather boring subject, haystacks. His objective was to show how their appearance changes throughout the day as the light shifted, and then how they changed throughout the seasons as the angle of the sun changed. “Chiaroscuro”,which in Italian, means “light/dark” is a way that artists since the Renaissance have used modeling or shading to suggest volume in two dimensional drawings or paintings. Even certain parts of the world have different natural qualtities of light, from the golden sunlight of the blazing tropics to the silvery tones of summer light in Scandinavia.

So, for this fourth art quilt, “Elements – Air”,  I had a lot of choices from which to choose when it came to picking the main colors for this piece. I chose what for me is summer sunlight, here in the Mid-Atlantic in the eastern USA, golden shimmers on a white background. I used hundreds of golden buttons and beads to give that effect. A costume jewelery pin along the upper right (and also in the detail shot below) has a terrific sunburst array.Shi-sha mirrors from India, gold lamé fabric, and large gold colored domed buttons with silver rims add to the golden quality I was trying to create. The same clear “poof” buttons that have been feathers, jellyfish, and smoke puffs in the last three postings I’ve written about, are also used in this quilt. (I love using the same material for different subjects.) In this piece, I used them all over the surface to suggest the thin wisps of high cirrus clouds that indicate in this part of the country that we will have precipitation in the next 3-4 days. (Growing up in farmland, I spent a lot of time imagining circus animals or faces in the shapes of the clouds overhead. I like looking at the variations in clouds!)

Blue is another important color that I associate with a bright summer day, so in this detail shot on the left, you can see the tiny 4mm flat blue glass rondelle beads and the 7mm flat glass flower beads that were used to suggest a blue sky peeking out from behind all of this gold and white splendor. Since each of these beads has a central hole, a “keeper” or “stopper” bead has to be used to fill in that center space. Thread comes up from the back surface, through the central hole, through the keeper bead and then back down through the middle. This way, thread doesn’t have to be used to sew over the surface of the flat bead to secure it to the background, obscuring its shiny surface. I LOVE shiny things, so many of my beads have what’s known as an AB or Aurora Borealis finish to them. (How perfect is that to use them for a piece whose subject matter is air?)

As I was writing this piece, I realized that for all four of the pieces that I’ve written about so far, I’ve captured my impression of my perception of what the subject matter is like, not the actual “element” itself. This realization was especially true for this piece, as light is a difficult design element to include for a lot of artists, especially photographers to capture in their work. Glass, jewelry, and other media whose surfaces are reflective are much more difficult to acquire a true color representation of the piece. I hope that this art quilt and how I chose to depict this subject matter gives you some sense of how I feel about this elusive substance, air.

Have you ever had an experience where the quality of light that you were observing had an effect on you? Perhaps your memory includes sunlight shimmering on the surface of a pond, or beams of light glinting off of spider webs in the forest. Why not leave a comment and tell us about it.

You can see more of my beaded art quilts at www.fiberfantasies.com