Design Concept

 In 2009, I spent a week in Paris, visiting museums and seeing the many attractions it has to offer. In a vast, cobblestone plaza, in front of the Pompidou Museum of Contemporary Art, I photographed a lone musician, absorbed with playing an instrument that looked like an upside-down wok. Ten years later I decided to use this image in a quilt. Using Corel Draw (a vector-design program) I drew the outlines of the cobblestones and filled them with a gradation of rainbow colors. In the spaces between the cobblestones I used a gradation from white to black. What had been a water drain in my photograph became a diagonal line of black and white stripes, dividing the sky and ground. I designed the sky in another gradation of rainbow hues with a speckled pattern, reminiscent of the pointillist painting of Seurat, and in which you can see the subtle outlines of the Pompidou Museum façade. I painted the figure of the musician digitally, using my Microsoft Surface Design (touch screen) computer and gave him a colorful wardrobe of saturated colors to replace the browns and beiges he was wearing in real life. The composite image was digitally printed on cotton fabric.

Many different colors of thread were used in the quilting, which approached the level of thread painting in the figure of the musician. The cobblestones are quilted in a pattern of smaller cobblestones, and the sky is quilted in a swirling meander pattern. The custom binding fabric, with black and white stripes fading to solid black in the corners was printed at the same time as the quilted center. One of my dye-painted fabrics was used for the back.

I googled “musical instrument that looks like an upside-down wok” and came up with the hang (German pronunciation: [haŋ]), which was developed in 2000 by Felix Rohner and Sabina Schärer in Bern, Switzerland. Since the musician was hanging out in front of the Pompidou, I verbed the name of the instrument and came up with the double-entendred title for this piece.

Exhibitions:

• Quilts a World of Beauty, IQA Contest, International Quilt Festival, Houston, TX, October 3 -November 3, 2019 (First Place: People Portraits & Figures)
• Pacific International Quilt Festival (online) Visuals #2 exhibition (Honorable Mention)

Publications

• Quilting Arts Magazine, April/May 2020 Issue 104, pp.18-19
• Art Quilting Studio, Winter, 2021 (feature) pp.50-51
• Art Quilt Quarterly, SAQA, Issue #22, p. 54 + (front cover)
• Exploring Art Quilts, SAQA Volume 3, Museum Quality, p 127