“Inspire the artist in you”

This was the theme for the booth at Quilt Market a couple of years ago. As art director for Bali Fabrics, one of my favorite jobs is to create the booth quilts from Princess Mirah’s beautiful batiks. I have been getting inquiries about these quilts after they appeared in the photographs of the winter issue of Quilter’s Home Magazine. It was easy to do fabric tributes to four of my favorite artists since my background is in fine arts. I used the batik like fabric paint to recreate the famous paintings. The easiest one was the O Keefe skull because the fabric did all the work. I found the perfect batik  for the sky and the  various shades of brown, beige, cream and gray were all in three textured batiks. I just cut out the section needed to quilt-by-number.

Tribute to O Keefe

The sunflower quilt was the most time consuming. I struggles to get the depth-of-field needed from a limited color scheme. The sunflower quilt  is  my brother Paul’s favorite. He farms in Kansas, the sunflower state!

Tribute to Van Gough

My personal favorite is the Tribute to Picasso. When I did the paper cartoon for it I simplified the original design for doing the applique.  I had to put back many of the details because the design did not work without those elements. Notice that the fabric design in the batik  background adds another element to the picture that was not in the original painting. I learned so much about the underlying design structure that Picasso used when creating this quilt.  He was a genius.

Tribute to Picasso

The Matisse paper cuts from his later years are the theme of this quilt.  I have used Matisse’s paper cut ideas in my cloth doll designing to create fabric paper dolls and a jointed doll.

Tribute to Matisse

I have been inspired by other famous  artists with my cloth doll making. I have a Frida Kahlo doll, a Picasso doll and the Arthritis dolls inspired by Matisse’s paper cut figures. Click here to see the cloth doll section on my web site.

I have new appreciation for these great artists. I also can’t believe that I get paid for doing  such a fun job!

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