Stone Angel Panel Done for Lyon

 

 

Thank you all for all the supportive comments and thank you Red Shoes for your comments on your blog. The Dordogne is a favourite area of ours , though our accommodation ran to tents! And yes the forest fabric has a much more European forest feel than Australian forest.

I have finally finished the Stone Angels panel- I am not sure why it has taken so long, but there have been many disruptions to the week , and I have also been dyeing fabric to take up to the workshop I am teaching in Braidwood this weekend.The fabric has to be ironed tonight so I gues it might be a late night!

When I was teaching in france Genevieve Verrier mentioned an artist whom I had not encountered before. The last couple of days I have spent sometime researching Simon Hantai- he was Hungarian by birth but lived in France from 1949. I find his work very interesting because though abstract he has crossed the boundary from painting into the actual materiality of the canvas he is using. There is a very interesting article on his work on the website I have linked. Hantai worked by first folding his canvas then applying the paint and then unfolding the resultant painting and stretching it. The positive and negative spaces both came into play in an interesting way- suggesting pattern and repeats but in actual fact being random. Hantai shapes are also reminsicent of Matisse's cutouts and how they floated in the space of his canvas. The reason I am interested in his work is the use of positive negative space, but also it is in essence how I dye fabric often- letting the folds of the fabric and the cursory manipultions I make have a role in the final appearance- though of course the dye reacts differently with the fabric than paint does with canvas- still.... some food for thought methinks..... and of course then there is shibori- which relies entirely on folding, stitching and manipulations for effect.