A day in the life of a 'textile exegete'.

Psalm 133 - what to do next?

Embroidery isn't the calm and happy stress-free activity that it might seem. We stitching types often say we could do with a chaplain (you know who you are!) just as much as they might need them at the Olympics, because there are some tense moments, hours even. So psalm 133 was coming along fine, but then I got to the bit where decisions need to be made - which stitches, what colours, and I made a few attempts, but somehow nothing seemed right. I'm not always a great one for doing samples, and so my experiments happened on the thing itself, and there's only a certain number of times you can pull out before it starts to look like a dishcloth. Here, it's only glued together.

No!

I went down my usual tramline, dividing the pieces by means of the usual stitch so far - Pfaff no. 134 using various shiny rayon threads to represent the flow of liquids, oil and water, around the place. It seemed to be going well, but standing back, it became apparent that far from the contrast helping to bring out the velvetty character of the cloths, it actually drew attention to itself and made the velvettiness disappear. So that had to be abandoned and pulled out, which took an hour and a half.

NO!!

So I thought about trying a different stitch, less spiky, and in a mousey coloured matt silk thread. Oh dear, no! I know; you'd think that by now I had more sense. So that had to come out. Experiment three had to work, or the whole thing was going to become ragged at the edges, me too, and I'd be needing a chaplain right here, right now!

MUCH better!

So plain stitching was applied, just as I secretly had known was needed right from the beginning, and here was a lesson, that however 'symbolic' I might like any of the individual elements to be, the overall mood of the thing was of greater importance.

Rothko's Four darks in red, 1958

It sometimes happens that I think I know what a psalm is about, and then when stitching it out, I discover that the work is making me change my understanding of the original text. I had thought that Psalm 133 was about a riotous party, what with all that oil sloshing over heads and clothes and so on as the 'brethren dwell together in unity', but when the colours came up all velvetty together, (they are hand-dyed by me, and I fondly hope that they have a bit of a deep Rothko-like quality, even if his took up a whole big wall in a NY restaurant; see some Rothko), I paused and had to admit that the original psalm has something of a calm harmony that was coming through despite my party-animal tendencies. So I went back to the text feeling that I'd learnt something I might otherwise have missed.

It'd better be OK

But I did want there to be something trickling down and round, and so I decided we'd have a few beads down one seam, and of course these weren't going to be easy to choose as I have a bit of a stockpile of different sorts. So I settled on just three kinds, a shiny royal blue, a pearl, and a matt pale olive green, in fact really olive, the colour the green ones are at the deli counter. I just hope the effect is OK and the velvettiness is still there, and the calm atmosphere still there, but with a bit of fizz, like a nice quiet evening with family which begins with Cava and ends with cocoa. Maybe it's not for nothing the psalm doesn't mention wine flowing.

The whole exercise told me that I have a lot to learn about colour theory in practice, and so I went back to read up about Paul Klee (Klee's colour theory), who had a lot to say about these things. I need to study this and think about contrasts in texture as well as colour, so I'm hoping he will help there too. He was a weaver, so I have hope.

I love it that Rothko said  “If a thing is worth doing once, it is worth doing over and over again – exploring it, probing it, demanding by its repetition that the public look at it”.

 When my exhibition comes up, it will be seen that there is a lot of repetition in it.

Ps 88 begins

When I get to the stage of wanting to set a match to my work, it's probably then that I need the chaplain-thing, and this did happen the other day (I mean the wish to, not the actual match-lighting). But there's always an up-side to such feelings, and it gave me the kick to do an experiment for psalm 88 to come, which I knew might well take to  a bit of pyro-something. 'I am counted with them that go down into the pit..... etc etc', so he is fairly miserable. Thus I set about crocheting with some cord made of some synthetic material that turns into hard blobby bits when the cooks' blow torch is applied to it. The pic of it here seems a bit out of focus, which adds to the malevolence of the look, I think. My whole life in tatters, I'm a waste of time and space, nobody thinks I'm worthwhile, you know the feeling. No? Well count yourself lucky.  It feels like a bit of a risk taking on psalm 88, as though one might be dragged down into the mire by constantly musing on it. I think the opposite would be more likely; that's why the psalms are so good, isn't it? Because you're never alone when you read them, and apart from psalm 88, and maybe psalm 89 (which is also more specific in its complaints), there's always an upbeat note to tap into at the end, so the overwhelming message of the psalms is that life is good despite all.