Over the Memorial Day weekend, I found a great block of time to finish Any Color’s All Right As Long As It’s Green (for Lucille). Pieced, fused, minimally quilted for subtle texture, and embellished with vintage clip on earrings and Nonie’s photo, this reminds me of the green carpets in her home.
While I was working on “Any Color’s All Right As Long As It’s Red” in honor of my Grandpa Clark, I realized Red was the first in a series for my grandparents. After a little digging through my parent’s and my own memory banks, favorite colors were recalled so the work could begin.
My maternal grandmother, Lucille, loved green. The carpets in the three houses I remember her living in were always some shade of her favorite color. She was an independent, strong, and stubborn woman — I’ve inherited all of that from her and couldn’t be more pleased. My brother and I were her only grandchildren, so she doted on us, taking us camping in her Airstream trailer to Paraiso Hot Springs. The scent of eucalyptus reminds me of those trips.
I remember her letting herself into our house, a dozen Winchell’s donuts in hand. “I can’t stay; I brought these for the kids,” she’d say as she dropped the box on the kitchen counter, one heel already turned to dart back out the door to run her errands or attend Altar Society meetings or visit with friends.
She also loved music. Or more correctly, loved musical instruments. She owned a baby grand piano, an organ, a violin, an accordion, a flute, and probably a couple more. I faintly recall a guitar. Probably not a Les Paul, though.
Lucille passed away when I was 25. She was the last remaining grandparent and the one most active in our lives. I hope she can see the field of green I’m creating for her.
A field of greenI can see her playing the piano…
Come back in a couple of weeks to see how the quilting is coming along.
This homage quilt to my paternal Grandfather could have been finished in a week if I didn’t have a day job. 🙂
However, because, like everyone, I have bills to pay and I prefer eating to starving, off to work I go. I’ve mentioned I changed jobs in November; the requirements and obligations of taking on a new role are such that the time to balance my life with creativity has been diminished. I’m working on getting that balance back.
In the meantime, I did finish Any Color’s All Right As Long As It’s Red (for Basil). I think it’s my best art work yet (and that’s saying something because I’m pretty hard on myself). Primarily pieced and fused, it’s the little extras like lettered beads to spell “transmugliforcandanbumshamity” and a scanned copy of the famous Basil that make this art quilt pop. I kept the quilting to a minimum and think I’ve found a style that represents my voice.
The first in four panels honoring my grandparentsMinimal quilting. This piece didn’t need the density.The beads spell “transmugliforcandanbumshamity”, Grandpa’s invented word.The whales look 3D to me.Poem labelGrandpa Clark
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Any Color’s All Right As Long As It’s Green (for Lucille) is up next.
My paternal grandfather lived to be 91. Born in Mississippi, he and his family moved to California when he was 2. While he spent the 89 intervening years claiming a strong Southern heritage, epitomized by a deep love of fried catfish and hush puppies, he embraced the quirkiness that is California by inventing his own word, making up his own song, and spouting personal bon mots that became fact in our family.
“Any color’s all right as long as it’s red.” This was his response to any inquiry regarding his favorite color. In an era when men’s suits were limited to a few dark colors – black, navy, charcoal grey – Grandpa added a splash of color with his tie. He sometimes wore a bolo tie when he wanted to shake things up a bit, but the cloth tie with those three-piece suits was red more often than not.
Grandpa Clark passed away my 17th Spring. No one in our family ever recorded the words to his song, but bits and piece remain in our memories. His word, “transmugliforcandanbumshamity”, was 29 letters of nonsense and serious fun to say. I’ve always thought of it as an inventive curse word, but please feel free to create your own definition.
When I started making quilts in the 1990s, his saying about the color red popped into my head during a visit to a fabric store. My immediate reaction was to think, “That would make a fantastic name for a quilt!” And so I began to collect red fabrics. Over the years, I built up a rather impressive stash of red. The time to make his quilt is now.
This quilt only uses a small sampling of that stash. Either way, I think Grandpa would like it.
A small selection of reds.A panel of redBackground close up
I will fuse items that represent Grandpa to this panel and add a bit of embellishment before making the sandwich and quilting it together.
This is the first in a series of four, one for each of my grandparents.
It was a near thing, getting it completed before the end of the year. I had several thoughts urging me on before the calendar rolled to 2015:
I had established a SAQA Visioning Project goal of 4 new art pieces in 2014 (this is the 4th). No way was I going to miss achieving the goal by mere days. Not that there’s a gold star or a smiley face or a trophy for the goal meeting. Instead, there is satisfaction in accomplishing something I set out to do in the time I set to do it.
I refuse to let the busyness of a new job stop me from creating my art, and….
I needed the dining room table cleared of sewing machine, cutting mats, fabric, thread, scissors, Ott lites, and art to make room for Christmas cookies, Christmas cake, and Christmas Eve dinner. Food, drink, and fabric don’t mix.
Somewhere through the process of creating this piece, I realized its name had changed to Sunburst. The bright, bright points of color in the compass explode across the pale, pale yellow of a dawn sky.
Both the art and the duvet it is laying on have some warp. I’d love to know what I am doing that prevents the finished piece from laying flatStraight(er) shot. See the sun exploding in the sky?The poem label
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Next up: “Any color’s all right as long as it’s red” – My Grandpa Clark used to say that. I always thought the statement would make an excellent art quilt name. Check back in January for a progress report.
Hilary Clark Studios 