Charlotte Ziebarth

Quilt National 2013 opens

charlotte — Thu, 23 May 2013 09:00:30 +0000

Tomorrow night Quilt National 2013 opens at the Dairy Barn Art Center in Athens, Ohio. This exhibit is probably the most prestigious quilt art exhibit in the country, maybe the world. 95% of applicants are rejected. I have entered it at least 9 times over 18 years I think.

—-And this year I got a quilt accepted into it!! How joyous!! I can’t wait to see it hanging among quilts from artists I have long admired.

Reverberations

It’s full name is Reverberations: Yellowstone Waters. It measures 62 inches wide by 42 inches high and is one of the largest quilts I have made. It is part of my continuing Water Study Series in which I aim to capture the human fascination with looking at water and water reflections, as well as represent the natural drawings present in stop action photos of water. In addition the items found floating on water surfaces are incorporated into my patterns.

The quilt uses slightly altered photographs taken of hot pools in Yellowstone National Park in the late summer of 2011. I have been to Yellowstone many times. (In fact we spent our honeymoon there a long time ago.) And each time I have a better camera with a more powerful zoom capability. Looking at the LCD screen I spend many enjoyable moments composing pictures in this astounding environment.

Multiple panels of one image were cropped and printed on charmeuse silk and then arranged in a number of different block patterns until I found one that captured some of my feelings about the beautiful waters. It is a hot pool but it looks swimming pool cool. It has interesting reflections. It has unidentifiable ‘things’ floating in it. It has bubbbles endlessly appearing. The circles formed from the hot bubbling waters rising to the surface form outward and outward till they bump into others. It has a range of values of my favorite color. Water is important to those of us living in drought in the semi-arid southwest.

Detail 1

I consider my work to be making use of “found art”. I take many, many photos of things that are interesting to me (not necessarily to others) and later when looking at what I have photographed I find all the elements of art to play with: line, shape, color, value, texture.

Form Not Function: Quilt Art at the Carnegie

charlotte — Mon, 20 May 2013 22:25:28 +0000

This exhibit opened last week in New Albany, Indiana. Celebrating their 10th anniversary they have published a very beautiful catalog of this year’s exhibit which also includes the Best of Show winners from all 10 years. Having been in this exhibit for 5 of those 10 years I was pleased to receive the catalog. The jurors mentioned Marsh Morning Mists (discussed here in the April 2 blog entry) as one of several dealing with light and shadow intrigue.

The catalog can be purchased from their website. http://www.carnegiecenter.org/exhibit_form.html

New Quilt Book — “Cutting Edge Art Quilts”

charlotte — Wed, 08 May 2013 19:50:48 +0000

I just got my copy of Cutting Edge Art Quilts by Mary Kerr from Schiffer Publishing. It is a unique collection of contemporary quilt artists whose works are remaking the definition of quilt. I am proud to have been chosen to be amongst these artists.

It includes (now sold) Autumnal Equinox #3: Before the Frost, a portion of which can be seen on the cover collage.

Several other quilts of mine are also featured

More Fun With Inversion, Stretching, and the Distort Filter

charlotte — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 20:34:57 +0000

I have shown in previous blog posts how I use inversion as a photoshop tool to create elements of my imagery. I use it quite frequently, combining the inverted image with color gradient layers and various blending modes.

Water photographs have contributed to my “landscape painting”. The following are examples of design play that have been used in several of my recent quilts.

water at the base of a waterfall

blue mountain design

Stretched in width and with added drippy line photo-drawing from earlier work ( see earlier post September 25, 2012) it became this design which was the basis for Smoke And Ashes of the Ruins Series.

Further modifications to the design were made with the distortion>displace filter using a closeup photo of a Scottish castle rock wall to distort with. (The distort filter gives some interesting results sometimes.) The designs were composed at 5400 X 5400 pixels and printed in sections to create a 36″ X 36″ quilt. Blowing up the designs creates interesting pixelation that looks very painterly on the silk.

another step in the design process

added rock effects with distort filter

A second example of what I consider “landscape painting” is created with the inversion of the water cascade photo below. The small rocks become mountains and yet the leaves on the bush suggest a foreground plant that we are looking through. You will see quilts based on versions of this design later.

another water cascade photo

mountains in the mists design

The Ruins Series –new work

charlotte — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 20:33:20 +0000

I’ve been working on a new series for the past few months which features imagery that conjures up ruins, crumbling rock structures, and broken building imagery. Some are impressions of recent events such as the results of forest fires; some remind me of past cultures; some show crumbling of rock that natural forces have caused.

Between The Cracks

detail

Smoke And Ashes

detail 1

detail 2

Messages in the Stones

detail

Marsh Morning Mists

charlotte — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 21:50:27 +0000

I sent off my quilt, Marsh Morning Mists, to the Carnegie Center for the Arts for the annual Form Not Function Exhibition of art quilts opening in May. I am fond of the various transparent layers of imagery in this quilt. The heron images came from a photo I took at the Bodega Headlands in California in the winter of 2011. It was a very foggy day and the bird’s image was not very clear. I cropped it, selected out part of the bird, transformed it into a charcoal sketch, and incorporated different sizes and transparencies into the background wetlands ‘paintings’.

: Marsh Morning Mists

I enjoy using otherwise not very intersting photos to make sketches that I can use in my layered imagery–whether digitally or physically layered. Some of the birds are layered into the printed composition. Some are printed on organza and applied to the printed surface. Some are almost not seen and some are suggested with stitching. The more you look the more birds you will find.

I used one of my standard techniques of severely elongating a composition. Each of the five horizontal panels started from a 12″ x 12″ square, but was elongated into a 12″ by 40″ rectangle. The resulting pixelation from this extreme stretching creates a more painterly surface.

Something like this:

became this (with birds added after stretching):

There is lots of free motion stitchery, programed machine stitches, and even some digitized wavy lines in this quilt. A detail shot shows some of this.

Wrinkles, Lines and Scars

charlotte — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 18:40:03 +0000

Having recently passed another birthday this little quilt seems appropriate. I entered it in a SAQA show competition on metaphors of aging, but it didn’t get chosen.

I had found some unfinished work with images of aspen bark with varying degrees of age, abuse by elk and human, and the ravages of the environment. These had been printed on silk noil and were fairly even toned and almost monochromatic. The roughness of the silk noil suggests the bark roughness and I had started stitching and embroidering the lines and patterns of the photographic image with contrasting shiny rayon threads. But still the project had derailed and been ignored for a while.

Cutting up the partially embroidered pieces, rearranging them, and butting them up against each other revived my interest in them as abstract imagery. I finished stitching and embellishing. Now the composition pleases me and I have one less unfinished artwork lying around.

Maybe it will be the start of a new series of small works featuring embroidered abstracts from nature.

Wrinkles, Lines, and Scars

“Natural” Polka Dots

charlotte — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 22:17:37 +0000

Happy Valentines Day

While thinking about where I could find photos of natural dots, circles, and polka dots recently, I noticed the sun shining through the bubbles on the inside of the plastic container of my humidifer set up in the studio because of our very dry winter and my sinus problems.

Being willing to try to capture any image, I used both the intelligent zoom setting and the action setting on my little Panasonic Lumix to take pictures of these sunlit bubbles, getting various arrangements, sizes, and focuses. Many of the images captured the little prismatic qualities of these little dots and circles very nicely.

Using Photoshop I heightened contrast and darkened the images for more contrast in layering.

Used in separate layers, with a color gradient layer in between and playing with various blending modes I created a number of colorful multi-circular image “paintings”. The uneven light, reflections, and other “noise” in the photos gives interesting color bands. Even the out of focus ones create interesting hazy but still circular effects. Some of the blending modes imitate a hand stamping or stenciling look by accentuating the edges of the circles.

One of these serves as background for Valentines Day cards by adding hearts and musical notes from the Photoshop menu of shapes with the custom shapes tool. Again I used several different blending modes to get some of the uneven background coloring inside the hearts and added some stroking to some of the shapes. –a good opportunity to play with and learn more about how another of the Photoshop tools work.

Lines in the Asphalt

charlotte — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 21:12:56 +0000

Looking for something interesting to take photos of at this somewhat dull time of year. Melting snow and magnesium chloride on the roads highlighting cracks in the asphalt make wonderful abstract compositions. Since I am currently working on digital ways to add texture to my compositions these might be useful.

I like to use the overly, multiply, or difference blending modes to layer one photo or painting over another, often adding a gradation layer in between. A photo can also be layered with a duplicate of itself with a gradation layer in between to not only change the colors but also highlight the lines and textures and disguise what it is an image of. Some of my quilt designs have used this technique–for example the Sand Pictures series.

December Show at the Nature Gallery, North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences

charlotte — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 21:35:40 +0000

Opening on Friday is a show of some of my quilt work entitled “Visions of Trees Dance in My Head”. It is being shown in the Nature Art Gallery of the Museum Store at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh and runs daily from Friday December 7 through January 2, 2013. It features a selection of favorite works using imagery based on trees and tree lines, all derived from my photographs and digital art. The Museum Store will also have signed copies of my book and a selection of my digitally printed silk scarves.

Birds in the Bush

detail from Birds in the Bush