Over the past 15 years, my artwork has changed significantly. In the early work displayed in Archive 3, you will see that I have arranged pieces of commercially-available or repurposed fabrics to create designs, which I then quilted. I also experimented with shibori dyeing fabrics, sometimes adding beads to the quilting. But I continued to draw and paint people, and endeavored to make quilts of these drawings and paintings. What followed were the line drawing quilts in Archive 2, and the painted figurative quilts in Archive 3 and Archive 1, as well as many more recent quilts that can be viewed in Stitched Painted and Stitched Inked Quilts.
When I was in art school, Abstract Expressionism was in vogue. To my dismay, my family insisted on seeing things in my abstract paintings—“No, look—I see a face here, and a dog, there!” They were relieved when I painted realistically. Today I am honoring that family history while satisfying my need to continue to evolve as an artist. So instead of rendering my subjects realistically, I might push the classical parameters of portraiture. In New Work, you will still see people, as long as you don’t stand too close to the quilts in a gallery (it will be easier to see the subject matter online). You might be distracted by the close cropping, the introduction of fanciful shapes and colors, and the abstraction of elements of the human form, and fail to see the figures at all. Or they might be paintings of incomplete faces, figures, or only body parts. Another important aspect of this most recent work is emotional intensity, conveyed through various tones, shades, and juxtapositions of color hues and values.
In addition I continue to work on a second body of work—small collages and paintings, most of which are non-representational. In these smaller quilts, I play with texture, color and form. Smaller and therefore more affordable, many of them are mounted on stretched canvas.
When I was in art school, Abstract Expressionism was in vogue. To my dismay, my family insisted on seeing things in my abstract paintings—“No, look—I see a face here, and a dog, there!” They were relieved when I painted realistically. Today I am honoring that family history while satisfying my need to continue to evolve as an artist. So instead of rendering my subjects realistically, I might push the classical parameters of portraiture. In New Work, you will still see people, as long as you don’t stand too close to the quilts in a gallery (it will be easier to see the subject matter online). You might be distracted by the close cropping, the introduction of fanciful shapes and colors, and the abstraction of elements of the human form, and fail to see the figures at all. Or they might be paintings of incomplete faces, figures, or only body parts. Another important aspect of this most recent work is emotional intensity, conveyed through various tones, shades, and juxtapositions of color hues and values.
In addition I continue to work on a second body of work—small collages and paintings, most of which are non-representational. In these smaller quilts, I play with texture, color and form. Smaller and therefore more affordable, many of them are mounted on stretched canvas.
©2002-2020 Kathleen Kastles. All Rights Reserved.
