I am the Executive Director of Studio Art Quilt Associates (SAQA), which is celebrating its 20th Anniversary this year with special events and exhibitions. Visit http://www.SAQA.com for more information.
News
BOOK NEWS
SAQA 2009 Benefit Auction
This year's Benefit Auction will start Thursday, September 10th at 2:00 Eastern. SAQA has already received 214 donated artworks and more are on the way. All the artwork is 12" x 12". You can see them on the SAQA website: http://www.saqa.com/newsebulletins/Squares09_1.aspx
Here are a few that caught my eye:
Susan Shie "Garden Hug #3"
Deidre Adams "Horizon 12"
Eva Henneberry "Full Moon Bird"
Diane Wright "Fault Lines"
BOOK NEWS
Lark Books has asked me to write Volume 2 of "Masters: Art Quilts". It is scheduled to be published in the Spring of 2011. I will keep you posted as the book progresses. Volume 1 is still available through the SAQA Bookstore.
REVIEWS
Inspired to Quilt: Creative Experiments in Art Quilt Imagery by Melanie Testa (Interweave Press, 2009, ISBN 978-1-59668-096-8, $24.95, 136 pages)
Need to get your creative juices flowing? Spend some time in Melanie's world - journaling, experimenting, and playing with your ideas and materials. Includes a good overview with step-by-step directions of dyeing, printing, soy wax resist, and painting on fabric. The strength of this book is Melanie's explanation of how to use your journal of ideas to put all the techniques together to create a work of art. She explains and demonstrates how she uses her signature technique of layers of sheers to create layers of design, and how a single image pulled from her Journal can be used in a multitude of different designs. I found this section fascinating as I've always thought of using images as "one and done." Melanie mines each image for a variety of uses. Instructions on how to use quilting and embellishment to highlight elements of your design, several small projects, and a gallery fill the last section of this book. Inspiring!
Clare Plug: Look South (Hawkes Bay Museum & Art Gallery, Napier, New Zealand, 2009, ISBN 978-0-473-14879-9, $20)
"Look South" is an exhibition of Clare Plug's work at the Hawkes Bay Museum & Art Gallery in Napier, New Zealand. The works in the exhibition are the result of three years of new work following a artist residency in Antarctica. Three essays explore different aspects of the exhibition. Lucy Hammonds (Curator of Design Collections at Hawkes Bay Museum & Art Gallery) describes Clare's artistic pathway and how the Antarctic residency affected her work. Douglas Lloyd Jenkins (Director of Hawkes Bay Museum & Art Gallery) describes the history of the Robert Scott expedition to the South Pole and the importance of flags and textiles to the expedition and how that affected Clare in her response to the Antarctic environment. Ursula Ryan (Information Advisor, Antarctica New Zealand) looks at the Heroic Era and its periods of exploration and how the artifacts from that time affected Clare's work. A fascinating body of work and a fascinating catalog.
Photo-Inspired Art Quilts: From Composition to Finished Piece by Leni Levenson Wiener, Krause Publications, 2009, ISBN 978-0-89689-804-2, $29.99 includes DVD hosted by Nancy Zieman, 128 pages, list of resources, index.
Not only will this book inspire art quilts, it will inspire you. Leni shows clearly how to evaluate your own photos to find interesting ideas for art quilts, to use cropping to eliminate extra visual information, and how to combine several photos to create a stronger composition. Digital cameras allow us to capture so many wonderful images. But they're not all great art quilt candidates. Being able to follow Leni's thought process as she evaluates different photos and combines them to create a composition is extremely helpful. Good instruction in art quilt construction and thread painting shows the reader how to translate the photo collage into fabrics. Especially valuable is the section on creating faces.
