Friday, May 4, 2012

The black, white, gray--and color fiddlehead tapestry...

Here's the tapestry without the ends being finished yet:


And, yes... my original thought was to put the monochromatic piece atop the two rows of color, with the black & white narrow band separating the two areas.  Now my dilemma is... does it work as a composition?  Or does it look like two (or three--if you consider the narrow b/w band) pieces?!  I am not yet convinced that it doesn't work, compositionally.  Shocking, yes.  Dramatic, yes.  Not feasible, maybe.  

The color rows began last March... wrote about the lower rows at this blog post: http://tapestry13.blogspot.com/2011/03/new-tapestries-are-underway.html

I continued above those, one done each week for five weeks, with five more.  The second row of five were based on a line drawing detail of plant matter, turned in a different direction each week.  Both of those rows--about 10 weeks of weaving time--were being done without too much planning other than to consider the possibility of eventually using the upper part of the warp in some planned design.  Doing the lower part was very good for me, though, since those were the first extended times of weaving being done after my hand accident.  Like I mentioned in that earlier blog post, at first I was still bandaged and it was quite awkward to weave.  One other point of significance is in that first color bit on the lower right--the black shape was what I wove the day I learned that James Koehler had died. 

Anyway, I'll wait a few days before attempting to separate them--if that's what I decide to do.  In the meantime,  I've stitched the slits together between the bottom areas; had not done that as I wove them but I didn't want 5"-6" long slits remaining.  I generally stitch as I go so I spent yesterday and today doing the slit stitching in the color area.  I'm going to post some photos of that process on the Tapestry Share blog tomorrow.

And I'm going to be blocking the piece tomorrow.  Now... got to continue looking at the other fiddlehead drawings and deciding on the next one.  It's going to be about 45" wide.  


4 comments:

  1. Hmm, I think it does look like 2 or 3 different tapestries. They look really fun together, but the black and white tapestry is so perfect by itself(composition, shape, colors)....and the other ones distract from it.

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  2. I think this works well as a whole. The colorful bottom " cradles "the monochromatic theme giving some weight which I like. But not too heavy! Also the monochromatic part really isn't because of this red/orange line running through which I think is strong enough color wise ( with the design movement) to move the eye upward. I find my eye moving around this piece and not getting stuck on one design element.

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  3. A tough decision. You are wise to wait a few days.
    The black & white one - it has amazing depth!

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  4. The more I look at it, the more I realize that in this photo, you can see little bits of color all around the edges. That looks really cool, but if you do separate off the black and white it would look very different. If it were me, I think I'd take this photo into photoshop and see what it looks like cropped various ways without all the background noise.

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