Monday, December 20, 2010

Finally, a passable arrangement


So, I dyed all this fabric and screen printed it and discharged it with silkscreens of ancient texts (Irish, runes, and cuneiform) with a vague idea of doing a second shrine-inspired composition. (Shrine Composition #1 is on the shelf under the coffee table at the moment, being hand quilted; I'll pin it up and take a shapshot once the Great Purple Monstrosity is off the board.)

The idea for the Great Purple Monstrosity, aka Shrine Composition 2, is to go back to the origins of the word. "Shrine" comes from Latin "scrinium," meaning a thingie to hold books. I want the incomplete and overlapping layers of text to reference ancient writings; then I'm going to make a scroll to put in each of the "niche" areas. The niche idea is taking off from the niche full of fabric-wrapped books I saw at the Jama Masjid in Delhi a few years ago. I don't know why the "niches" here are half-window blocks. I tried some full-window blocks and didn't like the way they looked. I kind of like it this way, with some openness and some confusion about perspective.

Anyway, I've been pinning this thing up and fiddling with it and discarding "window" fabrics for quite a while, and today I finally don't feel compelled to move anything. I'll give it a couple of days and then start sewing - umm, well, with packages to wrap and stockings to stuff and Christmas dinner and both my girls in Austin for Christmas, it will probably stay on the design board more than a couple of days. We'll see. In the interim, if anybody has any suggestions for improving the composition, I'm all ears. (Try to ignore the fact that the strips aren't pinned exactly straight. I got awfully tired of positioning strips during the last week of the design phase.)

Now that I'm looking at the snapshot, I'm beginning to feel that the big windows should be below the smaller windows. Dither, dither, dither.

2 comments:

  1. I'm liking how this is starting out for sure...how did you screen print on your lettering? Adds interest to the pice!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks, Robbie! The lettering was all on Thermofax screens that I made a couple of years ago using images of different scripts - some I screened with discharge paste, others with a mix of gold bronzing powder and textile medium.

    ReplyDelete

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