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Saturday, August 23, 2008

Post FOQ blogger blues

I've been struck this week by how quiet my feed reader has been, as though I'm not the only FOQ visitor who is finding it difficult to capture the experience in words or pick up the threads of what they were doing before.

Of all the things about FOQ, three elements stood out. One was the standard of workmanship on the EQA stand. There was absolutely no justification for the comment, heard on more than one occasion and not just at FOQ, that art quilts are an excuse for sloppy work. I liked quite a lot of the work here, though not all, but the standards were exceptionally high throughout. The second was the sense of companionship - whether meeting friends, both real and virtual, or just chatting with strangers over coffee.

However the over-riding element of the festival for me, was the work of Dorothy Caldwell. I revisited her exhibit several times over the three days that I was at the FOQ but seem to be thinking about it more and more as time goes by. There is something about her work, something that I can't put into words even for myself that draws me in. You can read about her masterclass which Margaret has blogged about, but perhaps the blog of another Margaret or Olga's writing can better capture the work of Dorothy Caldwell. Her work can be seen here http://www.ccca.ca/artists/image_timeline.html?languagePref=en&link_id=180&artist=Dorothy+Caldwell but this is a very poor second to seeing the real thing.

3 comments:

The Idaho Beauty said...

My sitemeter was showing a huge drop in hits, last week, and I decided maybe everyone was busy watching the Olympics, but I can see that FOQ might have factored in as well.

I have to say it used to be highly true that art quilts (along with the term folk quilt) was synonymous with poor workmanship, but I've seen a real change in that the last few years. There's a lot of high quality stuff out there now.

Helen said...

Hi linda, thanks for the link... I thought I'd see you somewhere before :D
I guess everyone is suffering from visual creative overload? It will take a while for the grey matter to process all that viewing :D

MargB said...

Linda
Thankyou for this.
Dorothy Caldwell is awesome - I would love to see her work in real life. Can you tell me is her stitching hand or machine done? My eyes aren't the best but I would guess hand.