In the past several months I have addressed the concept of size in my art quilts.  Although it may not seem that way, the size you decide to work is very significant not for the resulting work, but for the working methods employed in order to get there.

Let’s start by discussing the impact of the overall size.  Large pieces demand attention.  Even from across the room, a large piece has presence and drama.  An artwork that is five feet square will make more of a statement than a grouping of smaller pieces.

There are advantages, however, to working small.  A small piece requires that the viewer move in close and really examine the work.  It becomes more of a personal viewing experience, less dramatic maybe, but there is an opportunity to fit a lot of drama into a little space.

Most of us work somewhere in between very large and very small.  I know for myself, no matter what I tell myself when I get started, I always seem to end up with a piece that is in the 24″ x 30″ range.  Maybe a bit larger or smaller, but really not far from these proportions.  This size must be my comfort zone.  But although many artists would consider this to be small, for me it was just too large.

Why too large?  That is where the technical aspects come into play.  Let’s look at this piece “Dreaming of Brandon”

This piece is in that same size range.  Despite the fact that it is not a huge piece, I did think it had some drama in that the closeup was so tight that there was an immediacy and impact to the piece.  Here is the problem for me:

If you look closely at this detail shot of the arm, you can see where my frustration comes from–the functional stitching that must go on every fabric work layered with batting.  If you work with these materials you know the requirements–any areas that are not secured with functional and/or decorative quilting will eventually look puffed out and may sag.  Therefore, quilt stitching is necessary for an area like this arm which is only about six or seven inches wide.

Although many fabric artists WANT that stitching to add texture to their work, there are areas in my work where I do not want the additional texture or pattern of the necessary stitching.  This was one of them.  This is neither right nor wrong, just the way I ultimately see the finished piece.  So for me, even working 24 x 30 when the piece contained large pieces of fabric became a problem.

So by contrast, here is a piece still on my design wall, almost completed:

Of course, it is hard to compare apples to oranges on a computer screen, without being able to see the actual size of the two pieces.  But this piece is only 12″ square.  That means by the time I secure the edges of each piece of fabric, I do not need to add additional lines of quilt stitching in order to prevent puckering or sagging:

These resulting smaller pieces work for me, because I can use more elaborate stitching where I want it, as opposed to where I need it.  This might not be a problem for others, but it was for me.

Frustrations in your art are an invitation to make changes in the way you work, to evolve and grow.  For now, this change is working for me.  It does restrict my ability to enter shows, as the trends now is for ever larger pieces that fill the gallery space with big impact.  But unfortunately for us as artists, the reality is that we need to do what we do, what we are driven to create, regardless of the trends around us.

For the past several months, I have not shared work in progress–and for good reason.  I have been working on a series of pieces for a show called “sightlines” and am not supposed to show it prior to the opening at the Houston festival this October.  But I have been told I can show pieces of it, and more importantly, I wanted to discuss what I learned from this experience.

Sightlines is an interesting concept, fourteen artists have been chosen to participate in a hard wall show that will flow from one artist’s work into the next.  Each artist will have about ten feet of wall space and each must start and end with two pieces–each 8″ square.  In the main section there can be up to four pieces any size and all pieces have only an inch of space between them.  The “sightline” is a visual cue that begins and ends at the center of the 8″ pieces and meanders through the central section–thus allowing the sightline to flow from the work of one artist directly into the next.  Cool idea.  Not hard to accomplish with something abstract, but since I don’t DO abstract, I took a different route.

I decided to examine couples in various stages of their relationships.   The couples, which vary in size, are placed on yellow rectangles which form the sightline, and everything is placed on a background of deep purples and blues.  A “poem” (I don’t know what to call it, it isn’t REALLY a poem) meanders through the central pieces.

Here you can see one of the pieces.  OK, so now you have the lay of the land.  What I really wanted to discuss in this blog post is working outside of one’s comfort zone.  Often, we don’t push ourselves to do something that isn’t safe and comfortable, so a challenge like this one is good for growth.  For me the three areas that were challenging were:

1.  to work large.  Originally, I thought I would do the center section in one large piece, but quickly decided that three semi-large pieces would be more managable.  These are not SO large, but for me they fell out of my safe zone.  Hard to quilt, hard to square off, hard to handle.  Don’t let anyone kid you, size matters!

2.  to work in a very specific size.  I didn’t realise what a challenge this would be until I got there.  When I work, I finish all the quilting and then trim where I think it should be cropped.  Something a bit off, no problem, square it off by shaving somewhere.  Not so with a very specific size.  All the pieces and their 1″ spaces had to be a very specific size.  For me, that was a huge challenge–they all had to be the same height and had to be a very particular width.  Without going into too many details, this eventually ended with me on the floor with painters tape, tape measure, tailors chalk and a certain amount of cursing.

3.  to keep the backgrounds abstract.  This is a direction I decided to explore with the pieces “Joy and Wisdom” and “Little Lotus” both of which were completed over the summer.  For each of these, I decided to focus attention on the face, leaving the background (which are usually recognizable environments) more like color washes.  This is the direction I wanted to take my work, so it seemed only natural that my sightlines pieces would be constructed this way.

I did not find this part to be as challenging as I had expected, and enjoyed the process of adding strips of color here and there, looking for a balance of light and dark, with hints of brighter colors to pull the eye around the surface of the work.  This is something I have decided to continue to experiment with, and to incorporate into upcoming work.  I have decided, however, to work even smaller than I have been.  I would like to work on making the faces larger but the overall pieces smaller.  More face, less background.  That is where I go from here.

Think about challenging yourself.  Perhaps it is a color you don’t usually work with (I am not a purple person, but have found that I love the way deep purple looks with the oranges and yellow that dominate my palette, so purple is becoming more prominent in my work).  It could be a size–smaller or larger, or attempting a new theme–landscapes, abstracts, architecture, whatever–start with something and push yourself through to the end.  It is a great learning (and growing) exercise.

If you don’t work outside your comfort zone, you will never evolve as an artist.