About 30 years ago on my first visit to Buenos Aires, capital of Argentina, we visited the Museum of Fine Arts and were blown away by their collection, containing many European classical, C19 and C20 art works, but also some wonderful Chinese and other Oriental art.  It’s always nice to go back to revisit somewhere you’ve enjoyed before, isn’t it? We had need to be in B.A briefly recently, and spent some time in this wonderful museum.

These may be the same two large urns or vases, labelled Ming dynasty (from mid C15 – mid C17) that enthralled me back then, and maybe not; but they’re stunning all the same.  The same lack of security barriers or alert systems still apply, but there are still a good number of watchful attendants hovering close by.  I was so taken by the huge pots with rims around chest height, that I barely glanced at the group in the case between!

What really impressed on this recent visit was a suite of rooms containing a huge collection of paintings, sculptures and beautiful objects, thousands of them, acquired on the travels of Argentine father Manuel Jose de Guerrico (1800 – 76) and son Jose Prudencio (1837-1902)   The collection is said to be the beginning of private collecting in Argentina by two people who were aware of their pioneering role building an important collection; so it reflects principal tastes at the time, and also documents material cultural changes and preferences in daily life.  De Guerrico descendents donated the collection to the nation in 1938.   I gazed at a beautiful collection of the very large tortoiseshell combs or peinetas worn by elegant spanish mantilla-wearing women –

Nearby was a large cabinet loaded with beautiful small decorated boxes made from all kind of materials and techniques, ornamental vases, candelabra and small urns.  In another were hundreds of fans, though most were folded and the ones opened out didn’t photograph well.  In another case were more lidded containers with many netsukes though my photos seem to have focused on the boxes – never mind, there are lots of images of those online – Netsukes are highly collectable these days, and many of the older ones are very valuable indeed.

At a time when Argentina was far more relatively wealthy than it is today, C19 and early C20, people in much of Latin America imported huge quantities of fine furniture and art, everyday items like fabrics and high quality household items, plus machinery, cars and boats, from European manufacturers.  The de Guerrico collection is presented in galleries painted strong bright red – sumptuous, in every way. Those frequent father and son trips to Europe must have been hectic and fabulous shopping trips!

As a background to my blog page, there needs to be something interesting, but not too overwhelming, happening out on the edges.  I went back and re-manipulated several pics and came up with some more, and although my final choice may be none of these, I feel I am getting closer to something that I will be happy with.

As I said the other day, I’m working on a re-design of my website, though it is more correct to say that the technical work is being done by the wonderful team at Gloderworks who built this now 10 y.o. website. The current background is based on Timetracks 1, which began the Tracks series, and led to some new thinking about my art. It reflects where I was then, just as did my first (19 years ago) and subsequent sites. I still have some more rewriting to do, and choices to make on what I really want the website to convey.

I’ve been looking at other textile artists’ websites and blog pages in many different styles. There are lots of combinations of bio, cv, galleries, exhibition news, publications, class schedules, blogs, archives and most have a contact page. They range from very formal to madly, crazily, informal.  Some have plain white, black or other colour backgrounds.  Others have some kind of texture, subtle or bold, and some are so lively and full of visual stimuli that it’s hard to see the main focal point.   It might be an age thing, but I’m looking for something uncluttered, almost ‘minimalist’.

I spent much time yesterday looking at quilted works and some landscape pics in my photo files. I manipulated some of them in fairly faint pencil sketch mode so they are not intrusive, and compiled a file of about 15 possibles plus several hand drawn liney things that I’m thinking over.  However, thinking I was a bit clever, saving these as very faint B/W pencil sketches when I put some of these up to show you, they looked just too severely washed out of colour, and rather boring, so I’ve just left a couple for the record, and it looks like an afternoon of a fresh round of manipulate+saves coming up!

It’s time for some lunch!

A few years ago I developed a power point presentation for a lecture to a textile group about my textile art, and how it developed with inspirations and influences from the Earth’s surface.   About 70 carefully chosen slides of the quilted and embroidered textile art I’ve been making much of my adult life are in this presentation, A Journey Through Landscape,  and this image (Sunburnt Textures) graced the title page slide:I studied undergraduate geography and some geomorphology, and as a result of marriage to an exploration geologist, I have travelled through, lived in and on a variety of landscapes on several continents.  Colours and textures, shapes and processes of landscape formation all provide inspiration to my designs.   As an adult my personal interests have expanded to include the history I eschewed as a child, and include anthropology, primitive art forms and ancient history.

Looking at the fabric and thread part of my art, I can say that various kinds of embroidery were done by the women in our family, so I began to embroider and stitch decoration on things at a young age.  I came to patchwork later, in my 40s, and though my brief affair with traditional geometric patchwork in the late 80s was an intense one,  and we parted amicably, it left me with several enduring marks I’d call influences rather than scars.   Lines and shapes the basis of cut and pieced fabric known as patchwork –  which is my favourite textile art technique from a wide range of other textile art skills.  As a result, then, I love compositions of line, shape and colour, and love compilations of repeated units known in traditional circles as ‘blocks’ that build up into an overall patchwork design.   I love hand and machine embroidery, and hand and machine quilting.  Well, quilting IS an embroidery technique, anyway.

So you may wonder where all this is  going.  I’ve been doing no actual making for several months while I was recovering from a surgery, and haven’t written in my blog, either: but I have been thinking about it all.  After ten years, I’ve decided it’s time for a major website re-vamp.  I will be altering what is shown and how it is presented.  I want newer work up front or on top however you think about that, with plenty of archives people can explore if they want.  To please those who want good close ups I’ll have some click-throughs for those details that my wonderful photographer Eduardo Baldizan captures so well.  With a wet and windy weekend ahead, I am keen to start work on the revision.

“Simpson Desert Sunset” is about 30cm x 20cm, a freeform bargello needlepoint, highlighted with masses of french knots, dates from approx 1979. The frame is not visible.