Dance

A recent wedding (which was fabulous by the way) was a feast for the camera's eye, and I thought you might like to share the inspiration. Trying to catch movement is always a difficult thing with out just getting in a blurry mess. Actually blur is a key factor which animators tried to indicate with a couple of little marks at points of movement like the heels of a dancer or tail end of a rocket. Well actually that's not quite right as the tick marks were there to indicate more frames should be added to fill out the action sequence, but it did become a symbol for movement that people copy in cartooning.

Long time exposures with a small iris opening on a camera can capture movement beautifully and it's possible to experiment so that you get just the right amount of sharpness (on still and slow moving parts of the picture) mixed with speedy blur. Black and white photographs really are the forté for this but you can do it in colour too... hmm must try some colourful fairground scenes :)

Painting the idea of movement was done really well by Monet in his picture of a lady battling with a blowy brolly, capturing the motion of the wind by it's effect on an object, be it skirts of fabric or the umbrella itself.



















One thing I've never managed to capture is the way a field of long grass ripples in waves when the wind is blowing across it. Photographs don't seem to get it right so maybe painting the idea of it might work... perhaps in a vanGogh style.

Anyway these are my two different styles of dancing pic. I think any painting I take from these will be just totally swirling and blurry just to take it that one step further :)































Would love to see what you can come up with to represent the movement of dancing...

Language - Sandy

I am quite busy at present, so I am posting one I did earlier this year. I hadn't heard of Kurt Shwitters, but when I did a Google image, I was amazed to see the links with some of the current fragment textile work that is popular. When I made this I was inspired by the look of some of the collage work of Karen Stiehl Osborne.

For this piece I used pages from old dictionaries from other languages and tourist phrase books. They have been sprayed with various antiquing inks. I also stamped "cuniform" transliteration of the word "Language". and wrote the word for language from various countries. It is all fused together onto a backing fabric print that looks like writing. and unified by fusing a thin paperlike fabric over all. That fabric already has words printed on, which look like they are from vintage documents. The "heads" are also of a similar fabric in green.

gritty schwitty - Helen S

collagé is not my strong point but I thought I'd try and do some sticking down of images, tearing up old prints of my work and adding a bit of grainy texture.

new inspiration

I love all your debris finds, and wonder if you've taken it any further. These things tend to sit in my mental filing cabinets for ages before I use them.
I've been in a real slump recently, so apologies for absence. Now I'm determined to focus again and try find some inspiration. I'm not very verse with history of art ashamedly but have been looking through some images which might relate to textiles. One of the artist that I've come across recently which I thought inspiring is Kurt Shwitters. You may have already seen his work but it's worth a closer look. So the challenge, if you're interested, is to have a google of his images and see if you can make something in the style of...

gnarly debris - Helen S

A tangled gnarl of old wire and rope on a beach down in South Uist

Debris - Cathy

Debris from wallpaper put up a long time ago, Photo taken in an old slave home at Magnolia Plantation Louisiana USA

Debris - Sandra Wyman

Debris on the lake at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park