inspiration

Katherine and I went to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts this past weekend to see Art in Bloom. This is when florists from around the metro area create hundreds (?) of floral arrangements based on an item in the permanent collection. It’s a wonderful museum, with a very broad collection. I probably visit at least 4 times/year — I’m very grateful to have this free museum nearby where I can periodically just go, browse, and enjoy.

Art in Bloom is held annually for one weekend, Thursday through Sunday. The place is packed, there’s special events, and parking can be challenging. Below are some pictures that I took of the event. No captions; if I took the time to take notes at the museum and then caption, I might not ever blog about it, so enjoy!

I ducked in to look at some beadwork. A tribe native to Minnesota is the Anishinaabe (Ojibwe). Here’s some pieces owned by the museum.

And as I was leaving, they were inflating a duck in the park in front of the old, main entrance. Don’t ask me why!

I’m getting closer to figuring out what I want to do with the rest of the warp. I’m pretty sure I want to do a version of the Hoffman painting I already did — narrower and taller (so I’ll add to the top). I’m going to have to mess even more with his painting, as I’m almost out of the red, and have so few of the dark green transparent beads that I could actually count them, if I wanted to.

I like how the greens group together, I want to leave them as they are. The contrast of the light value of the yellow and the dark value of the darkest green I want to leave as well. So, I think I’m going to transpose the blue and red, giving this a blue background with some small patches of red. I have another dark transparent French green, but it’s a bluer green — which may actually be better, with the increased amount of blue in the painting.

I think I’m going to remove the painting from behind the current painting, continue it to increase the height by about 3/4″, and then cut it to the width I want. I’ll just have to remember to transpose the red and the blue.

For the rest of the width of the warp, I’m going to make the bracelet I want as well.

I fell in love with the cover of Aleutian Sparrow, a book by Newbery-winning author, Karen Hesse. The book is historical fiction, based on the invasion of the Aleutian Islands by the Japanese navy in 1942. The cover is a wonderful woodcut by Evon Zerbetz, an Alaskan artist.

I will use beads inspired by the colors in the woodcut.

In my feed reader not too long ago, I admired a bracelet by Kashaya. I like how it’s somewhat abstract, interesting both when you see the entire length, or just the curve on the top of your wrist. She generously provides the peyote pattern here.

In Photoshop Elements, I replaced colors to get something close to the colors I want, to make it easier to follow her pattern.

The center of the flower will be the transparent aqua. The opaque aqua will be the ring just inside the center of the flower and the outer petals. The inner petals will be the medium green, and the background the lightest green.

I will resize the image so that it is the length that fits my wrist — which is almost exactly the height of the second version of Hoffman’s painting, and the width is narrow enough to fit next to the painting. Then I’ll tape the bracelet and the painting images to a piece of paper, again situated so that I can loom right over the paper, doing paint-by-numbers with two separate pieces simultaneously.

That’s my idea today, anyway.

What’s the image that I’m doing, and how did I choose it? One of the feeds in my feed reader is Eye Level, done by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. February 29th’s post was of Hans Hoffman. Hoffman was born in Germany, came to the United States, and was an important influence in Color Field painting.

I liked the painting shown in the blog, Fermented Soil, and wanted to see more. I clicked on a link in the entry, and it took me to Technorati tags for the artist, and in another blog, found Autumn Gold. Chris Abraham had been to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and wanted help identifying this painting that he loved.

Someone helped him out, and provided the NGA’s information on the painting, image below courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.

I printed it out with no resizing or editing, and decided to do it as is. My printer, which has seemed to print color out as I expected in the past, made the colors richer and deeper. Well okay then. I like that too! So, the orange is now a rich orange-red, and the other colors are more intense too. I took a Sharpie and outlined the shapes, deciding where I wanted the edges of the colors to be when they are more blended in the painting. I don’t have all the colors in the size 10 French and Italian beads, so I’m substituting. It will definitely be Hans Hofmann’s painting, but probably only recognizable to those who know his work well.

I went to a museum today, one that is in a beautiful mansion with carvings, etc. I took a picture of the rug, and built a palette, for my own amusement — no project planned for it.