One of the challenges presented to my Seams Unique group this year was to pick a famous artist and compose a fiber piece to imitate the artists' style or color palette. My artist was Salvadore Dali, a truly prolific man, if a little mad. In researching his work, which spans many different styles and color palettes, I decided to focus on a couple of his iconic images. Specifically, his melting clock from the Disintegration of Time and also the crutches he used in several of his works. In my piece I used the crutch to hold up his identifiable mustache. The piece I constructed is small, only 14 inches, but we were allowed to do something as large as 36 inches. Dali worked extremely large for his religious works,but also very small for some of his later works.
We normally never show our challenge pieces in the group until the hanging of our exhibit at a local quilt shop, but since we all selected a different artist to imitate, I felt that showing this on my blog wouldn't be able to influence any of the other members in the execution of their pieces. Several of Dali's later works were done in a gold/brown/beige palette, so I used those colors in my piece. To add a bit of bling, I surrounded the two clocks with a gold sparkly fabric. And just to be a little "out of the box", I let the major clock melt out of the piece! I'm not sure what Dali's intention was in portraying the melting clocks; perhaps he saw time slipping out of his grasp, but the melting indicates a slow dripping to me, and I find that as I get older just the opposite is true. Time seems to speed by faster as we get older, don't you think?
