Flower Drum Song

Flower Drum Song (28.5 x 71)
When creating this design, as I experimented with different shapes       petal forms kept appearing in the background and the piece took  on an Oriental flavor. Those petal shapes along with the rhythmic beat of the line work inspired me to name this piece “Flower Drum Song.”  I wanted to keep the very high contrast figure/ground, and graphic appeal this design had when I designed it in black and white.  So I decided to simplify the color scheme and juxtapose  the bright red, hot pink, red-orange pieced background against the saturated black sateen shapes for the maximum contrast to distinguish the figure from the ground and make them appear interchangeable.

Flower Drum Song Detail

Shards (31 x 74)

Using a simple color scheme to emphasize the figure/ground relationships, I chose triangular shapes in a warm brown sateen as the main design element. Then crazy pieced the background in many values of turquoise blue, again using many triangular shapes. I initially thought of it as a Southwest Indian design, but in the end it reminds me more of diamond shapes and broken shards of glass.

Shards - detail

Native Spirits Full View

Native Spirits (74 x 30.5)

I became enamored with the cave writing idea, and decided I wanted to reverse the darks and lights of the third quilt in this series to see what happened. What a difference! These 2 quilts are clearly related, but yet individual as well. The lights seem to glow and pop the figure out even more in this version. The graphic feel and vibrant colors are spirited and take me back to earlier times and make me hear tribal rhythms.

Primitive Echoes (62 x 29)

Starting by designing this piece in black and white, I loved the graphic quality and possibilities of it. It’s my version of primitive writing and drawing on cave walls. Halfway through, I decided to piece the background to add the texture and depth of a cave wall, and this time my effort was to integrate the sizes while going from large to small. I felt it just called out for some vibrant colors that contrasted well enough to stand on their own, but also to emphasize the figure/ground relationship.

Primitive Echoes  Detail View

Decipher (42.5 x 55.5)

Continuing my cave writing theme, in this quilt I emphasize the smaller more worn-looking writing by piecing the background and quilting it extensively.  Meanwhile, the foreground consists of large shapes also found in cave writing to form the figures.

Decipher - detail view

Sun and Shadows (35 x 40.5)

Using the sunny yellows and oranges as light ground area, while the purple, rust and dark gray form the shapes, this composition took on the topography of a mountainous region with cracks and crevices making the darks and gold medium color shadowy in the glare of bright sunlit colors.

Sun and Shadow Detail

Sun and Shadow

This quilt took me back to my high school days in plane geometry class. Cutting pieces for both the foreground and background in triangles, pentagons and other geometric shapes forms the basis for this quilt. The values separate the foreground made of dark blues, crimsons and rusts from the background which is composed of various shades of lime and avocado greens. Most of the shapes are quite large, but there are 3 areas of very small shapes pieced together and distributed to balance the design. Three styles of quilting are used to define the foreground, background and small pieced areas as well.

Plain Geometry-detail views

Plain Geometry-full view

Sedona detail

To convey my impressions of the Sedona Arizona area, I used a palette of the two basic colors that make that area so striking.  Rusty orange tones for the red rocks that suddenly pop up when you drive into the region, and blue/turquoise tones of the sky that contrast so beautifully with the rocks, making them even more striking.  To complete the Southwestern feel, I quilted the rust areas with rock-like forms, and the blue areas with curvy connecting lines to show the vastness of the sky.