I thought I’d finally get a chance to do some felting this week, so gave the 4th quarter challenge on Suprematist Art some thought. I know it’s basically just positioning pieces of various shapes and/or sizes, but I thought the description from the Art Story site about how the simple shapes “also encouraged many Suprematists to emphasize the surface texture of the paint on canvas, this texture being another essential quality of the medium of painting”. I know it’s hard to see that texture through old photos of old paintings on a flat screen, but it sounded like an interesting angle to explore. I’d originally planned to do my base/backgrounds with wool tops, but remembered some thick white prefelt, so used that for my base. I started out with a quite simple layout of shapes cut from commercial prefelt and handmade fibre paper:

I used a few more pieces on the next one. I had to concentrate to not have ‘neat’ or regular angles!

Another thing which intrigued me about one of the key ideas of Suprematim was the ‘Zero degree’ of painting which Art Story described as ‘the point beyond which the medium could not go without ceasing to be art.’ I might be wrong, but I thought Kazimir Malevich’s White on White was a good example of the way I understood that. So, I had a go at my interpretation, though not quite so minimalist! I built up a piece using mostly the same white prefelt as the base, and some white fibre paper. It’s a long time since I made it, but I think it is bamboo. And I think the cream square in the bottom left is tussah silk paper:

The last piece is a complilation of white and grey prefelt shapes, and white and ‘black’ bamboo paper shapes:

As I was putting the last piece back onto a piece of cardboard to take downstairs, I noticed the light had changed and was picking up the textures of the prefelt/paper layers, so I took a few photos of theose. Suprematist 1:

Suprematist 2:

I love this one, I think it’s the most interesting of all of them, Suprematist 3:

And lastly, Suprematist 4

I completely underestimated how long actually constructing the pieces would take, so never did get a chance to felt them, so I’ll show the results next time.