Lively Conversation

2024 is my year for exploring and learning. My explorations center around finding beauty in the everyday. While driving, I noticed the playful, gestural lines of tar used to repair my street. Something about their expressive, hand-made form caught my eye and one day I pulled over and began photographing the street. I brought my street compositions into my digital studio and played with  transforming the grey and black of the street to bright color, which brought out the texture and gesture. The photos were printed on 100% cotton fabric, enhancing the tactile experience.

To keep the fun going, I added my own colorful lines on top of the fabric/photo using Golden's tar gel medium, colored with acrylic ink--something I didn't even know existed--creating a lively conversation between the original tar lines and my own gestural lines. It's a coincidence that I'm using "tar gel" to enhance my photo of "tar lines." The grittiness of the street and the texture of the fabric contrasts nicely with the smooth, shiny tar gel lines.

It’s like having a visual chat with the municipal road worker who fixed my street. The transforms a mundane street repair into a vibrant artwork, shows that there’s artistry in the most unexpected places. It’s an invitation to see the beauty and creativity in our everyday surroundings.

Do you have a suggestion of a title for this work? I'm settled on "Lively Conversation" right now. Any other ideas?

 

SACRED MUSE by Mary-Ellen Latino

As part of the Westies group, which is a subgroup of Art cloth Network and comprised of artists mostly from California and Canada, I have created a piece from a call entitled, “One Long Earth Song”. Each artist was prompted to read “Benedicto” by Edward Abbey for inspiration and create a piece 36” (W) and 18” (H) by 2/29/24.

I decided to create a piece to highlight such wonders of Mother Earth in the Petrified National Forest in Arizona. While visiting there, I was captivated by fossilized logs and stumps that had metamorphosed from trees over a period spanning 200 million years. Bursting with magical color, texture and glimmer, they exemplify powerful strength and perseverance in the face of adversity. These petrified beauties are gifts we will treasure forever.

I digitally developed a photo I had taken in the forest, commercially printed, machine stitched and fused (gilded) the log with multiple layers of metallic foil.

Here is the piece in progress as I apply foil with heat to develop surface design.

After several days of applying the foil in many layers using Misty fuse and heat, the piece is done!                 

                                                                     SACRED MUSE

Here are  3 detail views of SACRED MUSE:

SACRED MUSE, detail 1

SACRED MUSE, detail 2

SACRED MUSE, detail 3

One of my favorite poet and authors is John O'Donohue (1/1/1956-1/4/2008) who was an Irish poet, author, priest and philosopher. His writing also speaks to me about this piece.

“THE BEAUTY OF THE EARTH IS THE FIRST BEAUTY. MILLIONS OF years before us the earth lived in wild elegance. Landscape is the first-born of creation. Sculpted with huge patience over millennia, landscape has enormous diversity of shape, presence and memory."

SACRED MUSE is the second piece in the Petrified Log series. I plan on creating more pieces in this series.

PETRIFIED LOGS (diptych) was juried into the ACN exhibition LAYERS in 2022 by juror Lasse Antonsen.

 

                                                                     PETRIFIED LOGS 

“The tree is more than first a seed, then a stem, then a living trunk, and then dead timber. The tree is a slow, enduring force straining to win the sky.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery

by Mary-Ellen Latino

A Photographer Explores Collage in Art Cloth by Kathleen Cunningham

I think like a photographer. I look at my surroundings and then I frame what I see. I've extended this idea to art cloth and have some interesting results. Now I'm looking at giving the images a twist by creating collages in cloth, but collage is a very big idea.

I started to exploring collage techniques by simple, instinctive assembly of objects, photos and fabric to see what fits together by color, shape, scale, and texture. What stories can I tell? 

    Patterns scaled and covered in net.            Hydrangea with abstract trim.

 

Trees with added stitching.                                Collaboration with a Painter, in process.

 

The Collaboration with a Painter is inspired by various collage artists I've been seeing on YouTube and by my experience with the 12 Cycles project. I enjoyed the energy of the collaboration and want to see if these kinds of projects can help with developing the stories I would like to tell. We'll see where that goes.