Leannderthal

I did a couple of pieces for an upcoming show at the 212 Art Center in Saline.  The requirement was to use a picture from the book “Earth, A New Perspective” by Nicholas Cheetham for inspiration.  This is the picture I chose, I liked the straight grid lines imposed on the natural landscape, and I thought for once I’d do something pretty.

Well, I read about the picture in the book, then Sixty Minutes did a story on this.  The lovely straight lines are the canals Saddam Hussein had dug to turn the wetlands of the Tigris and the Euphrates into desert, causing death and ecological destruction.  My lovely picture is of a murderous deed.

So I did a little rethinking.  I made a block print inspired by the lines of the image and printed it on black satin.  I then mounted it to a board painted then stamped with the work “water” over and over.

This is the first piece, “Water One”  I added beads and waxed linen.

This is a detail of the print part of the piece.

This is “Water Two”.  I took two prints of the same block, one done in a greenish gold and one in a greyish silver, and wove them, much like the way the natives of the wetland wove reeds to make their houses.

This is a third piece, a small 5×7 made from the scraps, for the gallery to sell for charity.

The show will be in January at the Two Twelve Art Center in Saline.  It will be a great show, some amazing artists have been working hard on it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 10th, 2009 at 11:23 am and is filed under fiber art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.