My absolute total favorites pictures of a window are the paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe of a window in her New Mexico home. This photo is taken from a catalogue of an exhibition of hers I once saw in Munich, and I think I must have sat in front of that painting for over an hour.
Of course, this photo does not do the painting justice in the least. But this is the standard I would have to live up to if I were to do something in the terms of 'window'. Fortunately, this current challenge topic was extended to include 'portals' as well, and that gave me options to think about.
It's not been so long ago that the world seemed to stand still while a container ship had got slightly off its route and was blocking the Suez canal. I also have an app on my phone that is called "Marine Traffic", which I love to look at, all ships with a radar can be seen in their current position, different types of ships are depicted in different colours. And when you zoom in on the Suez canal you can see that this is a very small and narrow passage way indeed (not that we didn't know that before the incident). The eye of the needle that the camel will pass through...? Somehow I got onto the idea of using this for my piece. A screenshot taken from the app
and run through a variety of filters on my photoshop got me going. At first I was very tempted to use the mosaic filter,
but it would look too much like Paula's wonderful pieces. So I tried different filters, saved some.
This one I found too dark.
The next one was an interesting concoction, but didn't really show much of a portal anymore.
I wanted to get the image printed on fabric and then work with it. In the end I went with this version.
Real life took over, I left my printing order rather late, ordered, wasn't actually happy with the quality of the fabric I received, because I hadn't realized that this is what I signed up for. But it was too late to try another one and I had to make do with this shiny thing that was as fickle as a primadonna to work with.
I quilted around various features of the picture, making sure to render the place names illegible.
At some point I had the feeling I wanted to add a compass rose to include that bit of a reference to map/nautical, and I stole like an artist, copying an image which I then transferred via transparent paper.
Follows my least favorite part, ripping out the paper, but the result was worth it.
The finished piece, as of tonight, photographed under unfavorable lighting conditions, but it's the best I can do right now:
Promise to edit the post with better pictures once work life slows down a bit.
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