MUSEUM PORTRAIT (Weekly Art Project #19, 2020)

Our time traveling in Egypt was quickly coming to an end.  With a few days in Cairo before flying out there was a LOT we wanted to pack in to that brief amount of time.  The most important being a visit to the Egyptian Museum.

Sadly, as with many museums, cameras were most definitely forbidden.  Therefore I have no photographic images to remind me of the extraordinary artifacts I was privileged to see in just a few short hours.  Let's just say...I had to remind myself to breathe.  The sculptures, the carved wood & stone, the exquisite plaster work, the gold from Tutankhamen's tomb, the sarcophagi....sigh...EVERYTHING!  When walking through a place like that, knowing that this is likely to be the only time in my life to see these remarkable & beautiful objects, it feels that if I don't breathe time will slow down so that I can absorb it all the more permanently!

One of the sections I most wanted to see was focused on Akhenaten . I have long been fascinated by him, partly because of his bravery to change the whole way in which his people worshiped, but mainly because I've found the elongated body features with their exaggerations visually beautiful.

The above photo was taken in a museum where I was obviously allowed to take a photo, but sadly I don't recall where that was.  It may have been Alexandria. I can see why I took it though, & why, even though it's slightly out of focus, I kept it in my photo collection. Not only is the face  elongated (albeit slightly), but I LOVE the hair treatment.  Therefore, I'm choosing her as my muse to represent 'the Museum experience'!

After drawing a resemblance of her within an A4 space, I gathered my fabrics, stitched in the design & got ready to cut back.  Here's how it went...

Here she is, the final outcome.
I did consider doing this piece in a landscape orientation, but to do so would have meant losing that wonderful long sinuous neck, & I felt the neck was important to keep!
One of the successful aspects of this piece is that I achieved it in a relatively short period of time!  Yesterday was rather time-restricted in terms of studio work, & when that happens I need to be able to adjust my expectations in terms of design complexity.  This is quite a simple design, but it captures the components I wanted it to; exaggerated eye, long features, skin tone & a nod to that fabulous hair.  I'm also pleased with the choice of background fabric too. It may not be perfect & is certainly not a resolved enough design to reproduce for sale purposes, but it is a sufficient aide-de-memoir for me.  Sometimes sufficient is enough!!

THE LIBRARY (weekly art project #18, 2020)

Wouldn't it have been amazing to visit the Great Library of ancient Alexandria?! A library that held up to 400,000 scrolls & led to the city being heralded as the capital of knowledge & learning.

Well that ancient wonder may no longer exist, but it's modern version does & we were very VERY excited to visit it during our exploration of Egypt.

The current Library was inaugurated in 2002 and as well as having space for 8 million books, the interior also has it's own planetarium, a state-of-the-art conference centre, museums, art galleries and a restoration laboratory for manuscripts (I would have loved to have been allowed in there!!!!) It was such a special privelege to be able to wander around inside & have a look .

The architecture was very modern, with the interior set out in terraces like a coliseum and lots of light & airy space. The exterior looked like the prow of a large ship from the entrance, but when viewed from across the water it looked like an armadillo's armoured shell! What attracted me the most was that this outer surface was decorated with engravings of all the alphabets of known written forms of language.  It was mindblowingly beautiful.

An obvious choice to use as my muse for this week's art project.

I know that it was only a few weeks ago that I created a language inspired WAP, but that didn't stop me choosing to use this style of design for another week's art making practice.

This week I wanted to use the library itself as the source of my series of glyphs. therefore I sat at the computer with my few photos on the big screen & drew quick line drawings of different sections of the building, both interior & exterior.

I had purposefully drawn quiuckly because I wanted the essential lines & shapes that grabbed me, I didn't want to get too caught up in the detail.  With that part of the process filling two A4 pages I had plenty of scope to creat my own lettering.

Using calligraphy pens in 2 thicknesses I started trying out line combinations, repeating them over & over until I was happy with how they 'read'.

Once I had sorted out my favourites it was time to think of layout.  The armoured shell of the building was constructed using different sized tiles, so I wanted to have a bit of variety somewhere in my layout, whilst keeping in mind the practicalities of an A4 size & my time limitations.  I also wanted to reference the grey colour scheme with a dash of woody tones for the interior.  I liked the graphic solidity of black forming the letters, so with these thoughts in mind I set about rummaging through my fabrics.

This was how it looked when I was ready to cut back.  Each patch only had one other layer before the black base & some of those patches had shiny black to create a bit of difference from the matt black.  I'd originally intended that each patch would have a piece of each of the fabrics mixed up in it's layers, with the hope to create an interesting relief effect as I cut back.  However, I didn't have enough fabric of each of these & the time to get these few fabrics together was way too long already.  I opted therefore, for the less is more approach.  With so few layers there wasn't going to be a lot of cutting back, which with the clock ticking wasn't a bad thing!

Here's how it went...

Hmmmm.

Well I think I should've just stuck with the 'even less is more' approach & kept the single layer cut back!  I don't think I put enough thought into tonal variation for the lower one in particular.  Never mind...we live & learn!

As it happens I was having camera issues again.  The outcome of one of my photography attempts has proved to be a very exciting alternative to the textile outcome! Take a look at these;

How cool does this look???? So all is not lost, this outcome is a very happy accident!  I hope that you have some positive outcomes from your art learning-by-making this week!

GOLDEN MUMMIES (Weekly Art Project #17, 2020)

 When I woke up yesterday morning I asked myself whether there was something I could work on for my weekly art project that would  fit in with Mother's day.

With a smile, the answer soon came to me...MUMMIES...of course!!

 From the White Desert we began our journey back to Cairo, stopping in the Bahariya Oasis where we wanted to see the Golden Mummies.

 Sadly we were not allowed to take photos in the small museum that contained these particular Mummies, and sadder still I didn't even mention them in the travel blog I was writing at the time.  In fact I could easily have forgotten that we'd even been there if it hadn't been for this note in my small sketch book.  I may not have been able to take photos, but so enamoured was I by the various ways that the wrappings were woven on the Mummies, I had drawn some rough lines to remind myself!

Flicking through that sketchbook there were a few variations of 'Mummy Wrapping's', so it is these visual notes that have informed my weekly art project this week.

 It might be hard to believe, but it did take a fair amount of time to work out my design & longer than I would have liked to choose my different 'gold' toned fabrics.  It was a relief to get to the sewing machine, partly because I wouldn't allow myself any lunch until I'd sewn in that design! (And I was hungry!!)

Here's how the cutting back went when I finally got back to it!!

 Theoretically this should have been the final outcome, but to me it just felt unfinished.

 Inspite of the fact that I had allowed my WAP to continue on into this morning (a serious breach of my self imposed rules!!) I still wanted to take a bit more time to finish it off better.  I decided on painting a simple lotus motif in the lower corners .

I'm glad I did as it makes the piece feel more whole.
All in all I'm quite pleased with this outcome.
What I'm not happy with...and I apologise profusely for...is the photography.
I continue to have an issue with my 'new' camera, which is so clever & fancy schmancy that it doesn't actually have a mode for full frame focus!  This means every attempt to photograph my art results in out of focus edges.  I can't tell you how frustrated this has made me & how long I've spent wading through YouTube video tutorials to try & 'sort' it out.  I eventually resorted to my old camera, but for some reason my computer no longer wishes to upload photos from it!  Therefore I'm left with my phone camera & what you see above is courtesy of that! Arghhhhhhhh!
Still, working on this week's WAP was a good way to calm down from my unresolved photography issue. I hope your art making is considerably more stress free! Cheers!

WHITE DESERT (Weekly Art Project #16, 2020)

 If corona virus hadn't brought international travel to a standstill, I would be in Portugal right now!  And sadly, making a darn fine Piripiri Chicken, eating portugese tarts & sipping a superb wine from the Alentejo region just doesn't quite take that loss away!

 I've been so very grateful for my travel experiences and recognise that I'm privileged to have been able to visit the places I have. Often have I said "If I never travel again, I'm grateful for where I've been, what & I've seen & done" ... and I am, but..... it is also true that, for me,  travel is a teensy bit addictive, the more I see the more I want to see and right now I'm experiencing withdrawal symptoms.  This is made worse of course by the onset of much cooler weather here in Adelaide.

All the more valueable then is my weekly escape to Egypt for my art project, even if it is armchair travel!

This week our journey takes us on & into the stunning White Desert.
Twenty million years ago, the Red Sea covered the Western Desert & in the time since then the land has become this incredible landscape of limestone deposits called inselbergs!

 Imagine a landscape covered in meringue shapes & you'll have a good idea of how it looked. The inselbergs came in all shapes & sizes & some have acquired pet names since tourists started visiting.  We had so much fun  walking around them identifying the Eagle, the Mushroom, the Rabbit and the Lion! .

How to capture them as a memory trigger was going to be interesting!

 It occurred to me that inselbergs also looked like ripped paper shapes, so I thought I might start there.  Perhaps I could draw them & create a design from them?

 I scrunched the shapes up & they looked even more evocative of their limestone cousins.  In fact, they looked so good, I decided not to draw them, but to brush some protective matt medium over them intending to stitch the more interesting shapes directly onto fabric!

Okay, that would work, but where was the contemporary reverse applique going to come in?

 I didn't need to look far for the answer to that question! 
As well as wandering around this bizarrely beautiful landscape, we were also going to hunker down & watch the sun set whilst eating a meal.  Our guide set up a wonderful screen to keep the wind & sand off us as we cooked & ate.  The fabric is printed, but is in the design of the elaborate tent panels of former years.  The patterns are beautiful, so I thought I'd like a reference to them in my design.
I quickly drew a few of the patterns that I could decipher from this small photograph, with a large dose of my own imagination!!  From this I worked up a design & chose to make it a low border on my art piece.  It was time to get started.

 To represent the brilliance of the blue sky, I chose a sunprint sample from my stash & kept plain colours for my border.

 Already having white cotton in the sewing machine I stitched in the Inselbergs before changing the thread for the blue outlines.   Then it was cutting back time!

This is the end result. I haven't worked with paper on fabric much before, but really enjoy the crinkley aspect & feel of it.  The down side though is that I'm afraid I'll lose all those lovely creases if I iron that top section, which means the sky looks a bit dire!  I love the border & am very pleased with how that has worked out.  All in all, an unusual outcome, but it does instantly transport me back to the White Desert & sitting by an open fire, protected by the wind as we watched the sun go down. A truly special experience.
I hope you have enjoyed this week's blog & are finding inspiration in your own travel experiences, whether to far off places, or just around your living room.  Happy creating.