Cindi Handy

I come from a long line of quilters. And although I have quilted myself several times, quilting is very time consuming, and I prefer to paint. I appreciate the time and effort that goes into quilting and all the attention to details required, both for piecing the patterns and the actual quilting.

When I got married, in 1997, my grandmother (Elizabeth Phillips) gifted me a quilt that had been worked on by three generations of my family. My great grandmother (Maria Hansen) began piecing the quilt using fabric from the 1940s and 1950s, but never finished it. My grandmother had the pieced squares for several years before she decided to work on the quilt, adding fabric she had from 1960s and 1970s. Helping my grandmother finish the quilt, my mother (Merideth Maloy) worked on the quilting. The result is a mix of fabrics (some 80+ years old) and colors in the basic basket design. In honor of generations of quilters in my family, I decided to do a painting of this quilt.

I’m calling my latest watercolor, Blue Cascade, not only after the waterfall of fabric pooling at the bottom, but also the second definition of cascade which is, “a process whereby something, typically information and knowledge, is successively passed on.”

The following is a slide show, followed by a description of my work in progress.

I draped the quilt on a chair outside and took many photographs, rearranging the fabric until I found an abstract composition that I liked. Working from that photo, I began my painting.

For the first couple weeks I used only three colors. Starting with washes of Phthalo Blue to find my shapes, I then used Prussian Blue to start defining the shadows. I used Indigo Blue last, deepening the shadows and building up the texture of the fabric. I finished with a light wash of Cadmium Yellow to warm up the lighter areas where the sun shined on the fabric.

Next, I started blocking in the other colors. This was the fun part – painting all the patterns in the fabric. Since several of the fabric pieces were light patterns on dark backgrounds, I had to work in reverse (negative painting) to create my patterns.

The “baskets” were then painted in a pale blue, not matching but close, to the solid teal blue squares. I tried to stay true to the colors of the original fabrics as much as possible.

Lastly, I painted the remaining white fabric. The bright whites were left unpainted, but I added several layers of watercolor to create the shadows. Some additional tweaking of the shadows throughout the painting and Blue Cascade was finished.