Virginia Greaves

I have been making progress at putting my studio together in our new house. I had to cut down the design walls to fit 8 foot ceilings but I realized that I didn’t have to wait on someone else & I did it myself. I had to have to room for my cloning. I took the piece that I started at the old house and started experimenting. I started with black (& white) facing purple, red facing green, and blue facing yellow. Then I made an inverse of yellow which I thought would be cool — it wasn’t. Then I made stages between the sets horizontally — light shades of black with dark shades of purple and light shades of purple with dark shades of black — and then I made stages between the sets vertically.

Sharon, a friend of mine, came over to the house yesterday, and since she was being toured through the house, she saw it. I don’t like showing in process pieces — well, at a stage that I haven’t picked at least — and she obviously didn’t like it. Don’t get me wrong — I realize not everyone is going to like my work and I’m OK with that — but Sharon is a friend of mine & it took a little bit of excitement out of the piece for me. I’m going to work on an exciting way to set all of the blocks in the hopes of bringing life back to it. Oh well — it happens sometimes. It’s usually my husband.

And I forgot to mention — some of these were very challenging to do and I have a few rejects — and a few that had several lives before they were happy on the design wall. It is very hard, for example, to put 2 light blues with 2 dark yellows — and get the contrast in values that I’m looking for in order to have depth. That is why I had to move into orange.

Trying to refine a picture is one of the most challenging things to do. I move away from the pattern and use the original photograph to make alterations. The goal is to give the essence of the person in the quilt.

I have made subtle changes to the yellow portrait. This is what I started with:

This morning, I added deeper color to her eyebrows and the area around her eyes. I also made the eye on the right side smaller since that side of the face is receding away from the viewer.

I then decided that there was not enough highlight on the right eye in the corner by the nose so I added a lighter color there. I needed deeper shadows in a few places to highlight certain areas so I added deeper color under the chin, in the throat area, and on the right side of the face to give more separation between the face and her hair.

At this point, the mouth still looked wrong to me. At some point, I had cut away the shadow of the upper lip on the right hand side because it was too deep — but in hindsight, there needed to be some deeper line there to show the full character of the smile. I raised the lip a quarter inch or so and changed the shadow so that it created a crease in its corner.

I feel very good about the piece at this point.

I started this portrait in yellow quite some time ago. I completely fused the front after very carefully following my current methodology, and then hung it on the wall for what I call the “gut check”.

And it failed. Part of the problem is that the main color is yellow and it is hard to develop features with this color. Another problem was my computer. The pictures on the computer looked better than the quilt top. Once I propped up the piece and walked down the hall away from her, her face became a mass with no distinction. The last problem was the initial picture. I realize now that it was a poor choice because it wasn’t helping me much.

And so I bought the fabric for the background and began working on Christmas projects. I even took the background fabric & draped it over the front of the quilt. It hurt to look at it — it just wasn’t right.

Once the holidays were over, I spent some time adding shadows — and they looked completely out of place. I folded up the quilt top and tried to decide if I should just abandon it.

But really folding it up seemed to help. I realized that the entire face needed to be redone in darker hues. I took out the pattern and decided on the line around the face that would be my new beginning point. The fabric at that point was a 3 in the value scale — so I pulled the 4 value fabric and made that the main part of the face. I then pulled a value that I had pulled out of the dyed stack & decided not to use. I used this one because it contrasted nicely with 4. Using a pencil, I then renumbered the values in the face using these other 2 fabrics as reference points.

While I was doing this, I redrew a few lines in order to simplify some shapes. I allowed myself to be less involved with the left side of the brain and let the right side run the process. It became a completely visual experience.

I don’t know how much of her personality it captures but I am hoping that more of that will come through with the quilting.

This is the original photo. Do you think I came close?

In the end, I need to remind myself that this is art and not intended to be a reproduction of the original photograph. There has been a lot of discussion on the quiltart email list about illustration and its merits. I think that I was greatly influenced by Wayne Spradley. He is a famous watercolorist that lives close by, and I took a class from him a couple of years ago. He is a master at offering suggestion of a shape and allowing the brain to fill in the rest. It would not be as engaging if he added all of the details, for example, of a person in the background, and yet the suggestion has to be just so in order for the brain to become involved.