Leni Wiener

Today was the day I set out to really clean up and organize the studio so I could start work on the book.  But yesterday, after an enlightening lunch with a friend, and emails with another, I decided to get back into the studio again and try to do some work.  I had a great idea in my head (and it looked great in my head) to try and rely more on my brain and intuition than the photos I start with.  So unable to sleep, I was up early and in the studio.

First of all, I decided to revisit the UFOs that were plaguing me.  I don’t usually have UFOs, I either finish, rework until I like it, or throw away and start fresh each time.  But the last series I started of the close-up faces was frustrating me, as was the very large piece I was going to make that would be my work in progress for a month or more.  It turned out to be the snooze that kept me out of the studio for almost two months.

So clean up or shut up, or something.  When revisiting and recropping, I decided that I really did like two of the three chose-up faces (sometimes all you need is time away from each other!) and here they are now:

on a background and cropped in close, I like this piece now.

all this one needed was a crop at the top and bottom, and I like this, too.

The only two figures I liked from the abandoned “big project” were put together, and here they are:

still needs some work, but not the worst thing I have ever done;

These two didn’t make the cut on sightlines, but I thought they were so cute, they got set onto a background, and don’t pretend to be anything but kitch…

So on to that piece that looked so good in my head at 4 AM.  I wanted to amp up the color, and rely less on realism and more on just “feeling it” :

ARGH!! This is NOT how she looked in my head, maybe part of the problem was that it was 4 AM.  She looks like a raccoon hooker.

But I share it with you so you can see that everyone has failures, and everyone needs to keep at it (or toss it) before they decide it is done.

I thought she needed more color!  Too cartoonish for me.

in an attempt to make her less of a cartoon and more “serious” I only made matters worse!

So I decided to scrap all the pieces and do the face in thread…

Better, but disturbing (and not in a good way).  But on the road to something more like art and less like the Sunday funnies.

I think I was on the right track with the close-up faces.  Guess I should stick with what I do well, and forget trying to be “intuitive!”  My intuition just isn’t what I thought it would be…..

This figure that has been the topic of the last several blog posts has really been making me crazy.  Why is one simple figure so difficult, and giving me such a hard time?  The answer, when I took the time to be honest with myself, is that I was seeing what I wanted to see–not what was really there.

As you know if you have been following my frustration in the past few posts is that I decided all was well with this figure except for the highlight areas of his jacket.  I kept changing those, having decided there was too much contrast between the highlights and shadows.  Well, that was a problem, but it wasn’t the whole problem–or the real problem.

I took a break from working on this, primarily because in the last few days my life has gotten in the way of my work.  When I did go back to work on him, I started with another highlight fabric in the jacket, but he still didn’t look right.  I had assumed that all else was fine, but that assumption is where I made my mistake.

Sometimes when working on something closely, we tend not to see it for what it really is.  I find that this is the hardest part of evaluating and making changes.  I become immune to the element as a whole, and tend to get too focused on one little piece of that element.  Such was the case here.

When really looking at him I made a few decisions:

1.  All my fussing about the highlights in the jacket was pointless.  I had entered into this project hoping to simplify and create “broad strokes” that had subtlety and nuance rather than detail.  The highlights didn’t look right because they were detailed.  With no other real details in the rest of the figure, that jumped out as the most important thing to look at, and consequently the whole figure didn’t look right.  So my decision here was just to eliminate the highlights and go for nuance.  This certainly helped.

2.  Looking at the rest of the figure (the parts I was so sure were fine) I saw that the two fabrics used for the face were too close in value to make much of a statement.  In changing these values so that there was greater contrast, I was able to show highlight and shadow on his face with only three small pieces. This also served another, more important, function.  With greater contrast in the face it is now much clearer that he is leaning on his hand, and the separation of the hand and face is more obvious.  Because the face is the most important part of this figure, the greatest contrast here draws attention to it, rather than the jacket.  I also trimmed the shape of that hand slightly, so that it has a cleaner and more elegant line.  This small change is probably the biggest problem I had been experiencing, but I never even noticed it.

3.  The real changes were the most subtle, and are difficult to show even with photos.  These were the slight changes in positioning of some of the pieces–the head was brought lower and cocked slightly more to one side; the shoulder on the right was cut back just enough to look like he was leaning over; and the angle of the legs was brought over to one side.  These were not done by eye, they were the subtle changes indicated when the tracing template was layered over the work in progress.  These seemingly insignificant adjustments were a bigger problem than the highlights in the jacket.

Now he really does work.  I have achieved what I had set out to accomplish–that with very few pieces,  the body language comes through.  Now to move on to another figure in this (hopefully) large and complex art quilt.

What I want you to take away from this post is not just the rantings of a frustrated artist, but an understanding that often the biggest problem is not the one we think it is.  It is so important to step back and try to see a work in progress for what it really is, not what it is in your head.  Until I addressed the parts of this figure that I thought were fine, I was not able to find the problem; a little detective work and trusting my eye (not my brain) was the answer.

Here are my words of wisdom.  The most important two things to remember when making art quilts are:

Value, value, value

Use your eye, not your brain

Having reworked the figure for the third time, and pretty sure I had it, I looked again and discovered something interesting.  I was more on track the first time than in the two re-dos.  This is because I used my brain not my eye, a common mistake and one that always trips me up.

Here is the original photo and the three attempts at capturing it in fabric:

After completing the first figure, I felt there was not enough contrast between the two values in his jacket, which meant that the shadow areas were not clearly defined.  So I chose a fabric that looked lighter than the shadow fabric and used it without first comparing it to the value I wished to represent.  I could have (and should have) compared this fabric to the orignial photo with a ruby beholder (or red acetate) so be sure they were the same value.  But I trusted my brain because I really love this fabric.  I was wrong.

Having completed the figure the second time, and feeling it didn’t look right, I simply redefined the shapes of the lighter fabric, without really asking myself why it didn’t look right.  That didn’t help.  Why?  Because there is too much contrast–the jacket fabric is much too light and should not so far in value from the shadow fabric.

Too often we rely on our brains without really looking at the photo, as in this case, in assuming the jacket color would be much lighter than the shadow color .  This is the biggest advantage to working from a photo–all the information you need is right there for you.  Trust it, and it always works.  Second guess it, and usually it doesn’t look right.

I didn’t listen to my own advice–”trust your eye, not your brain.“  Tripped me up again.

So back to the studio, knowing NOW what the real problem is and able to fix it.  See what a wonderful tool a digital camera and a computer screen can be in evaluating and comparing your progress?

After looking at the reading man from the new piece on the computer screen, I decided that there is not enough contrast in the fabrics used for his jacket.  The three fabrics used–the jacket, the shadow and the one highlight on his shoulder, were too close together to work effectively.  I liked the bottom half of him, and the head was basically ok; here are the changes:

I am still not sure I love this, so I haven’t yet committed to it by gluing it together and moving to another figure.  But here is where the changes are:

1.  The hand under his chin has been trimmed a bit

2.  The biggest change is in the jacket; the main fabric has been lightened, as has the highlight, the shadow area remains the same.  This allows more contrast and the three fabrics no longer blend together as much.
Stepping back and looking at it, I think I need to work a bit on tweaking the shadow areas so that they better define his arms.  I am moving in the right direction, but I am not quite there, yet.  This is a process, and you have to enjoy the process.

Stay tuned!

The first figure of this new, large piece was completed yesterday.  My goal with this piece is to make the figures much simpler, like broad brush strokes, so that only a very few fabric pieces are necessary to make the same statement.  It is all about body language, not detail.

Here is the man from the original photo (the photo is such low quality that it almost looks impressionistic):

And here he is in fabric:

It is always so helpful to look at something in work on the computer.  On the screen, it is so much easier to identify what is working and what is not.  On the design wall, I thought this was pretty good.  On the screen I can see that the shadow areas on his coat are not dark enough to distinguish them from the coat itself.  And I need to trim around to define the shape of the ear more.  I will show you the changes when I make them.

For those of you who have read my book, you can see that he was created on a small piece of do-sew, allowing me to place each tiny piece onto a foundation that will have no bulk in the finished piece.  I will trim around him carefully and the do-sew will remain on the back.

If you haven’t read my book–why not!!??

After working for a while on the close-up faces,  I found myself looking for other things to do.  Some legitimate excuses provided the opportunity–I needed to make some samples for a magazine article I wrote and for a book proposal, plus four baby quilts (I don’t know what is in the water, I can’t remember making four baby quilts in a year, let alone two weeks!).  But now that all that is done, and the studio cleaned and all fabric folded and neatly put away, I was still unmotivated.  So I had to decide what the problem was.

As I have said on this blog many times before, the feeling of being unmotivated and avoiding working on something is a symptom of a larger problem, the unconsious and unaknowledged realization that what I am working on is either not going well or not interesting me.  I think the latter is the case here.

I do really like two of the three faces I created, but on reflection, they are just variations on a theme, to take a phrase from music.  They were the same faces, done larger and in greater detail, but they were the same faces.  Or the same types of faces.  There was no there, there.  No growth, no challenge.  No motivation.  Plus, I realized that I miss the nuance of body language, something I have come to recognize as a sort of signature of my work.

When I was working on the sightlines pieces recently, that large project with many components, I thought that working large was not what I wanted to do again for awhile.  I thought that smaller pieces would be more satisfying.  I have now decided that I need to move outside my comfort zone and do exactly the opposite–work larger and in greater detail.  Instead of working on a piece that essentially is finished (at least to the glue stage) in a single session, I need to take on a project that will last longer, be more of a challenge, and that will allow me to stretch the way I work just a bit more.

So here is the new piece–it began with a series of photos I have been sitting on for a long time.  The photos were taken at Union Station in Washington DC, and until now seemed too daunting to attempt.  I love the viewpoint, and I plan to make this the largest piece I have done to date.  This is the challenge that will carry me through the next few months, here is the photo I have chosen to begin with:

I love that there is so much going on in this photo, giving the viewer a lot to take in and think about, but feel it is a bit too disjointed, with no real focal point.  Look at the left, the man sitting cross-legged on that bench.  He is my focal point, here is the crop:

Cropping is vitally important when working with any photo. Taking away any extraneous distractions allows the viewer to focus in on what is important, making a much stronger statement.  Cropping makes this more about the people than the station.

I also plan to move a bit away from the naturalistic representation of these figures and try to make them just a bit more abstract and (I hate to use the word) impressionistic than what I have done in the past.

Stay tuned, will share the progress as I go…….

Last April, I took a photo in Hong Kong that ultimately became “Market Day, Hong Kong”:

I loved the photo, and felt that the resulting art quilt was ok, I liked the bag she is holding, was very proud of the way I fussy cut the umbrella fabric, and I used a silk for her shirt that my parents brought back from Hong Kong twenty years ago.  Nice touch, but I really felt that the strength and interest in this photo was the woman’s face, which was so small in the overall piece that I felt it lacked the impact it deserved.

So there is nothing that says we cannot revisit a starting photo, and in keeping with my new series of closeup faces, done small but (hopefully) with big impact, I reused this face and did it again.

This still is no where near finished, just at the glue stage.  But I think this now captures what was missing in the larger piece.  Of course, I could redo the entire figure, larger, using this face which has more impact, but in moving forward I feel that I don’t want to do big pieces, and I don’t want to do the bodies, the backgrounds–that for now, anyway, I just want to work on the faces themselves.  Finding your voice has as much to do with what you want to do as with what you don’t want to do, remember?

Where I have also made an adjustment from the other two I did since I started this series (go back in the blog entries a week or so to see them) is the color.  Here, I decided to mix both warm and cool colors, letting the base fabric of the face remain warm and fleshy, and using the cools as the darker values.  I prefer this approach to the last face I worked on in this series (and may make adjustments to it before I finish it) where the face done in the red tones is just too warm.  It needs to be cooled down, which I tried with the blue at the bottom corner, but the overall effect is still too hot.   So I like this approach, mixing color temperatures for more of a balance.

What was it the three bears said “not too hot, not too cool, it was just right”.  Damn, those bears knew their color theory!

In my continuing quest to move forward, I have completed the first stage of a second piece.  The new direction I want to explore is faces with little or no background; and the pieces are smaller–they will be about 10″ square when quilted and squared off–in an attempt to get big impact in a little piece.  Many art quilters strive to work larger, but I am finding my comfort zone is getting smaller and easier to handle.  One of the reasons for this is that I want to focus more on the quilting and I can do more elaborate and intricate stitching on a smaller piece.

Here you can see the face and her arms complete.  I tried several colors for her hair, feeling that her skin tone is far from representational and the hair need not be so literal, but only this color looked right.  This is the stage where little details mean a lot.  I did not like the edge of her face, so made that darker; and needed to find the right fabrics for both her clothing (which will show just a bit on the edge) and the blanket on which she is leaning.

The blue in the corner is unexpected, but I think it brings some life to the otherwise somber palette.  I plan to do a few of these and then do the quilting at the same time.  For me, it is easier to focus on one change at a time, and since these are small, they will have not wait for too long.

Critiques:

On another note, often readers of my blog and/or book “Photo-inspired Art Quilts” email me to ask my opinion about something they are working on or have just completed.  This is what I do in my monthly art quilt workshop–help guide my students along when they have problems or questions.  Even when the work being reviewed belongs to someone else, it helps everyone learn to see the problems and the possible solutions.

For this reason, I am offering my blog readers the opportunity to submit photos of pieces they are working on, or have completed, for a review on this blog.  You must be willing to let me share it here so that others can learn from it.  You can send me a Jpeg at Leni@leniwiener.com and I will post your photo and my comments.

This is where we were yesterday, when I left it to come back and look at it fresh to see what jumped out at me as being wrong:

On looking at it fresh two things jumped out as being problems that needed to be addressed:

1.  although I like the color and the pattern of the hair, it is not dark enough in value.  It really needs to be a deep dark halo around the face.  I can do this just around the face and still leave some of the textural fabric there;

2.  if the hair around the face is darkened, the eyes must be as well.  The hair cannot be darker than the eyes or the eyes will lose their drama.  Also, in looking at the eye on the light side of the face, it needs to be better defined.

The changes from here on are subtle, but I think they make a difference.  It is important to look at the little details once the big pieces are set.  Here you can see the darkened hair at the top of her head, the darkened and better defined eyes.  In looking at it now on the screen, I can see that the defined eye on the light side needs to be just a bit rounder at the bottom, which I will do before everything is set in stone.

Right now there is no background, and I like the lightness on that side, but think it looks too balanced with the white side of the face.  The whole composition here is asymetrical, so balancing the white doesn’t cut it.

Here is that golden fabric as the background.  I love the painterly quality of this fabric, and the color lightens this side of the face, but I want to look at other options before I make a decision.

Here the same fabric is used so that the back is what shows.  I still have that painterly quality, but with a lighter value.  This may be better, but I have more to look at.

This goes in a different direction, the lighter magenta fabric will make the magenta in the face more prominent, and may help to make the background receed…

Here I have tried a bright blue silk, in the hopes that it will play nicely with the blues and still provide some contrast between the foreground and the background.  I think I can eliminate this one from consideration right away, as the blue becomes much too vibrant and therefore much too important.

It is always helpful to take digital pictures of your options and look at them on the computer screen.  Here are four, let’s discuss them one at a time:

1.  The golden background.  As much as I love this fabric, here it doesn’t do anything for me.  It just looks like an inconsistent and irrelevant choice which adds nothing.

2.  The golden fabric used on the wrong side.  I like this one, it is light (which I liked when there was no background) but not as light as the white side of the face, leaving some dimension and contrast.  It also retains the nice painterly quality, although not quite as much as the right side.  This is a contender.

3.  The magenta fabric.  This was a nice idea, and I like this as a background fabric, but now the magenta in the face becomes so prominent that it looks like a scar or a tatoo and is distracting.  So this one is also out.

4.  The blue silk.  I like the fact that it has a shine, but the color is all wrong.  It doesn’t play nicely with the other blues in the face and makes the magenta in the face look disturbing.

For now, I think I like the lighter golden background, but am not sure.  But here is when every little detail counts, so I need to make the following adjustments:

1.  round that eye on the bottom so it is a more graceful shape

2.  bring some of the very dark around the bottom of the chin to break up so much of that cross-hatch fabric.

3.  make the line of the chin more graceful

4.  fill in that funny little white valley that extends below the eye on the lighter side of the face.

5.  see what happens if I make the eyebrows darker, the same value as the eyes themselves.

tomorrow…..

Lying in bed at 2 AM (I get my most creative solutions in the middle of the night when my mind is clear of all the other stuff during the day) I decided not to try the swirly fabric positioned horizontally, but to go in a different direction.  The speckled fabric on the side of the face, which I think is very interesting, takes too much attention away from that gorgeous shape that I wanted to be center stage in the piece.  This is the graceful curving line that goes from behind the eye down the face and into the lips.  Doing it again in that fabric, however it is oriented, would not be as important as the speckled fabric around it, and therefore would be the wrong choice.  Solution?  Something the same value (because the value worked perfectly) but in that red violet I had rejected.  By using ONLY ONE of the red violet fabrics, it would take center stage and draw attention to the shape that I thought was the most important in the face.

Here is where I was yesterday.  I like where it is going, but that fabric behind the eye and down the face isn’t standing out as much as I would like.  The value, however, works just fine–darker than the face but lighter than the eye.  So it has to remain the same.

Of the red violet fabrics I tried in the beginning, this was the one that was the same value, so this is the one I tried first.  It is very strong and stops in the middle of the face, so it must be extended into the lips.

Now that strong colored line runs down farther into the face, ending almost at the bottom–so the shadow under the chin is next….

I am liking where this is going.  The strong color creates a line that runs from one side at the top in a curving interesting shape down to the bottom of the composition.  This takes away the attention from the speckled fabric of the face, and makes the whole face appear more graphic and less representational.

Adding the hair will help define the shape of the face and will help me decide if that highlight on the side of her face needs to be changed.  In the original photo, the value of the hair is the same as the value of the eyes, but I did not want to use the same fabric.  I did not want the two areas to blend together as if they were the same thing in different parts of the face.  This fabric, with the cross-hatch design on it is the same value, is also a blue with a purple under-color, and the perceived texture of the surface is reminiscent of hair.

As soon as the hair and the shadow under her ear and around her chin goes it, the face begins to take shape–literally.  The dark value next to the white on the highlighted side of the face defines the shape of her face.

Here I have added just a touch of a golden yellow at the side of her face in hopes of lightening that side and providing color compliment to the purple/blues.  I am not sure it works.  When I get to this stage, I often find that it helps to walk away for a while and then come back.  There is a saying about getting dressed up that you should look in the mirror and take off the first thing you notice.  The same is true here.  Walking away for a while and looking at it fresh, I need to take it all in with one glance.  If something is wrong, it will jump right out at me.   That is how I will know it needs to be changed.