Well this started out well as I thought of the prompt “Building”. For my work I travelled all over the South Island of New Zealand in November / December and I kept thinking of the pioneers who built the roads in and around the valleys, around the mountains to the West Coast at the top and then down around the lakes and rivers in Central Otago.
I wondered what they thought as they cleared the scrub and make tracks initially on foot by Maori (our first settlers) and then later for horses and carts when they were introduced. As we moved on through the decades we began to build the railways and the sealed roads taking us to what we have today.
It is so much easier today to hop in a car and drive a couple of hours from the east to the west of our island instead of it taking days.
So I tried to capture the people in their homes deciding to travel from other parts of the world by sea then settling in New Zealand and establishing the roads. The quilting lines represent the railway lines and the roads (this part worked) but the overall piece fails. Why? I have completely got the colour values and scale wrong. I should have picked this up but in rushing to finish to meet the deadline, as I was going away for 5 days, I didn’t look at it closely enough to correct it. So a lessoned learned and I may play with paint to see if I can fix it….but then the next prompt beckons so it may have to wait for awhile
I find this piece so intriguing and the fabric selection especially in the upper half is wonderful!
I read roads despite what you think about scale and color. I often wonder about early roads. Every time I go over the Sierra Nevada mountains near my home in California, I wonder how the settlers came over with wagons full of stuff. My view of native peoples is that they didn’t travel from one place to anther with loads of stuff, but then I think of all the baskets and tools and they must have had some sort of trailer/wagon that created roads before the European settlers. Art can make you think–your piece had that effect on me.
I am fascinated by the travel links that are in this beautiful art…I imagine the length of time you traveled, the sights and communities that were part of your thoughts, and also of the earlier travelers.
I think the muted colors are beautiful.