August 22, 2010

Monte's Art Quilt

My last color design class challenge was with analogous colors. I've been doing t-shirts and thread painting with a picture taken of a serpentinite rock slab Monte has. I print the picture from my computer, through the ink-jet printer, onto iron-on transfer paper. I decided to have it be my base "material" for the art quilt, along with a photo of a rock formation reflection Monte took in Norway. Then I printed some other photos reflecting tools and scenes from his geology world.




Serpentinite is like the origin of life substance (Monte of course would say this differently). It's related to the oil world. Origin relates to DNA. When Googling DNA, I saw lots of spiraling images, so was thinking spiral or diagonal when laying out the images. When taking geologist/scientists on a field trip through California, Monte took a picture of an oil bubble, capturing his and Stan's reflection in the bubble. I put the bubble image somewhat in the center.

So the dominant analogous color is green shades with some blue as accents. Then I printed a saying he's had in his office for years -

 
"Little boys who pick up rocks 
either go to prison or become geologists.

"Geologists are Boy Scouts who hated to give up camping
when they went to college, so they majored in geology.

"A geologist listens to more silly questions
than any other human, and he must
weigh each answer with the greatest of skill.

"Have pity on him. He's just as lonesome as he looks,
He'd love to tell you everything he knows, 
but he doesn't know how."

I was going to dye some material to add to the composition, but decided the photo image materials were enough. After stitching it all together I couched a variegated green yarn around each picture - this is the "quilting" thru the layers. There is a bamboo batting and a camo material backing. I crocheted a long "string" and attached it all around as the edging. I was going to crochet a lot of rectangles with the yarn to fill in the edges making it a total rectangle, but Monte likes it best with it's funky perimeter.

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