Art Quilts the Midwest (Bur Oak Book) by Linzee Kull McCray

Author:Linzee Kull McCray [McCray, Linzee Kull]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-03-11T16:40:00+00:00

Bang, You're Dead, 2013

Cotton, machine-quilted by Ann Christopher

6o by75 inches

Photograph by gregory case photography

Bernadette in Artichokes, 2012

Hemp and cotton blend, acrylic paint, hand-quilted

29 by 58 inches

Bernadette in Artichokes, detail

KAT[ OQMAN

Westerville, Ohio

Photos sent to Kate Gorman of family members who'd emigrated from Scotland to Michigan provided the perfect base for her artistic explorations. "For five or six years I've been intrigued with movement, migration, and the not-knowing of the future," she says. She added elements from the landscape of her much- loved Upper Peninsula of Michigan: birch trees, gulls, and a tempestuous lake. In one original photo, Gorman's great-aunt Bernadette had an enormous bow in her hair. "It lent itself to bird wings and I started from there. I like the idea of magical realism."

Originally, Gorman was an illustrator for text and trade books. She started quilting when her children were young. "I made about three traditional quilts but my corners didn't meet-I'm not someone who likes to draw buildings or cars or straight lines-and I thought `I'm never going to make it in this world,"' she says. Her home state of Ohio, however, was at the heart of early art quilting and proved the perfect place to explore the medium: Gorman took fiber classes in the early 199os but continued working in a number of media, including collage and drawing on clayboard.

She's since discovered that combining drawing with fabric gives her effects she couldn't otherwise achieve. "These pieces were drawn with a paint bottle held over the fabric, and I like the way the paint smooshes out in places, adding unpredictability to the lines," she says. "When I started drawing on fabric, I wanted my drawing and hand-stitching to relate to one another. On Uncle Bud, I wanted the stitches to be reminiscent of the other marks I made and vice versa. On Bernadette, the coarseness of the fabric and the unfinished edges are essential to the piece-it wouldn't have looked the same on paper or clayboard."

While Gorman's past influences her subject matter, her present has contributed to changes in technique. She is one of three studio artists helping clients with developmental disabilities create artwork that generates income at Columbus's Goodwill Art Studio and Gallery. "There are several Goodwill artists who do line drawings all the time," she says. "The looseness of their approach was very inspiring. Taking risks and experimenting has opened up for me since I've worked at Goodwill. My work still looks pretty organized and controlled, but I'm not going at it with the same mentality. I'm freer now."

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.