This week I’ve painted some fabrics in simple patterns and worked at arranging them and rearranging them on a quilt-in-progress.
But I am feeling a lot going on in this project.
In addition to the patterned fabrics, I am incorporating into the surface images recreated from family scrapbooks. This will be a storytelling work, and the story is about my Mom and our family history.
Do you begin to feel bubbling underground heat, here, the feeling of powerful events buried, unseen, underneath layers of many years, but making their effect known?
That’s how family stories can be.
Just to add to the complexity, the palette for this work will be the palette of Americana – red, white and blue, with the suggestion of flag images in the composition.
So, I am treading carefully, I’m doing a lot of putting the work-in-progress up on my easel and just looking at it, allowing myself to react to how it feels.
Here are a few bits:
Living inside my head, alongside my explorations of my own family history, is the daily reality of America as it is now. My parents, I understand, were believers in the 1950’s white family American Dream. Dad came back from the war. They married. They dreamed of a family and a house and a white picket fence, and an ordered reality that reflected the patterns they had inhabited all their lives. I was born into those patterns and they are part of me.
America now is much more complicated. Daily, I think about where we are and where we might be going. It is unsettled. I feel unsettled.
This work will not solve unresolved issues in my family history and it will not cure the hurts and misdirections of our current events. But, it touches on the things I am thinking about, and – in as artful way as I am able – it will provide me a way to explore the story.
More to come .
. . . . . .
For all the artmakers: Happy creating
For all the art lovers: Happy appreciating
Thank you for reading. I always enjoy questions and comments.
--Bobbi
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