i am not a crook/failure

Well, all of you who ventured a guess at the riddle in the last post were....right! Here was the question: if you had to choose, which of these symbols would you name taketa and which would you name naluma?


The brain perceives the sounds in taketa as hard and sharp, the characteristics of the lines in the symbol on the left. I colored taketa red -- warm colors come forward (are hard and sharp?). The sounds in naluma, are perceived as softer and smoother (but do they necessarily recede?).

Marketers design and name products accordingly (there's a lot more research on perceptual responses to sound and form and color).

Fascinating Fact: One of the first sounds babies produce is formed when the lips come together, as in the sucking response -- [m]. Of course that sound is soft and smooth -- like [M]ama!

How does this interesting linguistic information relate to art? Perhaps in naming a piece, perhaps in pondering curved vs. angular lines. Whaddya think?

Let's revisit my alstromerias (see the "a military aesthetic" post). Here are my photos and my initial transformations:




I liked the combination of curved lines with a few sharp angles. They seemed to capture the lyricism of the flower.

The design in the cool color version intrigued me. Aha, I could create it in fused glass and incorporate that into a piece!

And here's the rub. The incarnation in glass was...well, er, uh...ugly. Not only was it ugly, it fractured big time a few hours after I took it out of the kiln (turns out the types of glass I used were incompatible, kinda like Montagues and Capulets, or Rosie and The Donald). Here is the piece, a failure on many levels:



The whole design was a disaster -- it was too literal, the green glass was too opaque, and I had lost the whole feel of the flower.

But wait! I could play with the photo of my failed glass! I could print the results on fabric, or just admire the photos! So here's the result of a few hours' play:

First, crop to get a strong diagonal line, focus on those tiny bubbles:



Hey, that fracture line is way cool!

How about something I could print on fabric?



Kinda batik-y. How about another crop and something that would have a repeat design?




Or something that resembled deconstructed screen printing, but without the mess?




Well, the glass failure was not a failure at all, just fun fodder! I will make another alstromeria-based fused glass piece for a future project.

Meanwhile, I made another pass at the initial flower photos, and came up with this:




I combined that with some further incarnations of the blue piece (in my initial group of photos, way above), and ...voila! Something I reeeeeeeally liked!



Multiples of this image totaling 40" were printed on silk satin (yes, you can set your own printer to do this in Photoshop!):



This will become a wall hanging -- but, a conundrum. How to quilt it? I graciously welcome your collective input...