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Reflections on "Artful Response" - Part 1
2nd November 2021
As our group exhibition “Artful Response” comes to an end I have been reflecting over the experience of responding to another artists artwork
Work in progress on Kowhai Ladies with Kowhai Trio by Christie Cramer and my Kowhai Trio on wall next to Christie’s painting.
Marilyn Muirhead, a Textile Artist friend began mooting the idea around with a few of us textile artists close to two years ago. She had seen a similiar exhibition many years ago in Christchurch and decided it would be good to do it in Tauranga. Marilyn has contacts with the painters from the Tauranga Art Society who also agreed to be involved. The idea was to pair a textile artist with a painter and for one of the pair to do a response to the others work. The four textile artists agreed to having two pieces and Marilyn found eight willing pigment artists to pair them with.
In the photo above you can see a painting by Christie Cramer, a local Bay of Plenty artist, who was one of my pigment artists. My second pairing with Maxine Thompson, a pastel artist also local to the Bay of Plenty, I will focus on in Part Two.
I chose to respond to Christie’s painting, “Kowhai Trio”, because I love Kowhai flowers, and I love the colours, shapes and layers that Christie has used in her painting. I thought it would be relatively easy to respond to what I found very appealing. How wrong was I??!! Three responses later…..
I obviously needed to go through a process to arrive at the final art quilt that was in the exhibition – “Kowhai Ladies”…. So beginning with a small design as a sample which quickly became a small art quilt/work in itself – “Kowhai Duo”, pictured below. Techniques used are raw edge applique, hand painting, free motion stitching and match stick quilting.
“Kowhai Duo”
Part of the challenge for me in responding to Christie’s painting was that in a certain light the background colour would change from blue to purple. In fact it is an indigo colour; a difficult colour to replicate well. One way I like to work is to deconstruct the original inspiration and then reconstruct it. So I decided to use this process as my response – deconstruct the colours Christie had used, separate them out and then bring them back together again. I began with raw edge applique designs of the Kowhai and added hand stitching and some paint.
A single Kowhai shape, work in progress with hand stitching and paint.
Deconstructed colours from Christie’s painting in the Kowhai shape, work in progress being assisted by MeiMei!
However I got a little overwhelmed with trying to find matching colours so I explored the idea of opposite. I decided to remove the colour from the Kowhai flowers and focus on green and yellow with a touch of purple (in the quilting thread in background). My “Kowhai Trio” has hand painted Kowhai flowers, raw edge applique and free machine quilting.
My “Kowhai Trio”
While I really love my “Kowhai Trio” I still needed to explore the deconstructed colour idea. I decided not to pursue an indigo background and found a lovely intense black that allowed the colourful Kowhai to pop. The techniques used in “Kowhai Ladies” are hand stitching, hand painting, and free machine stitching/quilting. The lovely intense black turned out to be a one way stretch fabric which was a nightmare to quilt but eventually worked out ok. Lockdown meant our exhibition opening was pushed out by two weeks and that gave me the time to finish “Kowhai Ladies”. While everyone tells me this is the ‘real’ response to Christie’s beautiful “Kowhai Trio” painting, I think all three sum up my response journey to Christie’s “Kowhai Trio”.
“Kowhai Ladies” and “Kowhai Trio” by Christie Cramer
While creating this response was a challenge and stretched me outside my comfort zone I have loved doing it. I think the mostly challenging experiences are where we can grow. Thanks to Christie for the pleasure of enjoying your painting in my studio to work from.