Explosion in a jam factory

   When I first saw Mary Pratt's work I was amazed by photo-like quality of her works and the skill  involved. However, I found it  difficult to find inspiration in her subjects and spent a lot of time wondering how I was going to tackle it. One thing I was attracted to was the glowing colour in this photo of the jars of jam.

I decided to use explore that and included 'bubbles' inspired by the decoration on the glass jars. I used some cold wax, which I bought nearly 30 years ago and never got round to using, to make the bubbles on  pieces of hand dyed lemon cotton and organza at the same time, which I then overdyed with gradations of orange and red. I had wanted the edges to be a little darker, more of a plum colour, but it came out more of a dried blood colour. The hand seed quilting took forever, which is why this is so late. I had thought that I'd started it in plenty of time, but despite quilting almost every day until yesterday, it took a lot longer. My apologies for the lateness.

 

Marmalade

Sorry for the delay in getting this done.  Especially since Mary was my suggestion.

I had taken a picture of the shells left of the Seville oranges which had been boiled, the flesh scraped out, and just jumbled in a bowl awaiting slicing.  I liked the light on the oranges and kept thinking of how Mary used ordinary, day to day images.  I did chicken out trying to paint a clear glass bowl though.  But I did paint it using my Cretacolors, because she was a painter. 

The next artist is .......

Here in New Zealand it is 1st June so I thought I should introduce our next artist .
In 2015 my one son married our daughter-in -law on the Yucatan Peninsular , Mexico . We so enjoyed the chance to go somewhere which we otherwise would not have visited . Because of security issues we stayed in a resort called appropriately "Dream Resort" and we certainly had a dreamlike time there, wedding ceremony included . In one part of the resort's garden  I saw a tiled wall on which were painted fascinating naive animal and bird shapes filled with equally bizarre shapes of other animals and human faces or vaguely geometric shapes . I loved it and took several pictures . Here are a couple of examples :



I found his work happy,  amusing and delightful and have already made a couple of quilts based on it. His name is Fernando Andriacci . So ladies enjoy- with this artist anything goes!! His work is readily available to see online and is very recognisable .