I am working on new quilts for my forthcoming exhibition at the Carrefour du Patchwork in France next September, and is taking over my life entirely. I think of designs, shapes, lines, and above all colour - how to convey the feeling of the light, using fabric. And actually make the quilts, up on my design wall. Not to mention planning the whole exhibition - how many and what quilts to make, and how they will work together - and also all the paperwork!
The rainbow was my starting point on thinking about colour. By constructing rainbow or spectrum-based quilts, I got a real feeling for the interaction of colours - the importance of the 'bias' of the colour - whether I chose an orange-bias read or a pink-bias red, and so on. For the colours to work together, the 'biases', the saturation, the intensity of each colour in relation to the others, have to be just right. And that works only by what quilters call 'auditioning' fabrics, and Josef Albers calls Interaction of Colour. A visual thing.
My first ever quilt was based on the rainbow. Then I made a few more. The photo below illustrates one of them, "Tales of Tzars and Treasures", where I combined my very first Heide Stoll-Weber rainbow-coloured cotton sateens with black and white fabrics.
There are no cut and dry rules about what colour goes well with which other. The only way to decide whether a particular colour combination works, is to put the fabrics together and then to consider the specific circumstances and requirements, the light quality, the amount of each fabric involved, the personal preferences... that's to say, the visual effect of the interaction of specific colours, and how that relates to what you are looking for.
My favourite book on colour is the old Bauhaus workhorse, Johannes Itten's The Elements of Colour - still available, mostly second hand, some times at a price... but it is worth every penny. This book is a short version of his larger treatise "The Art of Colour" - worth several hundred pounds, if you can get hold of it - I used to read it in a college library.
Thank you for visiting and reading my ramblings!
Alicia
