Carpe Diem : inspiration for the design

Although the quilt started to take form in my internal reflections, finding new relationships between colours, and the means to bring the influences together, the structure had unknowingly always been there. I just needed to find it. Creative acts absorb influences from their lives, from other artists. Initially thinking strata formation as representing horizons, I went to my folder of design ideas and came across several A4 colour copies of the work of German/Swiss visual artist Paul Klee, working with the Cubist movement. I was no doubt attracted to the abstract nature of his angular paintings when I collected the prints as they resonated strongly with the grid of patchwork design – though in a more free form. I tend to muse that he could have been a quilter!

I chose one work as my ‘inspirational’ template, no doubt because of its horizontal stratification, and drew up a strategy for building the quilt based loosely on Klee’s elements of design. The name of the work that was produced in 1929 is 'Monument in a Fertile County'(as seen above). The usual process of creating fabric patches by joining strips was confined by size requirements. Then the fabrics had been previously cut into various lengths of about 1’6” (450mm), no wider than 4” (100mm, and many of them had already been sewn together. There had come a point to make a decision. Following the lead of Klee’s striations I would work on building roughly 7” wide striations, roughly 12” long for the width. To arrive at the desired length of 3’4” (1000mms) meant building nine or ten thirty-six inch long strata. It all seemed a bit random. To add a further random element, when each strip was completed it was stitched to the previous one, forming horizontal layers and parallel lines.

I found it interesting to read that Klee experimented with colour, both complimentary according to contemporary painterly usage, and also with colour dissonance that could be explored through abstractionism. Klee used blocks of colours designated by ‘pure’ geometric measurements, halving or doubling strips where layers cross on the vertical, creating points at which each block of strips intersected with the others. A lot can be said about Paul Klee, his life and artworks, a German Jew who fled to Switzerland during the Nazi regime. It’s somewhat incongruous that his works were both banned - and stolen - by perpetrators of the regime. But one quote is notable: when conceiving a view in this way, he suggested that it might “find its way back to reality”. This brought up the notion of perspective for me, which I'd considered as part of my PhD research.