Virginia A. Spiegel

Stick and Sand, 28×12″

This is my entry for the Surface Design Association member show, Merge and Flow, to be held in conjunction with the SDA Conference.  I have been working on it for some time as you know if you have been following me on my FB Fan Page.

I spent a lot of time building layers of fabric, paper, thread, and paint.  I knew all along that  with a theme of Merge and Flow, the artwork had to be something about the Boundary Waters.  But I decided to let the artwork evolve as it desired.

The center of the blue couched spiral is a piece of tissue paper that I printed with one of my hand-cut stamps.As soon as I focused on that I knew where I wanted to go.  I printed a photo on silk organza of me crouched on a rock in the Boundary Waters, oblivious to everything, creating a design in the sand all around me with a stick.  The design is almost identical to the stamp design that I carved — another one of those too weird to be coincidental moments.

Stick and Sand – detail

I am focusing on ambiguity of late and I like how my head disappears in to the artwork.  It may be unclear to most viewers what exactly this artwork is showing.  I say, Success!

I have been burning some new screens on my Thermo-fax to take along to Texas:

Since I’m not quite sure where I am going with my painting, I decided to go for some texture screens. The dark black ones (and the photo that opened this post) are photos from Alaska that I photoshopped. Included are harbor scenes, nets, buoys, ropes, and various “junk” piled in a Coast Guard yard.  

In the bottom right hand corner and center are a page of text and the same text transposed into dingbats, large and small, that I did in Word.  And last are geometric shapes I drew with a carbon marker.

Remember my Surface Design Associate exhibit entry?  I thought it needed a “real” binding, so I made a trial run of a blue/green 1/4″ binding. I didn’t want to spend the time and fabric to make a double-fold binding, so I just cut and folded strips and pinned them up around the piece on the design wall: 

Even taking into account the glare from a flash, it’s just not to my liking. Although it picked up the blue in the piece and was a nice contrast, I really didn’t like the abrupt halt to the flow of the piece.  I decided to do a zigzag with rayon thread and then painted the exposed batting and edges with copper paint:

It’s subtle and sensitive to the piece while still making a nice sturdy edge.  I also added a bit more hand-stitching to bring those big hand-stitches all the way to the edges: