Monday, January 10, 2011

A great day for surfing

barewinter

A rare snow bound day in Georgia…plus the incentive that freezing rain will probably bring down power and cable lines tonight – oh horrors! – gets me moving to surf and to blog!

I rarely have the opportunity to go to quilt shows, and even less often to solo exhibits which are usually in out of the way places, and never anywhere near here – alas.   And so being able to view their work on the internet is very important to me and a real treat!  I do buy their monographs too, if they produce them.  But publishers, I think, don’t care for monographs of fiber art.  Except perhaps Telos and they are SO expensive.

Some of my favorites have an excellent range of current and earlier work on their websites, people like: Michael James and Jan Myers-Newbury, Sondra Dorn and Barbara Lee Smith have websites well worth visiting. 

But others are not so up to date and that’s very frustrating; you’re left wondering what happened in the last 2 or three years?  Did they leave the planet? This is the case with Rachel Brumer, another superb fiber artist, or Joan Schulze  or Elizabeth Busch, Dorothy Caldwell, or Pauline Burbidge.  I really love their work and want to feast my eyes!!

Others are rather stingy in the number of images they upload: Nancy Crow, for example, has images of  only five pieces while telling us that she has made 300!   and Warning! before clicking on the link put dark glasses on!  Her first page is designed ( I swear!) to keep away the timid and easily intimidated!  Some really great artists are only represented on other sites with a single image: Elizabeth Brimelow, for example.

Of course my quilts are nowhere near in the category of the above folk, but still I feel it’s important to let folk see what I’m doing.  The quilts are a communication between me and the viewers, without the viewers there’s no communication.  It’s that poor tree falling all by itself  - silently -  in the forest!

I’d love to hear from you as to which are your favorite websites showing wonderful art quilts – the cream!  The Prime of the Art Quilter!

If you have been, thanks for reading..and now for a nice cup of tea and I think it’s a good day to make mince pies to go with a lovely pot of Lapsang Suchong!
Elizabeth

4 comments:

arts4all said...

Susan Carlson http://susancarlson.com/Welcome.html sure wins my vote! Her color sense seems flawless to me, and there is such exuberance in her art.

Laura said...

I like to check out websites, but I really love blogs because most people update them quite frequently and it's fun to check out all the pictures, especially when people put their process pictures up, not just the finished products. BTW, I'm trying to determine if I can afford your shibori workshop at Arrowmont this fall, I'd love to attend if I can!

June said...

I think the craziness of all the varieties of media means that we miss about 3/4 of what, if there were only websites, or only blogs, or only Facebook, or only Linked In, or only books, we would be able to find readily. It's necessary for artists to make choices, but that means that necessarily some things get left behind. It's maddening, but oh so true.

I myself have abandoned two excellent art websites that I once contributed to because I just couldn't keep up. Burn-out and life both intervene.

cyn said...

while you're out looking at stuff, check out Scott Schuman's site... there's a 7-min video where he talks about how he does his street photography called "visual life." I really like when he talks about how, even with very broad education and experience, most artists come back and work within a very narrow palette/set of tools.

http://thesartorialist.blogspot.com/