Welcome to all fleeing the other place.
Given the influx of people, I thought it might be nice to create a thread for artists to share their work!
Here is some of my work below, and I hope artists who are new to Mastodon or have been here awhile will share some of their work, in comments
Please boost to help support artists here and discover some new art accounts.
Just another childless cat lady
#Octobersurprise #Vance #childlesscatlady #caturday #fabricArt
"Quilt, Tumbling Blocks with Signatures Pattern," Adeline Harris Sears, begun 1856.
Sears (1830-1931) was only 17 when she had the idea for this quilt. She mailed diamonds of white silk to every significant person she could think of or read about, requesting they be autographed and mailed back. Most people did.
Sears' family was wealthy, and it's said she got Lincoln's autograph in person, and danced with him at his inauguration.
There's writers like Hawthorne, Dickens, Emerson, Irving, Longfellow, Julia Ward Howe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and a number of scientists, politicians (with eight Presidents!), artists, educators, Civil War heroes, and clergy. It took her 11 years to complete the quilt, which has 360 signatures in all, and a total of 1,840 patches of cloth. The quilt was written about in national magazines of the time, and is now a museum piece.
Sears did other quilts, but nothing on the same level as this, a document of its time.
From the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
"Branches and Vines Quilt," Ernestine Zaumseil, c. 1875.
Not much is known of Zaumseil, except that she was a quilter working in the latter part of the 19th century. Too bad, as this is an exquisite work.
The center tree is very much derived from a traditional "tree of life" quilting pattern, but she added a riot of branches and leaves around it. It is known that Zaumseil used actual plants from around her home as templates for the applique here, so while fanciful, as quilts are, it's also quite realistic in its morphology of the plants.
Quilts are endlessly fascinating; the patterns, with names like Double Wedding Ring and Drunkard's Path, are amusing, but the sheer artistry that goes into some of them is staggering. This could pass for a piece of modern fabric art, and it gives me pause to look at this and realize it's 150 years old.
Plus, quilts were PRACTICAL art. They were meant to be used. I get a certain joy from the idea of something as beautiful as this being a source of physical comfort to someone on a cold night...
From the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
