Go Figure

OK, a question for you:

Think about your favourite art quilt.

Now think about your favourite painting.

Is the quilt abstract and the painting figurative? Is the love of the quilt mixed up in technique and materials, but the love of the painting all down to the image, the way it lifts your spirit or punches you in the stomach?

It's important to me that the work I make now is judged as an image, not as a quilt. I don't want you to care if it's laboriously hand drawn or painted, or printed digitally in minutes. It doesn't matter how many pieces there are in it, how many metres of thread, it doesn't matter how long the darn thing took.

The quilt world seems at times concerned mostly with the abstract. I read a blog recently by a quilt artist who stated that now there are few artists to be found who work with the figurative. I'm not sure if she meant the art world in general or the quilt world specifically. I'm presuming quilts only, surely. I've been thinking about the direction of my own work, the way that I've veered from figurative through abstraction and back again. Which has been the most 'successful' and which has been overlooked, by potential purchasers and competition judges. For now my quilts seem to be unfashionably figurative in a world of surface decoration, layering of print and pattern and little emphasis on drawing and painting, the two things that always underpin what I do.

So what? I keep wondering if I'm on the right track. I look back at older work and wonder if I've lost my way. Strange to feel these insecurities. I know it's the result of too much time thinking and not enough time doing. I need to get back to the blistering pace that I used to work at. Stop questioning, stop worrying about what everyone else is doing, stop being concerned that people won't like it/buy it. A lot has changed since I made one quilt, well a painting in the first instance, 'Don't Go'. A painting of a dead swallow held in my hands. I've been told on two separate occasions that 'if I made work with a cheerier subject matter' that I'd 'do much better'. Those throwaway remarks have played on my mind, and yes, of course I still have the quilt and no, I probably don't expect to ever sell it. But then I think back to the two other people who came to me after seeing that quilt and told me that it made them cry, that they stood in front of it and wept. Not because it didn't hang straight, or that there were a few untidy thread ends, but because it had punched them in the stomach. And then I know, I'm confident that I'm on the right path, that I need to keep on doing what I do, because even if it's not fashionable, even if it's not chosen as a winner, or accompanied with a red dot, I know that of all the quilts I am glad that it's the one that I made.

Enough over-thinking, enough procrastination.

I just read a much more inspiring blog. One that said that in spite of everything you must never give up on The Thing. The Thing? The Thing is the thing that makes you get up in the morning, the smell of paint, the rush of making the first marks on white paper, the exhilaration when you have one of those days when everything just works, the thing is the reason I am who I am.

Onwards.