Challenge Day 3

February 15, 2019. Friday.

Process: I’ve been looking for ways to use fabric to create 3-dimensional art. I am a mixed media artist, after all. This piece was created when I found a piece of painted canvas in my cast-off artwork box (or the pile of work that I intend to go back to and ‘fix’ them to be something ‘more’). A rough idea was forming in my head and I grabbed a pair of scissors and started cutting the canvas up in strips in various widths. The strips were curling on the long edges and an idea formed to cut some of the strips into small rectangular shapes. The curl of those pieces on the painted side of the canvas placed on the back side of the curled canvas made an interesting 3-D ‘sculpture’ of the 2-D flat painting. I liked that and I laid the small piece along one of the long strips totem-style. I cut the ‘background’ piece to a shorter length then cut a thin strip of the standard length as a binding to hold everything together in one package. I decided to use red waxed thread and an awl to create ties for each rectangle and let the ends be the approximate width of the whole assemblage. I took the extra length of the binding strip, folded it back, sewed it to the background canvas as a ‘tab’ for hanging, and called it done.

Challenge Level: 5, mostly because stitching through three layers of painted canvas turned out to be harder than I expected—the canvas was stiff.

Lessons Learned: Stiff canvas assemblages are not as appealing to me since I had imagined a softer, more ‘used and abused’ medium to work with. I like the light on the piece from the setting sun when I photographed the piece because it exaggerates the sculptural contours of the work.

Detail photo: