Creative Life Sampler

Getty Center Visit   (2 of 2) A courtyard inside the Getty Center complex After an excursion, I always find it revealing to look back at what I chose to photograph. On this trip to the Getty Center, I was clearly captivated by the architecture of the museum; its exterior and interior... The Getty collection includes work from a wide range of time frames and art movements.       left: Portrait of Jeanne K éfer , by Belgian artist Fernand Khnopff right: Chromatic Rhythms III by Alfredo Hlito, Argentine It is always cool when you can find such disparate images as these two paintings in the same museum. However, I place them side-by-side here to point out their similarities. Notice the structure on which these artists placed their images. Though they had very different perspectives/approaches which are reflected in the subject matter of their paintings, there is an underlying grid of horizontal and vertical lines in both of these square canvases. The work on the left wa...

Revisiting a Museum Trip   (1 of 2) Getty Center in Los Angeles By this time of the year I’ve usually shared a few things from venturing past the front door of our home. Sometimes it’s just a discovery at one of our local libraries, and at other times it’s been observations from near or far-flung destinations.  During the quiet time of recent travel restrictions, I was reviewing some picture files and ran across photos from several forgotten museum visits. Immediately I was taken back to the joys of exploring these treasure houses. There are several art museums in the Los Angeles area, but a favorite destination for visitors is the Getty Center, a museum which sits at the top of a hill overlooking LA. Looking down from the summit of the Getty   The buildings of the Getty complex have some really interesting curves and angles.  And the exterior is constructed of travertine, a porous stone, which weathers under the elements and produces an interesting texture....

New Quilt to Share This quilt grew out of a quilt I finished in January of last year,... there were lots of leftover scraps that needed a new purpose.  A small selection of scraps from Blue Transitions The two quilts could not be more different. To see the contrast in style between this new quilt and the first quilt,  Blue Transitions, check out this link: https://creativelifesampler.blogspot.com/2019/01/first-project-completion-for-2019-blue.html ) This as yet unnamed quilt is "freshly minted." I was up until 2 last night sewing the binding in place and had to finish up the last length this morning so I could share it with you today. There are probably a few threads that still need to be trimmed away and a label will be attached to the back for a last touch- little details, still, pretty much done.  The project took longer than usual; it started off strong, then it was put aside for awhile. When I picked it back up as a UFO, ( u n- f inished...

Embroidery Sampler Many years ago my grandmother gave me a cigar box filled with embroidery floss in a wide range of colors: whole skeins, single strands, and many short lengths. Though I had never used a needle in this way, I was thrilled with all the color at my fingertips and my imagination went to work on how to put them to good use. At the time, the margins of my school notebooks were brimming with doodles of patterns and concentric circles of patterns, so this design was a natural progression from a doodle to a textile. It gave me an opportunity to use all the small pieces of thread and to try this new art form. For this project I had no instruction or reference book; either it didn't occur to me to seek one out, or an author had yet to compile a step-by-step encyclopedia of stitchery like the ones you can easily pick up today. So this was an experiment, a needle work sampler, filled with fabric stretching and puckers, inconsistencies, mistakes, and happy inventions, ...

Thought for the Day "Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another's view of the universe which is not the same as ours and see landscapes which would otherwise have remained unknown to us like the landscapes of the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply until we have before us as many worlds as there are original artists." The Maxims of Marcel Proust Marcel Proust (French writer) 1817-1922 This morning the word "artistry" kept coming to my mind. So I pulled out my trusty Bartlett's Familiar Quotations to see what the voices of the ages had to say on the subject and I ran across this thought provoking quote.  Proust is instructing us on how to view and appreciate art. Standing in a gallery before a French Impressionist painting, we get a glimpse of life in the late nineteenth century. An early American portrait or Renaissance masterpiece pulls us into a world we would never...

Newly Completed Just quilted this baby blanket/wall hanging. My inspiration was a small collection of batik fat quarters I've had for some time. The navy, green, yellow, peach, light brown, pink, and purple were sold as a set and reminded me of the rainbow. I decided to experiment with hexagon construction and place them so they transition from one color to the next. Originally the whole surface was going to be covered with batik hexagons, but as I was laying out the blocks, this shape emerged. I liked its simplicity and the large spaces around it, so here you have it. Any way, there are still a lot of blocks remaining for second project,... which means there's more to come.