Fibermania

Done with Taxes! Back to Art

Last month we had our annual Professional Art Quilters Alliance retreat in Racine WI, where most of our members enjoyed a workshop or demo, and spent the two days sewing, quilting or doing surface design stuff.
The girlfriends, Frieda, Tommy, Gayle, Sylvia Whitesides and I went into Milwaukee (Yarn store) to the Milwaukee Art Museum and gallery district. The next day we went to the Racine Art Museum and the art gallery district of Racine, which is bigger and better than the Milwaukee section!
We have all blogged about this before, but I have to show you these paintings that were in the two different cities galleries. This is the work of Jeff Condon. I was NOT allowed to take these pictures.

Oil Pastels framed under glass.

What particularly impressed me about this work, is that it is abstracted landscape. Mostly large areas of pattern next to large areas of less pattern. Color is not all that realistic, yet referential. Gravity is irrelevant! The sky could be eliminated and it would be even less pictorial and more pure design.

The compostion and layout of these drawings is just wonderful, imho. We usually don't think in terms of design in drawings, but it is evident here that this is more about the division of space using shape and color, than it is concerned with reproducing reality. I find these very much like really good quilt design. and it reminds me of my new fave quilt from Deb Boschert.

(The glass is making that reflection.)

I am going to study these landscapes and glean the lessons of shape, line and color, and find a way to add it to my work. I rarely make a landscape quilt, so there is no attraction in that for me. It is the shapes and lines that I want to emulate.