For a while, I have been intending to take a closer look at, and be inspired by, the works of Giorgio Morandi. He mostly painted arrangements of pots and boxes in muted colours. The compositions are very unusual, often a central arrangement with the tops of the pots nearly aligned. He also did beautiful etchings with detailed crosshatching.I purchased a variety of small, old pots from a charity shop and made a 'corner box' out of a sheet of foam core board to isolate my arrangements as well as project shadows, which Morandi often eliminated, but I find very interesting.But the colours were too distracting, so I painted many of them white. This felt like dressing them in school uniforms but, unlike uniforms, the white had the effect of enhancing their form and individuality.I played around with them for a while and did some drawings. But I didn't achieve whatever it was I wanted. I have recently been working with a beautiful blue piece of fabric - and wanted to continue working in colour so I roughly over-painted some of the pots.

... and set up an arrangement, again with the spotted scarf, in the corner box. I painted with water colour, 6 1/2 inches square - and, playing around with the computer cropping, realized that the importance of the shadows is enhanced if the blue pot is cropped on the right. - still, it looks a bit clumsy.I tried again, this time without the scarf - and experimented with text as texture and to provide a 'base'.Then I thought I'd try machine embroidering it. I should have experimented with thread colour swatches before starting, as even a 4x4 inch piece like this takes several hours to stitch. In the event, most of the threads I had, turned out to be too frail to use for such dense stitching. In this medium, the blue pot looked uncomfortably chopped off - but it's easy to just place a bit of extra backing in the right place and add to the design.

Still life

4 x 4"

These are some pots that won't be over-painted as I really like their 'outfits'. Watch this space for more pot studies.

Tray-cloth
28cmh x 40w
2004
Done from a postcard size linocut that I made many years ago, when the children were small - they wanted to make biscuits so we got out all the stuff and made the dough and a big mess - then they ran off to do something else. The thought flashed through my mind that I may as well roll myself out - and this image appeared. Now it is embroidered, ordinary sewing thread and single strand DMC on black homespun.

This is one of the pieces I made at Forum, where I took a quilting/mixed media class. My theme was the local fruit and vegetable markets where I did some drawings and took photos before the Forum. This is a textile interpretation of the apron of the green grocer pictured in an earlier sketch on this blog.
10 " high, free-standing.
Painted vliesofix (wunder under), fabric, paper and wall-paper scraps, encased wireform, machine embroidery.