Beautiful World Where Are You

The sky was still dimming, darkening, the vast earth turning slowly on its axis.         (chapter 27) 

Outside, astronomical twilight.  Crescent moon hanging low over the dark water.  Tide returning now with a faint repeating rush over the sand.  Another place, another time.  (chapter 28)

I bought Sally Rooney's newest novel, Beautiful World Where Are You, in the airport and read it before bedtime on each of our UK nights.  I slowed down at the end, trying not to finish it.  I wanted to keep reading it forever.  

The pictured textile is the travel cloth I made in England that might be finished now, I'm not sure.  I finished the book. 

Lingering

One of the main challenges I have faced as a woman artist is the conflict I feel about caring for someone, loving someone, yet remaining dedicated to my art in an undivided way.

I think that generally men find it much easier to be selfish.  And you do need to be selfish.  Ideally you need 'to care and to not care'.  You need to give yourself completely, while at the same time seeing things from a distance. 

Every important creative act has this duality: of giving everything and then of letting go, so that the created work can have a life of its own.

I would like this book to speak to young women artists - and perhaps to all women who will no doubt face this challenge in their lives at some time and will have to resolve this conflict in their own way.

This seems to be essentially a feminine dilemma.  Throughout history, women have too often been seen as subjects of art, rather than artists.  Their natural propensity for giving themselves up to the experience, combined with an aptitude for stillness, has made many women great muses to great male artists.

As a woman painter, one needs to work out a strategy: I feel the need to put up barriers to protect my solitude.  I agree with Virginia Woolf that the vital thing for a woman artist is ' a room of one's own.'  

Celia Paul

 

All the previous text  is from the Prologue to Celia Paul's memoir Self Portrait.  

I loved reading this book slowly over about ten days.  I took my time with it because I did not want to finish it.  I snapped it shut after a few pages, saving its depth and resonance for another day.  I consumed it like dark chocolate, loving it, looking forward to the still unread sections.  

By understanding Celia Paul through her very honest self-gaze, I understood myself.  The book is about a woman artist's interiority.  It is rare to find something so poignant and true.

Self Portrait has had rave reviews, please see here and here and here.

Celia Paul is interviewed by the very intelligent and perceptive Judith Thurman here.  

The way I feel about this book is how I feel about my green quilt.  I linger over it.  I'm so in love with spending time with it, intentionally going at it slowly, knowing I will miss handling it when it is finished, but at the same time wanting to work on it, eager to work on it, wanting to see it done so that I can move on, even though I love it in my lap, under my hands.  Becoming finished.  How can I express this feeling in words?

In my mind the name of my quilt is 'lamentation' and it has only been in my hoop for a little more than two months.   When I hand pieced the squares together a year ago, I un-picked and re-stitched over and over as I worked towards creating a meadow of green that would encourage our eye to keep moving.  Now the double grid of quilting stitches seem to give this field a 'mysterious stillness'. 

The rest of this post continues with more text from Celia Paul's memoir.        

Painting is the language of loss.  The scraping-off of layers of paint, again and again, the rebuilding, the losing again  Hoping, then despairing, then hoping.  Can you control your feelings of loss by this process of painting which is fundamentally structured by loss?

Painting has a unique relation to time.

A painting that has been done quickly has a different energy from a painting that has been done slowly.  A painting that has been done quickly is like a newly decorated room and the air is fresh, empty and echoing.  A painting that has been done slowly is like a room that has been quietly lived in: it acquires a mysterious stillness.

When you are overpowered by loss and grief, you stare at the image, almost uncomprehendingly, not knowing or caring about how to define the thing you see.

Celia Paul

Lancaster County Amish quilts

Diamond in the Square by unknown Amish quiltmaker,
 Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, circa 1920
pieced wools 78 x 78 inches
This is a very pure example of the simple Diamond, the essence perhaps.  Here we see the intense, glowing colours for which twentieth-century Lancaster quilts are known.  text by Julie Silber

This post looks at the 'Square in Square' and the 'Diamond in Square' quilts  made between 1890 - 1940  by Amish women in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.  The images include commentary by Julie Silber and are taken from the beautiful book The Art of the Quilt (1990).  Also included in the book is an essay by art critic Robert Hughes.  The book is a coffee table sized catalog containing about 80 quilts from the larger 350 piece Esprit collection and accompanied an exhibition at the San Francisco de Young museum.  At least 82 of the Esprit quilts have returned to Lancaster County and it is possible to visit them.   Read more    I've woven some of Robert Hughes' essay in with the 8 masterpieces in italics.  

I've long been inspired by these quilts and this is not my first post on the subject.  In 2010 my husband I visited Lancaster County and I posted then about seeing some Amish quilts face to face with close up photos of the stitching. here

To make a quilt you take 3 pieces of cloth and sew them together to make a kind of padded blanket.

These Lancaster County quilts are a warm, soft, swaddling minimalism.  These quilts are just a tad more aloof than most of the things that folk cultures produce.

Center Square by unknown Amish quiltmaker
Lancaster Country, Pennsylvania circa 1890
 pieced wools 78 x 78 inches
Very few early examples of Lancaster Amish quilts remain, so it is difficult to be certain of how design developed.  It is likely, however, that the Center Square represents an early stage in Lancaster Amish quilt design, preceded by the whole-cloth (unpieced but fully quilted) type and followed by the diamond in the square.  Few Center Square quilts were made after the nineteenth century. 
text by Julie Silber

Folk art, like vernacular speech, may be whimsical.  It is never inflated.  It wants to be understood by everyone who sees it, and so it tends towards conciseness and practicality.  

Virtually all Amish women were quiltmakers.  

Center Square by Unknown Amish quiltmaker,
Lancaster County, Pennsylvania circa 1890
pieced wools, 78 x 79 inches
Lancaster Amish quilts are characteristically made from a very few pieces - large geometric fields of solid-coloured fabrics.  None is as minimal as the Center Square, the purest of all their designs.  The simple box and surrounding borders are showplaces for their elegant, masterly quilting, which here covers the surface of the quilt.  text by Julie Silber

These things were not anonymous when they were made.  These quilts were the intense and focused expression of individual people who made them for their families and who were proud of their skills.

A fine Amish quilt has: 

a spare-ness of design, 

almost dogmatic rigor but not because of its inventive quirks,

a magnificent sobriety of color, 

a balanced amplitude of conception, 

a truly human sense of scale.

The quilts on these pages are like emissaries from a vanished world.

Diamond in the Square by unknown Amish quiltmaker,
Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, circa 1920 - 30
pieced wools 74 x 74 inches
The daughter of the woman who made this quilt said that "the dark blue "henrietta" was from my mother's dress".  The Lancaster Amish use the term 'henrietta' to describe a variety of fabrics, but it usually refers to the fine wools they favor for their quilts. 
Lancaster quilts are most often square and symmetrically arranged, almost always ranging from 72 to 88 inches square.  text by Julie Silber

If folk art means images that high taste can condescend to in the very act of savoring them, then Lancaster quilts are not folk art.  The quilts radiate a fierce distinction, a forthright economy of means, a syntax that is governed by strict traditions and yet looks inescapably modern.

They are a high enclave within Amish quilts.

Diamond in the Square by unknown Amish Quiltmaker,
Lancaster County, Pennsylvania circa 1940
pieced wools and rayons 80 x80 inches
Later Lancaster quilts are often quilted in floral rather than geometric or abstract designs.  They are also typically les densely quilted than their predecessors.  One contributing factor may be that it is more difficult to make tiny, fine quilting stitches in the synthetic fabrics Amish were using in the later period.  text  by Julie Silber

Lancaster County quilts have large geometrical colour fields.  

They use deep, saturated colour but not usually black.  

Lancaster quilts have peculiar designs, like Diamond in the Square.  

Lancaster quilts use a central medallion structure. 

Lancaster quilts use elaborate quilting and contrasting thread and are made from fine wool, not cotton.  You look at them and think How Modern.  

But they are not modern.  They come from a culture to which modernism is anathema.

Diamond in the Square by unknown Amish quiltmaker,
 Lancaster County, Pennsylvania circa 1910 - 20
pieced wools 81 x 81 inches
Lancaster County Amish women loved the elegantly simple diamond in the square pattern and made it again and again from the late nineteenth century through the 1960s.   Because it was so popular with them and only they made it, Diamond is the pattern most closely associated with the Amish in Lancaster County. text by Julie Silber

What is the Theory of Amish quilt making?  It is too simple to say that they do it to keep warm.  There are much easier ways to obtain a blanket than by patiently expending hundreds or thousands of hours. 

Here is an activity that is part practical and part aesthetic.  Part ritualistic and part social binder.  It is not pure creativity, neither is it pure use. 

Quilt making falls under religious rules governing social customs, moral life and work.  It directs the Amish towards the cardinal virtues:  Humility, non-resistance, simplicity and practicality.

Lancaster Amish have saturated colors.   No white and no yellow.

Diamond in the Square by an unknown Amish quiltmaker,
Lancaster Country, Pennsylvania circa 1920 - 30 
pieced wools 76 x 76 inches
The Amish were discouraged from using printed fabrics and from engaging in the worldly practice of using many small pieces in their quilts.  among quilts of all the many Amish groups, Lancaster County's are especially spare.  text by Julie Silber

The quilts are made from dress and shirt fabric, but the Lancaster county Amish also bought cloth especially for their quilts.  They did not wait for suitable scraps.

Diamond in the Square by unknown Amish quiltmaker,
 Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, circa 1920 - 1930
pieced wools 77 x 77 inches
This Diamond has a clear, almost sparkling feeling, which the quiltmaker achieved by her particular arrangement of colour.  text by Julie Silber

In their complexity, visual intensity and quality of craftsmanship, such works simply dispel the idea that folk art is innocent social birdsong.  They are as much a part of the story of high aesthetic effort in America as any painting or sculpture.  

They deserve our attention and abundantly repay it.  Robert Hughes.

April on deck

Our daughter April has been home with us for the last 6 weeks.

 She and her cat left Toronto when things closed up because of the pandemic.

 Most of her time has been spent out on our deck with her quilts.

 At first she sorted through her fabrics and read through most of my quilt books.

 She has more ideas than  she can possibly get to.

 She thinks about both sides of a quilt. 

Above is the reverse side of the quilt in the top photo of this post.

 Five of her pieces - there are two or three more that did not make the photo.

 My favourtie part of this mother-daughter pandemic residency is stitching with her.
We've been listening to The Dutch House by Ann Patchett on audio book.

 All hand pieced and hand quilted.

 She's completed a baby quilt from stripe fabric - both sides made into a web design.

What a kid.

imagination is the star

"it goes on endlessly and one never gets to the place where the sun is setting but the red gets more and more intense"    Tove Jansson

This post is about a book.
Sculptor's Daughter (by Tove Jensson)
is written from a child's point of view. 
Child logic combines with adult wisdom and experience
and teaches the reader about art.

In fact, the book is a work of art.
It is a work about imagination.

"making a whole is very important.  Some people just paint things and forget the whole"
Tove Jansson

'The act of art becomes charged with power, then with failure.
We are up against mis-judgements, pre-conceptions, mis-interpretations, age-old entrenched beliefs, traditions, authorities, inevitable failures and competitions, and those games you have to play.' *

'A child, she reminds us, is refreshingly free from pre-conception - as well as a sponge for it.' *

We see the closedness of pre-conception and the child 's unknowing up against it. *

Sculptor's Daughter is full of images.

Darkness and light,
kindness and understanding,
objects and humans and emotions vivid and surreal.

The book makes us understand the importance and the fragility of our smallness.

It asks us to be alive to the imagination.

 It is full of flung-open windows.
Thrown-open doors. *

Tove Jansson has written a book that salvages and gives back to adults the child-sized truth about how things connect and how they mend.

How they continue.

I dream and my soul awakens.
Imagination is the star.    Carl Jung

The italics marked with * are by Ali Smith, and are taken from her introduction to Tove Jansson's memoir, Sculptor's Daughter.  I read it over Christmas when the children were home with their magical world.

The images are of some pieces I made in December while being a grandma and a hostess and a mother and I wasn't letting myself think too much. 

poetic

 the poetic image is sudden

psychologists and psychoanalysts can never really explain the unexpected nature of the poetic image

 the sudden flare-up of being that happens in the imagination

 it's metaphysical

when confronted with a poetic image we experience a resonance with deep repercussions

something about it seems really true
we are pushed over a border line within us
between non-knowing and knowing with all our hearts

 our soul responds

 our inner light

I brought three linen cloths to work  on
while Ned and I are in Mexico for a bit

 last night I realized that I could look at them as sculptures and photographed them hanging from the outdoor shower in the balcony

Gaston Bachelard has written about the poetic image in the Poetics of Space