The meaning of red

improv process

When I started discussing with my quilting friends Carla and Giovanna, about the new game to be proposed as a Quilt Improv Studio challenge, I was reading the book Abstract Art. Carla’s proposal to try quilting a monochromatic work was perfectly fitting with the chapter I was reading then: the history of American Monochrome paintings.

At the time to start my monochrome quilt, I decided to experimented a bit with extremes.
I kept the shapes to a minimum (a good occasion to discover the difficulties of minimalism).
As in the monochromatic painting experiments, I focused on surface texture, quilting red on red, going narrow up to matchstick style.

At a certain point, the differences introduced in my quilt started to be barely visible even for me… and this reminded me of a photo galley I made twenty years ago, participating to a science congress on nanotechnologies, dealing with objects having size sometimes too small for being resolved by visible light.

Well… red is the color at the gate of visible light wavelength.
Thus, I decided that my red quilt had gained grades to be dedicated to all the above.

My monochrome quilt is titled “Threshold of the visible”. It makes me think of my experience with microscopy and surface characterization, of the American monochrome texture paintings, and of the wavelength where we start to see red: 740 nanometers!

Joining passions

collaborations

About one year ago, it was inaugurated my solo gallery Tagliamento king of rivers, where I used both photography and quilts to express my passion for visiting the wilderness of riverbeds in my region.

Now that it was time to propose a palette for the month of September, for my usual appointment with Patchworkvictim, I could not resist revisiting this homage to the colors of water and nature, and I selected the solids used for my favorite quilt dedicated to Tagliamento river. No wonder, it is titled “King”.

Fabric selection is described in a dedicated article on Patchworkvictim blog. You can get a full view of them all also in the video below. Wish you a nice dive in the waters of mountain rivers!