FMQ inspiration & evolution

Love the patterning on this building spied in an architectural magazine:

rendering of expansion to Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg proposed by Dominique Perrault

Inspired, I stitched these samples as a warm-up for fmq:

pattern evolution from straight lines to s-curves

I find curves much easier than straight lines. Is it that way for you too?

So Cal art whirl

When schedules suddenly aligned for an unencumbered week, I seized the opportunity and ran drove to southern California. When I go out of town, I like to know what to see, where to go and how to fit it all in. Monday was an eight-hour drive to San Diego. I laid out an ambitious schedule of exhibitions and venues for the next three days:

• Northern Stars: Twentieth Century Finnish Designs at the Mingei International Museum, San Diego (vintage Marimekko)
• Dyed Elegance: Asian Modernism and the Art of Kuboku and Hisako Takadu at the San Diego Museum of Art (roketsuzome - wax resist dyeing)
• Art Meets Science, Thomas Contemporary Quilt Collection, and Magical Mystery Tour: en homage at Visions Art Museum, San Diego (quilts)
• California Design, 1930-1965: "Living in a Modern Way" at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (comprehensive view of modern design)
• Breaking Ground: Chinese American Architects in LA (1945-1980) at the Chinese-American Museum, Los Angeles (googie architecture by Helen Liu Fong)
• Folding Paper: the Infinite Possibilities of Origami at the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles (mind-boggling folds)
• Claire Falkenstein at Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, Los Angeles (she sculpted entrance gates for Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy)
• Pasadena to Santa Barbara: a Selected History of Art in Southern California, 1951-1969 at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (Karl Benjamin's abstract compositions would make great quilts)
• Carefree California: Cliff May and the Romance of the Ranch House at University Art Museum University of California, Santa Barbara (he was great at marketing)

I didn't have time to see much more at each venue. I just missed San Diego's Craft Revolution: from Post-War Modern to California Design. It looked great even as the Mingei staff were dismantling it. But I maxxed out and even saved the Eames House in Pacific Palisades for another time. But I did manage to connect with friends in San Diego and LA for dinner.

Making it all possible meant a one night stay each in each city - if it's Tuesday, it must be ___ - and two-hour drives each day in crazy southern California traffic. To cap off the trip I spent one relaxing non-scheduled day in San Luis Obispo before returning home.

You may think I'm nuts, but this was a great vacation - full of art and inspiration. 

Simple beauty

The prestigious Pritzker Prize for 2010 went to SANAA architects - Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa - of Tokyo. They've designed buildings all over the world with two in the United States: the New Museum of Contempory Art in New York City and the Glass Pavilion for the Museum of Art in Toledo, Ohio. Christopher Hawthorne, the LA Times architecture critic, writes about them winning the award here. In an earlier review on August 23, 2006 he praised the pavilion. From that review:

". . . Minimalist architecture deserving of the name pares itself down not in the pursuit of style points but in an effort to frame the relationship between solid and void, nature and culture, and color and its absence -- and to explore how the eye sees and the mind understands those differences."

How about applying this poetic definition to quilts? Minimalist quilts.