Morning Glories for Georgia

"Morning Glories for Georgia," 24 x 30, handmade by Pam Geisel, November 2016

I made this art quilt to honor American artist Georgia O'Keeffe who is best known for her large scale paintings of flowers, New Mexico landscapes, and New York skyscrapers. By the mid-1920s, she began creating large-scale paintings of natural forms at close range, at a time when no one else was doing this. She learned about cropping from her husband Alfred Stiglitz' photography and used it to with her flower paintings because she want to make sure people really saw the flower. She even wrote of her desire to glorify flowers, “I’ll paint it big, and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it. I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.”

The hardest part of making this quilt was deciding what flower to use. I looked at her paintings of flowers. And I looked at photographs of flowers. And I took my own photographs of flowers to look at. I considered Jack-in-the-Pulpits because there is a quilt square that goes by that name, but I didn’t like the colors in them.

It wasn't until I looked through my stash of hand-dyed fabric that I decided to focus on Morning Glories. (when in doubt, let the fabric tell you what it wants to be). Much like Georgia's paintings of morning glories, I included two flowers in my piece, but I did come up with my own composition.

When I drew the outline of the morning glories I did intentionally avoid any sharp edges trying to keep the shapes as organic as possible. And I focused on keeping Georgia’s intention of glorifying the humble flower.

It is machine raw-edged pieced with machine quilting along the raw edges and also in the petals and background. I couched three pieces of hand-spun yarn for the stamens. It has a knife-edge binding.

As always you can click on the photos to see them larger.

More about Morning Glories for Georgia

PS. This is my 400th blog post!