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Archive for the ‘Art’ Category

Be Inspired, Part 7…Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain

Sunday, July 26th, 2009

The final figure is one that means a lot to me, as our oldest son is named after him:  Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.  He also means a lot to Mainers (only we didn’t know when we selected the name that we would end up living in Chamberlain’s beloved state!).  Chamberlain was a professor at Bowdoin College here in Maine at the outbreak of the Civil War.  He asked for leave to fight, and was denied.  So he asked for leave for a sabbatical, it was granted, and he promptly enlisted.

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At the Battle of Gettysburg, he was in charge of the 20th Maine.  That small group of men held the outermost position (the left flank) on one end of the union line on Little Round Top, a hill at the end of Seminary Ridge.  On July 2nd, they took a wicked battering from Confederate forces; by the end of the day, they were out of ammunition and engaged in hand to hand combat, but they held the line until darkness fell and fighting stopped for the night.  Because the 20th Maine held their position, the other Union forces were able to hold their positions.  Because the Union held the line on July 2nd, the tide of the battle changed in favor of the Union, and by nightfall July 3rd the Union had won the battle.   The Union victory changed the tide of the war, and the nation remained one.

SO…. when it came time to pick historical figures, and one for Maine, the choice was clear (at least to me!).

Here’s a drawing based on this photo:

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And the rendition in cloth (before I colored the eyes):

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And on the quilt top:

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Be Inspired, Part 6…Barack Obama

Friday, July 24th, 2009

I also worked on Barack Obama…. Initially, we had stipulated that only people from 20+ years ago would be allowed, because they would have stood the test of time for importance.  Then the 2008 elections happened.  SO…, the principal and I decided that Obama will clearly go down in history as the first non-white-male President of the US, plus his inclusion places this quilt in 2009.  I used a picture of him giving his inaugural address.  Because he is contemporary, however, I decided to make his figure a bit smaller…..Here’s the sketch (sorry the tracing paper is kinda transparent, making it harder to see the sketch):

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And the close up of the fused figure (down to the red tie!):

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I am not entirely happy (even now that the quilting is done) with his face…something is a tad off, but so be it… it is done!  I’ll share the quilted pictures next week or so….

And here is the panel so far:

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Be Inspired, Part 5…Jackie Robinson

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

Next came Jackie Robinson who is widely regarded as the African American baseball player who first really made it in the major leagues.  Using a black and white photograph, reference information about the colors of the Brooklyn Dodgers uniforms and such, I created an image of him sliding into a base…. I decided not to try to simulate the cloud of dust!  Here is the tracing/sketch from the photo, with shadow lines:

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And the fused figure:

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Then the panel with Robinson pinned to it, sliding into base from the upper left corner….

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Next post:  Obama!

Be Inspired, Part 4…Teachers

Monday, July 20th, 2009

To return to my progress on Be Inspired, the next figure I tackled was a teacher.  In our selection process, we realized that some professions inspire:  doctors, nurses, teachers.  Since this is for a school, of course we had to include teachers (and on the first panel, please!) as inspiring figures for kids.  Using a photograph of a classroom, I modified it to have the whiteboards in use in the middle school, wood floors (in the old 5th/6th grade wing of the building), and look sorta like a Camden-Rockport Middle School classroom.  On the blackboard, I will quilt “I touch the future, I teach” which is attributed to the late teacher-astronaut Christa McAuliffe, but I expect is a phrase that has been around a while.

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This section took forever to complete…there were so many little pieces, and during the quilting so many thread-color-changes, that it took a full day to just do the fusing/collaging in fabric.  Here is the initial sketch/tracing:

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And with the classroom pinned onto the quilt:

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Be Inspired, Part 3…Martin Luther King (2)

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009

Because Martin Luther King was the clear leader for the middle school students in terms of inspiration, I decided to do something different and feature TWO views.   This also helps with the “what to do with the legs” thing….  what attracts us as humans is the face (and perhaps the upper body/torso)….  we want to see the features and expression on the faces.   A bunch of complete body shapes on a quilt would either look like a drawing class sketchbook page or a display of Barbie dolls.  By focusing on the faces and gestures for some of the figures, I can draw the viewer in.

As well, some photos and images become iconic.  The “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington in 1963 is one of t hose images…who doesn’t instantly recognize King, his arm extended toward the mass of humanity crowding every open space on the Mall in Washington between the Lincoln Memorial, the location of the podium from which he spoke, to the Washington Monument in the distance.  So I added this view:

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Years ago, I remember seeing a quilt of a baseball player with the stands in the distance.  The quilter (this was in the early 80s when prints were very “calico” and floral) had used a few small sprigged prints, with the size of the flowers/dots decreasing as you got higher up in the stands.  Remembering that, I used three different floral prints for the crowd, with the smallest dots ones near the base of the Wash. Monument, the larger ones in the front.  Then, because it looked like a field of flowers, I took flesh-toned paints to paint dots onto the print to represent the faces.

Here is how the piece looks so far…..two people down, four to go….

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