Kelly Textile Portraits

People and Places in Textile Art
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-84994-894-4
Verlag: Batsford
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 128 Seiten

SHORTLISTED in The Creative Book Awards 2024. A creative and beautiful book packed with inspiring ideas to help you capture likenesses and explore personalities in stitch, from a well-loved textile artist. Anne Kelly's evocative and nostalgic work often incorporates portraits - of friends, family, historical figures and even pets. Within these pages she shares her approach to textile portraiture, bringing in a wealth of different embroidery techniques, including hand and machine embroidery, quilting and appliqué, to render in cloth the nuances of facial expressions and the personalities of her subjects. The book covers: • Selfies at Home: making the perfect self-portrait in cloth. • Representation and Culture: how portraits have been used in textile art for cultural expression around the world. • Stylized Imagery: going beyond the traditional portrait into abstraction. • Place and Time: creating a sense of place with portraiture, sometimes incorporating photographs. • Narratives: how to create a fuller story using deeply personal ephemera and related imagery. • Pet Projects: immortalising your pets in your textile work. Beautifully illustrated with stunning examples of her own work and that of intriguing textile artists who specialise in portraiture from around the world, this is the ideal book for embroiderers and textile artists who want to introduce this often tricky subject area into their work. 

Anne Kelly is a textile artist and tutor. She trained in Canada and the UK and now teaches and speaks to guilds and groups. Her work is exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions, including private collections in the UK and abroad, the Vatican Collection in Rome and at the Textile Museum of Canada in Toronto, and she was artist-in-residence at Sussex Prairie Garden in West Sussex and exhibited at the international World of Threads Festival and the Prague Patchwork Meeting. She is the author of several books published by Batsford: Textile Portraits, Textile Nature, Textile Folk Art and Textile Travels, and was the co-author with Cas Holmes of Connected Cloth. She lives in Tunbridge Wells, Kent.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kelly, Anne

Leseproben

Anne Kelly, , mixed-media inspiration board.

Self-Portraits

The global Covid-19 pandemic of recent years truncated our activities by necessity, and home has become a focus for many aspects of our lives. As well as introspection, it has served perhaps to let us focus more deeply on our relationships. In this chapter we are starting with self-portraits and family pictures, not just in the traditional sense but also as indicators of our mental and physical relationships.

I find the easiest way to prepare for making a portrait in stitch is to begin with a drawing. Whether made from life or by using a photograph, it is always a great starting point, and enables you to make notes on details such as skin tone and hair, clothing, lighting and posture. In Portraiture 101, I provide some simple tips for drawing faces (start small, then progress to a larger scale when you feel more confident), while Making a Self-Portrait on Cloth offers a step-by-step guide to help ease you into the making process, including mixing skin tones to add colour, which certainly can be daunting.

From there, we’ll be looking at artists who use line to create stitch portraits, starting with the family theme. How to plan and create meaningful compositions while looking at faces and features will also be covered, as will artists who use colour for further definition. Adding colour to portraiture can be complex but rewarding, bringing depth and texture to work, enabling the artist to highlight features in both the portrait and the surroundings. A personal take on self-portraiture and interiors is explored, too.

Anne Kelly, (detail), mixed-media textile on canvas.

Anne Kelly, sketchbook pages, mixed media on paper.

Anne Kelly, self-portrait, pen on paper.

Portraiture 101

Start with an outline of the face:

» Notice the face shape – is it round or more oval?

» Ears are located about halfway down the head.

» The top of the eyelid is parallel to the top of the ear.

Anne Kelly, drawings for eyes, nose and mouth, pen on paper.

Locate the eyes, nose and mouth:

» Draw a faint dotted line down the centre of the face, and draw two lines across to divide the face into thirds.

» The spacing between the eyes is important, as is that between the nose and mouth.

» Draw the features in tentatively to start with, then more firmly when you are happy with them.

Making a Self-Portrait on Cloth

To make a self-portrait on cloth, you will need a photo or drawing of your head and shoulders and an A4-sized piece of calico or sheeting fabric. Equip yourself with acrylic or fabric paints and a mixing palette to experiment with mixing up your skin tone colour.

1 Take the image of your head and shoulders and use a marker pen to draw around the main lines of the portrait.

2 Trace it onto the fabric with tracing paper, then outline the face with a waterproof pen.

3 Mix up your skin tone colour, referring to the skin tone samples (right). For lighter skin tones, use white as a base; for medium and dark tones, use a peach or beige. Add a hint or more of yellow, pink or brown as required. Test on a scrap of fabric or paper, and dry it off to see the finished colour.

Anne Kelly, self-portrait with background, pen on paper, and skin tone samples, acrylic fabric paint on paper.

Anne Kelly, , mixed-media textile on canvas.

4 Once you are happy with your skin tone colour, paint your face in first, using brushstrokes that go in the direction of the shape of the face. Add red or pink to the base tone to create cheek and lip colour. Paint the eyes in, using a small brush to create eyebrows.

5 Stitch around the main outlines of the face by hand or machine. For hair, you can couch wool, silk or string, or use machine embroidery. Add stitching details on the face with long hand stitches or machine stitching.

6 For the background, add collected fragments or pieces of fabric. In my , I have added a piece of needlework, some silverwork and some scraps of cotton fabric.

7 Once the piece is complete composition-wise, you can add extra machine stitching and hand-stitching details as desired.

Joetta Maue: Mother and Child

Joetta, an American artist based in Boston, has created beautiful ‘Mother and Child’ stitch sketches showing her everyday family life, as she explains:

‘Inspiration comes from being an astute observer of my everyday life. My eyes are always turned on for small moments of beauty and awe in the day to day. I look toward the landscape of my home as muse and document the moments that occur within that space. My thread drawings often focus on the relationships and intimacy of the home space. As I became a mother it was inevitable that my subject shifted to some of the aspects of motherhood.’

‘The narrative portraits often focus on the moments of closeness in these relationships. It starts with me noticing a moment that is profound but simultaneously ordinary. I then photograph it and work from the photograph to create a drawing with thread. I used to work more directly from the image, whereas now I work quite intuitively once the basic lines are established, responding to the line and light quality that the original image has. It is a slow, meditative labour that builds love, devotion, repetition and care directly into the piece. I primarily use found domestic linens so that they can bring their own witnessing of the home into the work.’

Joetta Maue, , mixed-media textile (detail).

Joetta Maue, , mixed-media textile.

Holidays

Time spent away or travelling gives us a new perspective on our relationships and breathing space to reflect. When my children were young, we were fortunate to visit a cabin in rural Canada in the summer, visiting family and friends in my native country. Before the invasion of the internet and mobile phones, reading and drawing were activities indulged in between swimming in the lake. captures that place and time, and I used a series of portraits taken from sketchbooks made at the time.

Anne Kelly, portrait sketches for , watercolour and pen on paper.

Anne Kelly, study for , paint and stitch on cloth.

Anne Kelly, (detail), mixed-media textile.

Anne Kelly, , mixed-media textile.

Family Spaces

In this composite portrait, I combined individual images of my immediate family, stitched over a multi-layered and patched background. I used domestic textiles and family fabrics for the background. I wanted the faces of the family members to be superimposed over the textiles. I used the tracing method as described in Making a Self-Portrait on Cloth (see pages 11–12) to draw the outlines and hand stitched them using backstitch and perle cotton.

Anne Kelly, , mixed-media textile.

Anne Kelly, ‘Tom’, (detail), mixed-media textile.

Anne Kelly, ‘Ruth’, (detail), mixed-media textile.

Dream Portraits

During the first Covid-19 lockdown of 2020 in the UK, I was invited to participate in a fundraising exhibition called ‘Isolated Observations’ at the Candida Stevens Gallery in Chichester in the south of England. I chose to enter four ‘Dream Portraits’ based on the strange and disconnected dreams that I was having at the start of the pandemic. I began the portraits as described in Making a Self-Portrait on Cloth (see pages 11–12) but added small objects in the background that connected with the people represented. As can be seen from the two examples featured here, the pieces were made with much extra stitching on top, where I tried to make the lines reflect the contours in the subjects’ faces, and additional embellishment in the backgrounds.

Anne Kelly, , mixed-media textile, framed.

Anne Kelly , mixed-media textile, framed.

Emily Jo Gibbs: Kids Today

Emily is a British textile artist based in London. In her ‘Kids Today’ project, she takes an affectionate look at the children in her neighbourhood, as she explains:

‘“Kids Today” is a series of small portraits of children who play in our street. I live on a culde-sac in south-east London and very unusually lots of children, including my two boys, play games together in the street. They ride bikes and roller-skate and dress up and make movies. They climb lampposts and kick balls and fall out and make up. They have picnics and water fights, and they grow up together. In this series of work they are all sat at my kitchen table, most eager to take part in the project, some less sure but keen not to miss out.’

Emily Jo Gibbs, , mixed-media textile.

Emily Jo Gibbs,...