My soul has been filled this weekend by visual art and music.

What could be better?

On Saturday I spent most of the day with my local art buddies, a group called Arts Etc, doing experiments in fabric painting with stencils. There was no pressure to create a finished work.

In fact, I told them it was very unlikely any of us would create something that worked as a finished whole cloth piece. But maybe we would create interesting bits. We were allowing the patterns to happen and to discover the rhythms of shape working together.

Then Saturday evening I went to a piano concert at Stetson University, here in DeLand. (Stetson is my alma mater and I am always happy to give a shout out to their spectacular school of music.) Guest pianist Anton Nel took us through Bach as intricate as bobbin lace to Beethoven filled with heart pounding fury.

As I looked at what I created this weekend, and remembered the experience of the music, I’m putting them together in my head. So much of what makes patterns in music pleasing and memorable is what makes visual patterns pleasing and memorable too.

Here’s the whole piece I printed:

What I see:

A composition works well when sizes vary. Something big. Something medium. Something small. And in values, something dark and something light. (In fact, as I led the stenciling exercise with my group, we had that as part of our instructions: begin with a big white circle and a medium sized dark square. Then depart from there.)

In music, if everything is a big crescendo then nothing is a big crescendo. The brain needs a rest between these. And if a work is all light and spritely, it can feel trite. A mix of dark and light gives voice to each emotion more fully.

Other take-aways;

Repeating patterns are pleasing. (Like a melody that reoccurs.)

The pattern itself can have repeating element, and then that group of things can also reappear elsewhere on the composition, perhaps with a variation.

Note the rectangles in a row: The unit is itself a repeating pattern. It also repeats within the whole piece. Dark in one place. Light in another.

A mix of positive and negative. It’s interesting to print a circle. It’s even more interesting to see that same shape used elsewhere as a negative image, printing its perimeter. These places create depth.

Geometric shapes and organic nature-based shapes can interact nicely

Finally, in the midst of all this diversity and variation, there needs to be some unity. This piece of painted fabric has very limited color choices. A neutral background plus a dark and a light. This holds the whole work together.

I could, at this point, introduce a bit of splash someplace: maybe an orange or red element. It wouldn’t be confusing because so much on the piece is already unified.

A color splash would work like the “ting!” of a triangle at just the right place in a musical performance. Timed right, used judiciously: perfect! But if there were triangles tinging and tubas blaring and cellos going all at once, all throughout the performance, it might be a lot to take.

I’ve been working diligently all week on the large House of leaves quilt I’ve written about a few times. I needed a mental break. Thank you, art friends! Thank you music! You were just what I needed.

For all the artmakers: Happy creating
For all the art lovers: Happy appreciating 

Thank you for reading. I always enjoy questions and comments.
--Bobbi

bobbi@bobbibaughstudio.com

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