I wanted to connect the sweetness of Summer’s white daisies as in Sarah Williams’s work with the majesty of Oregon’s cliffs and Aeries. Whisperings of the Big Picture is about the drama and elegance we find here in our part of the Pacific Northwest.
- Size: 18 inches x 30 inches (46 cm x 76 cm)
- Materials: Hand-dyed cotton, commercially printed cotton, cotton thread.
- Created: August 2022
- Series: N/A
- Current location: New Zone Gallery, Zone 4 All show
My Thoughts on the Work
I was the last in my series of Whisper Quilts with Valley South of SAQA Oregon. My work followed that of Sarah Williams. Sarah’s piece was a close-up view of three daisies set amid a field of tall grasses. It had bold vertical lines a fairly narrow color palate, and a simple elegance.
What is a Whisper Quilt?
The idea behind a Whisper Quit is a lot like the Telephone Game we played as kids. A small group of fiber artists agree to participate. In our case, I was number 5. The first person makes a quilt of a specified size and gives a picture of the finished work to the next person in the group. The second person uses the first person’s work as inspiration for a piece of that same size, then gives a picture of the finished work to person number 3. Person number three uses only person number two’s work as inspiration, having never seen the first person’s work. And so it goes until the final piece is finished. Then, all is revealed and we marvel at how we got from the first piece to the last. Often, you can see the progression. Sometimes, there’s a radical shift somewhere along the way.
About This Whisper Quilt
Whisperings of the Big Picture hints at the field of flowers of Sarah’s work, giving the bottom quarter or so to fields of green outlined in yellow and dotted with white beads. A gray cliff rises up to fill the left half or so of the upper work, balanced against the blue sky that fills the other half or so. I used open, light gray quilting lines to outline some of the white patches, giving them a vague cloud-like structure. I used a lot of vertical lines to quilt the grassy fields where I placed beads, and more vertical lines in the quilting of the cliff.
I wanted to pick up some of the elements of Sarah’s work, like the vertical lines of her grasses and the angular lines she used to quilt her sky. I chose a combination of straight, sharp vertical lines and rounded and sometimes angular lines for the cliff to capture the roughness of a rocky cliff. I felted a small Eagle’s nest, setting it in the upper left corner, and added two hand-drawn Eagle shapes flying in the upper half of the quilt to give the whole piece motion.
I was aiming to suggest a field of grasses and white flowers much like those of Sarah’s quilt as seen from a distance. I wanted to connect them with the majesty of a big and wild setting. I was thinking a lot about the drama and elegance of Chinese Rice Paper paintings that show cliff sides and trees and cranes. Whisperings of the Big Picture is about the version of that we have here in the Pacific Northwest, where Eagles nest on high cliff sides above fields of native grasses, flowers, and other plants.
