Ragged Cloth Cafe, serving Art and Textiles

Do you have personal icons? Images that you repeat in your work? I know of one quilt artist who includes a bird in every piece she does. Sometimes the bird is the subject, sometimes it is almost hidden amongst the main elements of the piece. Do you repeat the same subject over and over? I was fascinated with June’s painting class exercise of painting the same subject 11 (I think) times. I find myself returning to the same things, but also sometimes thinking, “Oh, I’ve done that–need to move on.” If you have a personal icon, is it something that has great personal appeal as a thing, or an image, or is it something you have adopted simply for the purpose of exploration, improvisation on a theme, a thread through the work?

I rather like the idea of taking a somewhat mundane object and using it over and over, which, to my mind, might help get one past the idea of art being about the subject and into the idea of art being about the art.

Jim Dine, known in the ’60s as a Pop artist repeated several subjects many, many times.

Some of Jim Dine’s Hearts:

Continue reading ‘Personal icons – Terry Grant’

If you are an art quilter and find yourself stuck in the art/craft-which-is-it? vortex, can you even imagine the assumptions people have about doll makers? I have made a few dolls, but don’t think of myself as a dollmaker. Still, I have a fascination with them, being sometimes magical little effigies, sometimes alter egos, sometimes haunting and spooky and more often sweet and cloying. Think of all the “baggage” the whole concept of dolls carries, made even more cumbersome by feminist notions of whether little girls need to play with dolls, especially esteem damaging numbers like Barbie and her cohorts. So, with all this in mind I was hesitant to feature a doll artist here. I can hear June snorting frantically as I write this!

I became aware of Charla Khanna’s dolls a number of years ago. She does not have a web site, so I began saving images, in a folder, when I found them for the simple pleasure of being able to go back, from time to time to enjoy looking at them. I find them quite unsentimental, beautifully imagined and equally beautifully conceived. Like good art should, they seem to me filled with meaning and intention and crafted with joy. I was delighted to see a profile of her in the newest issue of Fiberarts magazine.

Here are a few of the images I have filched over several years:

Continue reading ‘Charla Khanna’s dolls – Terry Grant’

Awhile back I went looking for other people’s thoughts about curves in art. At some point it occurred to me that the way curves are rendered , makes the difference between whether a work of art looks fluid and natural as opposed to stiff and labored. But what is it that makes one curve ‘good’ and another ‘bad’? I never did find any scientific or even philosophical answer that really satisfied me, so I am stuck with just knowing it when I see it, but in the course of my search I came across Hogarth’s Line of Beauty.

The artist William Hogarth wrote a book called The Analysis of Beauty. You can actually read the entire text online here. (Disclaimer: I have not read it) Hogarth proposed that the essence of beauty of line in painting, drawing, nature and design is not the simple geometry of a straight line or circle, or more subtle shapes such as the ellipse, but of curves that modulate from one gradient to another. Such a curve, the “S” curve is such a structure and he called it “the line of beauty”. According to his theory, S-Shaped curved lines signify liveliness and activity and excite the attention of the viewer as contrasted with straight lines, parallel lines, or right-angled intersecting lines which signify stasis, death, or inanimate objects. He goes on to say that the S curve is the basis of all great art. Continue reading ‘Hogarth’s Line of Beauty – Terry Grant’

A discussion of words/text on art on the QuiltArt list suddenly sparked the memory of Corita Kent nee Sister Corita, the wonderful pop artist of the ’60s. Sister Corita was a nun, a member of the Immaculate Heart Community of Los Angeles and an art professor at Immaculate Heart University. Corita’s silkscreen posters, fusing text and image, provided a visual narrative for the re-energized spirituality of the era of Pope John the 23rd, particularly as it strove to engage people in their everyday lives. It also embraced social activism, independent of the strictures of the institutionalized (and, of course, male-dominated) Church. It was literate, joyful and inventive.

Continue reading ‘Corita Kent, by Terry Grant’