Fasten your seatbelts: Art group Thursday night. The leader of our meeting, having abstained from work on the theme, Silhouette, instead provides a seasonal picture – a pastel drawing of a rainspotted maple leaf drafted in gentle fall colors. We all ooh and ahh.
Next: a photo of the oddest and most intriguing kapok-like clouds and silhouetted trees. Somehow the bumps in the sky associate with the rain drops in the previous work. Where is Bette Davis? Can it be going to be a bumpy night?
A handsome pair of linoleum prints are trotted out: a composition of fall leaves done in black and white and in color. We like these, too, and are interested in the process.
Another member of the group produces a seasonal, i.e. Hallowe’en, card made with an iris folding technique and a silhouette theme. Accompanying these, my own little nitwit puzzle, from a tract left by someone at the Y, a dictionary page, and the mental looping of lyrics from A Fine Romance, the fine song by Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields which I like sung by Rosemary Clooney.
One person provides the piece de resistance, a postage stamp quilt. A showpiece. It is derived from a photograph taken by someone she knows, a factory maintenance worker. The sunset sky is composed of batik fabric: purple and orange and red and yellow, with an overstitched black tree silhouette. Although the finished product has an authentic Asian look and feel, it is not a tree in a Chinese or Japanese painting, it is a tree crown at the botanical gardens in Allentown.
The one-inch squares make it measure about 23″ x 17″ plus double-mat and frame. She has sold it, too. We marvel at her gift for turning an idea or a picture into a fabric design and executing it, all in the past six weeks. She receives our highest honors. Here is an artist showing and sharing the power of making wise choices and in making something lovely, beautiful and desirable. It’s like a trip to bountiful that we all want a view to admire.
