Work in progress, final stages
Did you ever drive a car with a manual transmission?
I guess I’m showing my age when I say driving a “straight drive” was one of my favorite things in my younger years. Especially that yellow Mustang with the V-6 engine and white interior! Vroom, vroom! But I digress… Anyway, do you remember you’d be cruising along in 5th gear and approaching an intersection? You would downshift to fourth gear, then to third gear, and then to second gear. The torque of the engine slowed the car almost to a stop before you applied the brakes.
Work in progress, early stage before fusing stamped squares on base fabric
Well, I now have a car with an automatic transmission side (sigh). And I’m staying at home more in these Covid times, but I still feel that change of pace in my activities. As I work on these small fabric collages, I use painted and stamped fabrics to build the compositions. Then I slow down and add machine stitching for dimension and detail. The next step is hand stitching slowly for another layer of detail. Finally, I let the piece rest as I consider what else it needs before cruising to a stop.
Have you experienced this process? Do you find that the finishing stages of your art move more slowly and deliberately than the earlier stages?
One Comment
Once again your blog has made me stop and think. When I start a painting, first gear, it seems like it takes forever to get to the point where I can shift gears and really enjoy myself, just cruising along watching the signs along the way as I begin to add details that make my painting come alive. Then I start downshifting until I come to a stop. I’m finished, and it’s time to turn the corner and move in a new direction.
By the way, high school senior year, 1963-64, was spent driving a Nash Rambler Ambassador. Not my car of choice but it did have an air conditioner in it and seats that laid back. I learn to drive a stick shift in a 1967 Pontiac Firebird after I got married. I was afraid my marriage was over when I was slowly backing up to pull outbid a parking place and got hit by a garbage truck in Terre Haute IN. It made an illegal turn into an alley behind me. He hit the left rear, scraped across the top of the trunk, and lifted me into a fire hydrant smashing the right side of the car. Fortunately my husband valued me just a little bit more than his car.