Hello all!
This time I am taking you through my preparations for my local art group Spring exhibition coming next week (wish me luck).
All the entries in our exhibitions have to be original art that had not been shown before in our group’s other exhibitions, so I was looking through the many works that I had not shown and I had almost decided on a few older works. And then I found 4 small round canvases that just called to me to be used and changed my mind!
Of course, I just needed to make something new and untested, that I was not even sure was going to work at all, because, as you all know, I am the queen of planning ahead and keeping to schedules, making samples, never doing more work that I can help and all of that.
I saw those round canvases and thought about tondo works in art, and that got me thinking about traditional artworks and oil paintings. It made me think about being in my home country, Italy, and getting to be surrounded by old artworks for most of my life (my parents like art and we used to be regulars at museums as well). It got me thinking about art that one remembers and that becomes meaningful to you because it is linked to your upbringing and to your memories, and the art itself becomes tangled into homesickness and a lot of complicated feelings.
Tondi are not very common in art in general, and I find that they get your attention in a particular way because of that. There must be a reason why the artist has chosen that particular circular shape for their work, if only to show off that they could.
There are a few oil paintings of still lifes that are in my parents’ house to this day and that I remember from childhood. One of them also has a frame that makes it be a tondo, so that it came to my mind thinking about round artworks: I decided that I wanted to make some felt pieces that would be in a dialogue through time and across art forms with those still lifes, a way to talk about perception, memories and emotional impact of art in our lives.
So, I asked my family to send me pictures of those artworks as reference, and here they are:
The four paintings are very different and from different authors in different times, so I had to treat each one differently, though I wanted the underlying theme to be one and the same. My aim, as I said, was not to make a realistic copy of the original oil paintings, but to reinterpret them through emotion and memory. The different medium and the different shape of the canvas were both a clear way to keep an unambiguous distance from the originals, and the circular shape is also to be a recurring element unifying my still lifes.
I started from preparing a surface, a background to felt on. I wanted my background to help me set the tone of each single tondo, so I looked very attentively at the photos to try and find a background theme colour for each one, and I prepared 4 circular backgrounds in the size that I needed by using a bubblewrap circle as guide of size while laying out my wool for wet felting. I like my artworks to be noticeably smaller than the canvas or board that I fix them onto, so I went for a bubblewrap circle that was the same size than the canvas, knowing that the wool will shrink and the final result be smaller than that.
For the actual works I needed to mix my own colours, as the shop bought ones were not adequately close to the paintings. I do not have a machine for that, I have to card my colours by hand in small quantities, but luckily I did not need big amounts of special colours.
I not only prepared carded wool for, mainly, the parts that I wanted flat, such as background areas, but I also wet felted small pieces of prefelt in different mixed colours for the parts that I wanted to pop out of the surface, such as the flowers themselves, as flowers are what I look at, get emotionally attached and remember more of a still life painting.
It took ages to get enough of the wool mixed and ready both for the carded wool and for the prefelts, but I was very glad to have it done before actual working on the pieces, as it let me work in the way that I like best and find more natural: by adding colours and shapes in “big strokes” regardless of the small details and just following my emotions. I like to be in the flow, and not having to stop in the middle of it to mix up my colours (which I sometimes have to do) for a couple of hours, or, worse, realise that I needed prefelts that I have not prepared in advance.
Once everything was ready, I worked on the first two of the paintings and managed them together in one go, that is what it means to have a background and your wool and prefelts already prepped and waiting for you. I completed the layout and the rubbing on each of them, rubbing in the prefelt bits particularly, before putting them together and rolling them together at the same time, cutting on the total rolling time.
The first one is this:
And here is the second one:
On a second round in a different day I managed to complete the other two pieces:
I really am not enthusiastic about the third piece: I feel that it is just a jumble. That probably comes from the fact that I always thought that the original oil painting was a bit aimless, without any actual dramatic focus to draw my eye, but it might just be me. It could be that I could give it purpose with a bit of stitching to make some flowers pop up more, but I did not feel like doing it right now, so I decided to put that piece aside for now and only exhibit the other three on this occasion.
They are not much rolled, I stopped very soon, so they are not very strong felt, barely prefelt actually, but I like how they are and their feeling of immediacy. I like the fact that they have a tension between flat background bits and more 3D elements, and that the dynamic between flat and textural bits is very different from that of the originals (I mean the pieces that seem to stick out, be 3D or pop out in the paintings): what is meaningful and sticks out for me and got stuck in my memory of the paintings is not necessarily the actual focus of the original painting, and that is fine, because that is what it means when you look at art in real life. Each one of us gets from it different bits, and what is emotion and feeling for one person may be not that important for another.
At our exhibition this time each artist is supposed to choose their art to fit a wall space of 1.30 m of width by 1 m of height (4.2 feet by 3.2 feet) leaving at least 10 cm (4″) between works. My three tondi are actually pretty small and I felt that I could add to them two bigger old works that are also about memory and fit nicely in the space underneath them.
There is the chance to add unframed works in a communal browser, they must be wrapped and clearly labelled. One can also bring up to 20 cards for sale, also wrapped and labelled.
I do not have handmade cards to sell at the moment, but I decided to give a go at preparing a few smaller works to go in the browser, as it is always nice to try out things on a small version, make a study or a sample of it, before going bigger. It is also nice to be able to offer things in different styles and colours and sizes if possible.
So, I felted three small works that are actually studies of composition and colour combinations. They also were felted in a very particular day, when I had had very bad personal news, and I felt a bit reckless and a bit weird to be honest, and I needed to be working on some art with no particular planning other than “let’s make some different landscapes”. I got to use some of the fibers that Helene gifted me, so thank you, Helene, it was fun to use them!
I managed to get them all done together in a similar way to the tondi, by prefelting each one on the same day and then rolling them all together.
After drying them, I added small stitched details to help the landscapes being visualised, as I used such non-conventional colours for them.
So, I really hope to have made you curious about our Spring Exhibition during the last week of May, and I honestly can not wait to have a look at all my fellow artists’ artworks: I always have to be very careful and not bring my credit cards, as some of our local artists’ works are stunning and my flat does not have empty walls or empty flat surfaces any more.
If you happen to be in West London during that week, come and have a look with your own eyes!
Kiki
@kiki.textile.art
http://www.kikistextileart.com