Original Image

Shop talk with Max

It’s a simple drawing, stark lines of black ink, defining a figure standing confident and erect, draped in a pink sari. The shards of light falling on the folds of the garment are artfully defined by where the artist has chosen not to place color, leaving the white paper to do the job… one of the hallmarks of an accomplished water color artist. I will use this figure as the focal point of a fiber art piece. But first I need to clean up the original art, enlarge it and transfer it onto a material that I can sew.

That material is a modern invention: a spun polyester fiber that’s compressed and is somewhere between cloth and paper. It is called Evolon.  Polyester had not been invented in Max’s day. As I convert my father’s watercolor I am thinking of sharing with him the novelty of the various techniques and materials available to me that were not known in his time. My art education was pre-computer and so I also learned the various processes that made up his working life, ruling pens, X-Acto knives, lettering, and composing collages by gluing together various elements. Artists today still use those techniques but the ability to do all of that with a computer, as well as creating new, layered composite imagery would have astounded him, never mind the emerging world of AI.  And so I imagine myself saying “Look, I can isolate the image and put it on a separate layer where you would’ve had to cut it out, see how instead of coating the unwanted marks with white paint I can just delete the pixels, See how I can take your drawing that has faded and boost the colors or change them with infinite alternatives.”  I imagine he would be delighted; then again he might say “well that’s all fine and good fakery, but give me a paintbrush and a piece of paper and I’ll make my own way.”

Still, in my mind, I’m glad we had this talk.