Besides work, my grandsons, and a granddaughter yet to be born (two days "late"), these days my daily light shines on creating art with quilts. I am full of energy and passion for painting with fabric this way. It feels odd to watch the shift of attention from words and poems to color and pattern.
Susan Sontag said
“Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.”This is just what I feel! Eager!
When we write poems, we recycle words. With quilts, I am recycling fabric. Project scraps from the 1980s, clothes, dust ruffles, table cloths, sheets, whatever is salvageable and beautiful is fair game. My challenge to myself is to not purchase new fabric. There is a lot of gorgeous new fabric being designed out there, and I relish it when I see it in the creations of others. In another time I would have gobbled it up. But I find myself resisting buying anything new unless it is absolutely necessary. Besides, it is a sublime adventure to create something beautiful out of what would otherwise be discarded.
I am blogging about the quilts at birds of the air quilts. I'd love to share it with you if you are interested. I just opened an etsy shop with the first quilt, where one day someone may actually pay money for one of these.
I have only fiddled with art peripherally all my life. The media I've tried have not inspired me enough to put in the requisite work and practice. But coming back to fabric, sewing, and making quilts again, this time for my grandchildren, I discovered the wild and exhilarating world of modern improv art quilts. (Check out my Pinterst quilts board for my inspiration.)
If a poem comes, it will spill out here.
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| detail of my most recent quilt "Rose and her sisters" created from a cabbage rose Ralph Lauren dust ruffle my sister passed on to me that I never used, vintage 1980s fabric from my stash and linen toile leftover from a chair recovering project |
When we write poems, we recycle words. With quilts, I am recycling fabric. Of course, YOU would make the connection, Ruthie! I am loving this new energy and eagerness flowing through your life-veins. Listening to you describe your new sewing machine and the ease it gives you now in doing what you imagine is just pure joy for me to hear. YAY for grandbabies. And YAY for the one who's ready to come any minute now.....
ReplyDeleteThanks so much, Boots. I am an old fashioned girl, and I love the old black Singer. But as you know, when my shoulder, neck and arm began to ache from all that cranking of the stuck wheel, I wondered if maybe it might be time.
DeleteOh I can't wait to meet our little girl.
Just love what you are doing, Ruth. Your quilting is as beautiful as your poems.
ReplyDeleteHow kind of you, Maureen. I love your encouragement.
Deletei think it is a very beautiful and real place that you are in, ruth, a place which draws many important ideas together, but most importantly, draws them into practice.
ReplyDeletejust yesterday driving back from the states james and i listened to the two part series on The Inklings that i think i've referenced before, a cbc radio programme discussing C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Tolkien and Charles Williams. (Part 1, Part 2) god, i love this show, love them for their forward thinking, for how they investigated man's place in the world. the programme ends with a quote from Lewis' The Abolition of Man, "To participate is to be truly human". this sentiment is one echoed by Wendell Berry deeply and often, of course bringing to the forefront the importance of how we participate, how necessarily we must work with the natural world with reverence and gratitude. (the Inklings knew this as well.)
while at the wabash house i was so surprised in my rereading of rilke's elegies to find these very sentiments beautifully laid out for us in a letter he wrote to his Polish translator in 1925. in 1925! how much we know and how little we act. (i've been planning on posting this excerpt so that i don't dare to ever forget it.)
“Nature, the things we move among and use, are provisional and perishable, but they are. For as long as we are here, our possession and our friendship, sharers in our trouble and our happiness, just as they were once the confidants of our ancestors. Therefore it is crucial no only that we no corrupt and degrade what constitutes the here and now, but precisely because of this provisionality it shares with us, that these appearances and objects be comprehended by us in a most fervent understanding and transformed. Transformed? Yes, for our task is to stamp this provisional, perishing earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its being may rise again, “invisibly,” in us. We are the bees of the Invisible. Nous buttinons éperdument le miel du visible, pour l’accumuler dans la grande ruche d’or de l’Invisible [We wildly gather the honey of the invisible, in order to store in the great golden hive of the Invisible.] The Elegies show us at this work, this work of the continual conversion of the dear visible and tangible into the invisible vibration and agitation of our nature, which introduces new vibration-numbers into the vibration-spheres of the universe. (For since the various material in the cosmos are only different vibration-rates, we are preparing in this way, not only intensities of a spiritual kind, but –who knows?—new bodies, metals, nebulae, and constellations).”
we transform in so many ways while we live. (we must always ask ourselves in which ways do we care to transform?) we prepare poems. and sometimes quilts. at our most powerful we transform through love. in these ways we are.
you, ruth, are gathering very sweet honey:)))
xo
erin
oops, went a little crazy with the italics:) italics should end in rilke's quote after the great golden hive of the Invisible.
Deleteach! even worse i've posted errors in rilke's quote. (i've posted it correctly at noun. i should be more careful in copying and pasting.)
DeleteNo worries, Erin, I got the meaning just fine, and I had a sense when Rilke's words ended. :)
DeleteYour encouragement, your important and supportive connections with what you have found from the Inklings and from Rilke are golden to me. I've heard about the Inklings since high school, and I want to listen as you and James do. Imagine the conversations!
This conversion, transformation, from what is visible into the invisible, I am in process about this in a new art form. Yes this, and you help by bringing me back to this Rilke letter. I believe we are transformed in every moment. Maybe it's more accurate to think that we are given the chance to transform every moment. As you say, it's a choice, and we choose what we are becoming every moment. You and James absolutely interpret the material things of the world through your beautiful selves and give us photographs, poems — translations of the world through the self. It is intense, yes, and it should be. Every being has intensity, and as we slow down and perceive its essence, we bring our own essence to it and then express it, and our own. This will always be unique! Even our own representations will be unique from each other. I long for this in a new art form, and I am electrified at this new threshold.
I was so full of vigor over this last week, that I thought each new quilt design would erupt almost on its own. But I've found that I must listen for my own honey, power, love, what have you. I can be inspired by others (just like with poetry), but always, expressions will come through the gauntlet of my own self.
Thank you for this blessed conversation. Much love to you.
I meant to also say that each morning when I turn off my makeup mirror, I ring a brass bell that was my grandmother's (then my mother's, then my brother's who passed). I put it next to my ear so I can feel as well as hear its mellow tone, which dissipates gradually and thins to no sound. I speak to myself: everything is vibration, everything is connected. Starting my day this way helps me remember.
DeleteIndeed, I can appreciate the connection between poetry and quilting. How fortunate you are that you are able to join the two. I especially like that you reuse and bring back to life old fabric that may have been put away for some time. There is a sense of 'renewal' about that that is very appealing.
ReplyDeleteThe Broad, thank you for understanding, and for your sweet support. While the older fabrics make designs a challenge (how to make them into something new!), I do love a challenge.
DeleteI do appreciate the connection between the arts, especially in areas where I have no talent or patience. Thanks for sharing this with us. Off I go to discover your fabric creations.
ReplyDeleteRosaria, I'm glad you understand. I so appreciate your attention here, and there.
DeleteOh how exciting to have found your passion this way! - creating such beauty and passion from the Heart, whether through words or cloth, or both! How interesting that we can emerge from the "ashes" this way - through creativity - and once again find such *aliveness* within... Am happy for you!
ReplyDeleteChristine, I know you must understand this, as you write and you also create photographic art. What you say is helpful, and important. There is always this aliveness within, and when we begin to feel the lack of it, perhaps there is a new way to discover it. Thank you for your connective happiness!
DeleteI have always enjoyed looking at quilts here – I do believe this is an American art form as I had never seen quilts like these in France. My great-grand mother made a white fancy crocheted quilt that I have but that’s about it. I also would have liked to quilt someday but I don’t think I ever will. I have a big bag, like a grocery bag, full of all the ties my husband has had since the 1960s, and thought that would make a nice patchwork pillow maybe, but I would not know where to start – but I keep the bag… Last Tuesday we went back to the quilt show in Roswell where we admired over 205 quilts – I wrote a post on some of them and will be able to show them in two more posts. The range of ideas, the art, the execution, the imagination, the colors, all of this was sensational. Some quilts are so symmetrical that they look like an engineer’s drawing. I like that you can use your old fabric. I still have some dresses from my girls when they were little girls – maybe someday …
ReplyDeleteOh my, Ruth! This is amazing. So beautiful -- had no idea you quilted! What treasures you are bringing from your fingertips! And congratulations on your Etsy store. I don't go there often but will have to check it out! You dazzle this Sunny Sunday!
ReplyDeleteGood for you, Ruth, enjoy the fresh medium ... There's something much like poetry in making quilts, assembling bits of this or that as poets do words and phrases, the whole not possible or conceived until the writing done, and presenting something new out of the same old words. It's good your hands comply.
ReplyDeleteSorry not to have commented earlier.
ReplyDeleteSo thrilling to see you experimenting in a different media. Creating things is so very thrilling - words/paint/food/gardens.
I love the idea that you are recycling old fabrics - incorporating the past into the future - and making new things too.
I get such a kick out of making things with the grandchildren whose concentration is absolute - for a limited amount of time! I think the act of creation is sublime -one sort of vanishes out of oneself and tends to feel happy.
Longing for news when the new little one arrives.