On Monday I finally finished up my needle felt stream painting. It sat untouched for a while for a couple reasons. I was working to make a pair of socks pretty quickly for a couple weeks, and thus worked on very little else. And then I just needed projects for a bit which were high on the meditative/soothing scale and lower on the creative energy scale – I just didn’t have much extra energy between work and family things to put into being creative in the way I would need.
But after a long holiday weekend, I felt ready to tackle the final touches to the stream abstract. When last I posted about this piece, this is where I was at:
It was getting pretty close, but I had added the mohair locks to only about 50-60% of it, and there were areas which I felt were starting to become ill-defined, or lose their depth. The ripples were also starting to disappear. Basically, I was at the point where I needed to be able to give a lot of attention to detail, and spend almost as much time looking at it as adding to it.
This was my original painting from a photograph (which I’m sure I still have somewhere back in the U.S. in storage along with the original painting), and while you can see how they are related, the needle felt is very much it’s own piece.
I’ve had it in my mind to do a textile version of this painting for years. It’s one of my favorite pieces I did in high school, and it just felt like the abstractness of it and the range of colors would lend itself well. At one point, I thought I was going to spin bouclé yarns and use those somehow. I even started spinning some of them, and thought for a while that I would incorporate them into the needle felt somehow, but in the end they didn’t fit. I did use some of the same mohair locks I used to create the yarns.
Before showing the final piece, I’d like to tell you a little more about the subject of the needle felt. It’s not a painting of just any old stream, it’s of The Stream, i.e., the stream that ran through the little patch of woods behind our house growing up. This is a stream where I spent hours and hours of my childhood. We kids would play tag or hide and seek down there. I watched for deer, ducks, and on one memorable occasion*, fox, down there. My childhood cat would also take walks with me. She liked to wait until I wasn’t watching to cross the stream. In the event she got wet, she didn’t want anybody else to see it.
It was not a very big stream. Nowhere was it deep enough to swim, and in most places it was somewhere between ankle and calf deep. In a few memorable spots it was over the knees, but only a few. Only if we’d had some serious rainstorms or a hurricane did it get deeper, and then it turned from clear water over sand and pebbles to a sandy muddy brown color.
We had to go down a steep hill to get to it, as it ran along the bottom of a sort of ravine between the back of our street and the back of another housing development on the other side. In some places the wooded area was a bit wider, and in others it was barely wider than the yards of the houses which came up on either side. In other words, my mother never had to worry about us being too far away when we were down there. But we were also secure in the knowledge that there was really no way this space could be developed.
Yet at the same time, it was just big enough for us children to feel like we were having grand adventures in our own little forest. So as you can understand, the stream was a pretty special place.
In the needle felt, I took all the colors of the original and intensified them. It’s not what I set out to do, but it’s where things went. I think that in some ways, I was stuck as long as I kept referring back to the painting. Once I had the basic forms and shapes filled in, I was able to make much more progress when I worked from the image in my mind of the painting and my memories of what it meant to sit by the stream watching it, rather than from the photos I had of the painting.
I think I put in a good two hours yesterday finishing it up (maybe a little less if you deduct cat-wrangling?) and I think it’s really and truly done. It’s amazing how the smallest touches sometimes are so important. The small little dashes of white and beige (the white was too start in the warmer areas) really add to the completeness of the ripples. I also added just a little bit of dark green into some of the dark purple areas to increase the sense of depth by darkening it further.
I think I’ve achieved my overall aim, which is to create an image that captures how I feel like you can begin by glancing at something simple and everyday. But if you look a little more closely, and for a bit longer, you can find more in it – more colors, more shapes, more movement – than you initially perceived.
*memorable because the fox chased me – I was too near it’s den and didn’t know what a fox warning call sounds like. For your information, it resembles the sound of a crow with a frog in it’s throat.