Texture, Pattern and Color

Sitting in my Art as Business class last night (through the North Coast Small Business Dev't Center (SBDC) in Eureka), I had an epiphany. Lodged between and inspired by my two local online artist cohorts, Sue O'Kieffe and Joan Gold, I realized that what actually turns me on about the art that I create is TEXTURE, primarily. That it's all extremely tactile for me, in terms of what my hands feel and what my eyes see.

I took 750 photos over 15 photo-shooting days in Italy in October, and looking back over them I see how texture, pattern and color heavily inform my way of seeing the world. I've never realized this at this level before. And that what I seek to create in my textile work is a representation, tactily or visually, of pattern and color and how they interplay.








I see that I'm usually not going for the things themselves that I photograph, as much as the PATTERN that many of those things together create, and/or how different things play off each other on my mind's visual screen to create a textural image of reality.

And then there's COLOR. I look at my world through color filters, especially green. If I don't have green, usually plants, in my field of vision anywhere in my home for instance, then that space doesn't feel complete to me. I think I'm continually composing textural pictures in my mind's eye -- fields of texture, patterns, areas of color. Even my clothes, hanging in my closet or sitting on my shelves, are grouped by color, or arranged in a progression from one end of the spectrum to the other -- white, tan, gold, bronze, russet, brown, black. This is my way of organizing my world, visually.

I just hung my first show last night, of my textiles, in the hallway at the SBDC. Arranged in color order. I selected pieces that worked well together colorwise. I have another show coming up, at The Ink People Center for the Arts in Eureka (as part of the SBDC program) and I'm planning on a different color focus. Which means I need to paint another woven shibori piece this weekend in colors that will work well in that grouping.

I'll be thinking a lot about all these things from now on. I feel like I've just awakened to an organizing concept of how I see the world and how that insight exists underneath my art and behind what I create.