Procrastinating in Black and White

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I just need to procrastinate. You know, those times you should be doing something productive, but you’d rather check out all the Facebook posts from the last year. And one post leads you to a website or blog, that leads you to something else, that leads you to something really cool. Well that’s what it was like yesterday. I was testing out links from the SAQA conference page and landed on Maria Shell’s website (because she’s going to be one of the speakers at the SAQA conference in Philadelphia next year). I hadn’t checked out her blog in a while, so I clicked over to Maria Shell’s blog. She was discussing her series of quilts depicting chairs. She gave examples of chairs created by many artists. One of the artists was Wang Huaiqing. Beautiful black and white or grayscale images of chairs. I didn’t know of Wang, so being in procrastination mode, I had to Google him/her. Mr. Wang’s stylized furniture paintings are really worth a look.

Well, that got me thinking about several black and white quilts I had seen in the past month. As with black and white photography, there’s just something appealing about black and white, or black, white and gray quilts. One was Maria Shell’s donation to the 2015 SAQA benefit auction.

Then I recalled several black and white quilts that Kris and I saw in Europe. Mirjam Pet-Jacobs posed with Kris in front of her quilt Square City. If you happen to visit Heidelberg, Germany before January 10, 2016, you can see this quilt and many others at The 6th European Quilt Triennale.

The European Patchwork Meeting in Ste. Marie aux Mines, France, had a few stunning black and white quilts, too. Among Erica Waaser’s brightly colored quilts was this wonderful piece.

Harue Konishi’s piece in the Mixed Media Art Association’s exhibition was also intrigueing. I loved the way she cut apart the work and stitched it back together. It made for a much more interesting quilt.

Sheila Frampton-Cooper’s Untamed Symphony was another black and white piece among an exhibit of her very vivid quilts. Your jaw just drops looking at the stitching.

I really love color, so I’m not sure what made me so hyper-aware of the black and white pieces. Perhaps it was several weeks of looking at half-timbered architecture. (Or maybe it was all that amazing iron work – look at the restaurant sign to the right.)

Or loving the pattern in one of our works in progress.

Whatever the reason, I hope you enjoy looking at these pieces as much as I did.