moving along...

I'm trying out some things, inspired by the recent Silvia Heyden visit and also re-reading her book, The Making of Modern Tapestry. I'm attempting to take to heart this statement from her beginning paragraph:

...(I) have come to the conculsion that tapestry can indeed be an art form in its own right with its own specific mode of expression if the craft of weaving is allowed to influence the art of tapestry. In order to be meaningful, tapestry must find its own identity. It must not be a woven painting, but rather a composition that could only have been woven, not painted.

The painting I'm using as the inspiration for this tapestry has its unique characteristics of brush marks, pencil and charcoal marks. I never intended to copy those in the tapestry but was falling into the trap almost immediately of being intimidated by them. I knew that I wouldn't be able to weave them as I'd done them in a rapid way. But how to proceed was puzzling me... I thought I knew what I wanted to do but then that didn't feel right as I began.

So at one point yesterday I began to think that I should loosen up--let go of constant scrutiny of the painting to compare with what I was weaving--and begin to weave. I made a number of more color blends, still staying with the three colors and variations of those, and began to weave irregular triangular shapes. I'm much happier now with the process. I'm weaving quickly, the surface is becoming lively, the fabric I'm weaving doesn't look like the painting anymore--it looks like what it only can be.



I having so much fun now that I'm filling the color areas with myriad triangles of close value but with hue changes in each bobbin. And this painting I'm using for inspiration is a joyful one, one done after the intense thought and design work I did when at the retreat at Hambidge last fall. It was one that just exploded out within a few hours at the Aimone directed studies.