Quilt #231
11″ wide by 16″ high
Recently our Inland Empire Modern Quilt guild had a challenge that required that we use at least 4″ square piece of classic blue fabric, that any one side be no longer than 24″ and that the theme was Urban.
I’m on the board for this Guild, and am VP of Communications, so to help advertise it, I set up a mood board and we handed out a card with the 4″ square of fabric stapled to it. We chose Lapis, a Painters Palette solid from Paintbrush Studio, and I purchased several packets of it from Pineapple Fabrics, when they ran a booth at Road to California.
Then Covid-19 hit and it scuttled our plans. Like most, we were knocked flat for a bit, but then put together a Zoom meeting and resurrected our challenge. We had several amazing entries, seen on the guild website.
MetaStructure/Metaesquema was my entry (seen above).
I wrote on my label:
Helio Oiticica, a Brazilian artist (1937-1980), made hundreds of his Metaesquema paintings. Here are a few:
I like the way the solid blocks in the Metaesquemas kind of slump into each other, like a square that lost its energy, or tried to take off and was misdirected, or else it was trying to get away and couldn’t get free of the grid.
As noted above, Oiticica was closely linked to the global Concrete movement. They stripped art from any lyrical or symbolic connotations, believing that art should have no meaning other than color, line, and plane. Kind of sounds like catnip to a quilter, doesn’t it?
He created his Metaesquemas between 1957 and 1958. He coined the term as a means to “describe a work that, although schematic (esquema) in its formal development, is still open to the subjective interpretations inherent to metaphysics (meta). Oiticia was aware that artworks are objects that exist in time and space,” and are subject to the viewers’ interpretation (Philips).
For the contruction, I made wide 1-1/2″ borders around my blue squares, then created a tilt on them that I liked. I cut a few tilting to the left and a few tilting to the right, then arranged them. Of course, I would like to try this in a bigger quilt, with more white space around the tilted squares, but for a first go at it, I’m pretty happy.
Hop over to the Inland Empire Modern Quilt Guild website to see all the entries and the winners.
Eclipse • Quilt #189
Year 2: Urban Quarterly Challenges (from upper left): Maps, Structure, Landmarks, Contrast, Light (we seem to like this topic).
Year 3: Literature — We could choose what segment of literature to focus on. Some did a series of novels, Nancy did a series of children’s books’ titles, which she then donated to her local library, and I did a series of poems. I love the poems, pretty much hate these quilts, for a variety of reasons. 
Year 4: Color, and the challenges (again, from upper left): Microscopic, Music, Purple Passion, and I’ve Got the Blues.
I tried to shift slightly, trying to move to a more comfortable position: there wasn’t one. The pain pills they gave me from surgery had been effective, but unfortunately their side effect was ever-present weeping, so I’d ditched them a couple of weeks earlier, relying instead on acetaminophen, which barely tamped down the pain and discomfort. I was pretty much a mess.
I gazed at the ceiling, waiting for that sleep that wouldn’t come — hadn’t come, since I’d moved from the uncomfortable recliner chair two days post-surgery and had come off the prescribed drugs. The light from the white Christmas lights we’d left in the laurel bush outside the window shone up through the slatted blinds, casting a linear design on the ceiling.
Our theme this year is Light, and Camilla chose this quarter’s theme of Light in the Darkness. I certainly had time to think about it. I loved the nuance and the subtlety of it, and was glad to figure out how to interpret it.
OccasionalPiece--Quilt! 