2008 – Page 12 – Deidre Adams

Horizons series

Horizon VIII, 25 x 25 inches, ©2007

Horizon IX, 25 x 25 inches, ©2007

Horizon X, 25 x 25 inches, ©2007

The influence of the vast horizon line is something that’s buried deep within my psyche. A couple of times a year, I drive the 450-mile journey between Denver and Albuquerque, where my family lives. A lot of people think I’m crazy, but I just love doing this drive. There are some different routes you can take: You can either just get on I-25 and stick with it all the way, or you can head west at Walsenburg, Colo., and take the scenic route down through the San Luis valley and then through Taos and Santa Fe. Each has its advantages, but in either case the scenery is full of wide-open vistas and amazing skies, and is truly soul-restoring for me.

The Horizons series pieces are some of my favorites to do. I love working in squares, and I love the simplicity of dividing a square into just two major areas. The challenge is to make them restful but interesting.

These 3 Horizons works were included in a SAQA-sponsored show last year called “A Sense of Place: Artists working in Series.” It was an invitational exhibit curated by Peg Keeney, one of SAQA’s very generous and tireless volunteers. The Sense of Place show is documented along with another show, “SAQA: Creative Force 2007,” in a beautifully-printed catalog available directly from SAQA.

One side note – I was thrilled to learn that all three of these pieces sold from the show!

February 8th, 2008|Influences, Inspiration|6 Comments

The self-portrait: Part I

One of the assignments that seems to be a big fave of art school classes is the self-portrait. I get to do this at least once and sometimes twice per semester. Here is the first one I did, in an introductory digital imaging class. Since this was the first project we did, mine is rather simplistic – all I did was take a photo of myself in a mirror and superimpose it with some of my own favorite photos. We had to have logical transitions in the movie, so I just layered one photo with the next for the transition stage. The images were done in Photoshop, and then everything was loaded into iPhoto to export as a movie – about as simple as it gets.

[qt:/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/adams_self-portrait.mov /wp-content/uploads/2008/02/adams_spmovie_tn.jpg 400 320] https://deidreadams.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/adams_self-portrait.mov

February 2nd, 2008|School|5 Comments

Early influence – Nancy Crow

As part of our work for the Distinctive Directions show, each artist agreed to write about why we work in a series. As I was trying to tell my story in that regard, it got me thinking back to my experiences in Nancy Crow’s workshops. These were some of the first art-quilting classes I had ever attended, and it was a sink-or-swim type of environment. Nancy’s dedication to her work is legendary, and she expected a lot from her students. Those who were willing to rise to the challenge got a lot out of it. There were some who found it a little too intense, and rumor has it there were even some tears shed on occasion.

For me, it was an eye-opening experience. Up until that time, I had only just been dabbling a bit with trying to make my own experimental variations on traditional quilt patterns, but still stuck in the rigid ruler-and-rotary-cutter world. Nancy showed us how to cut freehand, stitch odd shapes together, and use a design wall to design improvisationally. She also taught us to take our work seriously and introduced us to the idea of working in a series to fully explore our ideas. In the first class, called Sets & Variables, we had to take a single motif and do several different variations on it. I made a lot of pieced quilt tops from these exercises, but Strata II, above, is the only one that I ever finished. Most of the motif blocks were made in class, but when I got home I wasn’t happy with how they looked just butted together. So I added the black & white striped fabric to make a counterpoint to all the wild colors. I can see some things in it that I would do differently now, but it was a pretty big breakthrough for me at that time.

I also loved the outside edge that was formed by all the differently-sized blocks, and so I was pretty proud of myself when I figured out how to finish the edge with a decorative overlock stitch that I could make with the Pfaff 7550 I was using then.

January 30th, 2008|Influences|6 Comments