“Graffiti” – Another Early Art Quilt with Buttons”

"Graffiti" - a hand appliqued and quilted contemporary art quilt embellished with buttonsNancy Smeltzer, MFA

While I hate graffiti when it’s pasted all over walls and public places, when you make it yourself on an art quilt. well… maybe it’s not so bad. I had just come back from New York City when I started this piece back in 1989, and had been struck by the textures on many of the telephone poles. Back then, most of them were wooden, and posters had been staple gunned. pulled off, and new ones attached, over and over, so that the poles had thousands of staples and shreds of paper stuck on them. Their surfaces reminded me of Nkisi or African power statues, where nails or other metal objects were pounded into them as part of various rituals. Many of the construction site barricades also had posters applied, torn off, and new ones added, so I had lots of images of overlapping shapes floating around in my mind when I came back home.

Detail of contemporary art quilt, embellished with buttons - "Graffiti"To duplicate those advertising posters, I set about cutting out lots of rectangles out of fabric. Slightly off-center of the right in this second photo is a dark grey vertical rectangle that has some Asian looking writing on it. To the right of that piece, there a piece of white fabric with black Asian writing on it. Asian looking fabrics were very popular in the late 80s, and I apologize to any group that feels slandered, as I have no idea if the symbols even say anything or if I have them facing in the correct direction. I like that idea that because of their repetitive patterns and arrangement on the fabric, they look as if they had meaning to the creator, even if they were just interesting symbols for me. In a way, that’s perhaps what graffiti is when it’s approached as art, as it definitely seems to have meaning to the creator.

Detail of contemporary art quilt, embellished with buttons - "Graffiti"Here is a section of the quilt top that shows some larger pieces of the black print on a white background. The rectangle in the lower left reminds me of some Asian newspapers that I’ve seen. You can see one of the problems of using a print fabric in that rectangle, for while the fabric was cut straight, the lines of design weren’t printed on the fabric in straight lines. As often happens with inexpensive fabrics, the fabric wasn’t pulled taut when it was printed. That causes the motifs to not line up with the vertical warp threads, so if you make a small cut and then tear the fabric, the designs will be crooked.That fault doesn’t show as much on the smaller, horizontal black rectangle in the upper left. However, try as I might, the one in the lower left couldn’t be straightened. I finally gave up and decided that graffiti and advertising posters are rarely stapled gunned into place accurately. As I made more and more art quilts where straight lines were important, such as using ribbons  as  a decorative element, I leaned to use more and more overlapping elements, such as large buttons or other embellishments to distract the eye from a line that wasn’t straight.

This piece used several styles and colors of buttons to enhance the shapes of fabric, but no where near what I now use. I was also still using lots of hand quilting to fill in the background, as here you can see where I used black quilting thread on the white base fabric. I was playing off of the old childhood riddle “What’s black and white and “red” all over?” Answer = a newspaper, but I couldn’t restrict myself to just black, white and red. Some yellow, orange, and purple snuck into the composition somehow when I wasn’t looking!

Now there are whole web sites devoted to graffiti or “urban” art. The genre has evolved to so much more than just spray painting subway cars and bridges and has collectors who are constantly looking for new artists. My piece is so tame in its look and feel compared to what I make today. However, in the late 80s, I thought I was being pretty adventuresome in even having a piece of art work with a name like that.

 Have you ever thought your art work to be really out there, only to find that it’s rather ordinary when you start researching what others are doing? For myself, because I find that most of what I make is created in a vacuum, with little feedback from others, I find blogging so important to me. You have no idea how important comments are to me and to others who are putting themselves out there for public scrutiny, so please write something!

Why not leave a comment as to your thoughts on this posting. Please take a minute, fill out the form below or by clicking on the “comments/no comments link” at the top of the posting, and then share your ideas with the rest of us. We all grow when we share our thoughts and impressions, so why not join our growing community of those who appreciate art quilts and textile arts. We’d love to hear from you!… and PLEASE tell like minded souls about this blog! The more readers and contributors, the more I write because encouragement helps the words flow!

You can see more of my art work on my web site at www.fiberfantasies.com (be patient as it loads; it’s worth it), my healing work at www.transitionportals.com and can find me on Google + , Facebook (for Transition Portals) Facebook (for Fiber Fantasies),  and Twitter.

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