Textile Portraits E-Book

Anne Kelly

• Herausgeber: Batsford
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 100

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

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. 

Leseprobe

Anne Kelly Stay at Home (detail), mixed-media textile.

Anne Kelly, Me and My Doll (detail), mixed-media textile.

Marna Lunt, stitched badges, hand embroidery on metal frame.

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1

Selfies at Home

Chapter 2

Representation and Culture

Chapter 3

Stylized Imagery

Chapter 4

Place and Time

Chapter 5

Narratives

Chapter 6

Pets and Animals

Conclusion

Featured Artists and Contributors

For Investigation

Further Reading

Suppliers

Acknowledgements

Index

Anne Kelly, studio shelf.

Introduction

Portraits can add an extra layer of meaning to a composition. We notice the style of the subject – their appearance and pose – and relate it to a time and place in the rest of the composition. Portraiture in any medium is a challenge, but in textiles possibly more than most. Rendering body form, skin tone and facial details in cloth and stitch is challenging but it can also be very rewarding.

As a fine art student, I remember drawing plaster busts as a discipline, which I found both daunting and at times boring, although it’s something I’m glad of now as it gave me the confidence to approach portraiture as a subject matter. Using a wide-ranging selection of artists and makers who use portraiture in their work, as well as examples from my own practice, my aim is to set out accessible approaches to adding people and figures to your pieces, too.

As a tutor whose practice has most recently spanned the extraordinary Covid pandemic, I have been struck by my students’ desire for connection with their environment, pets and home. In recognition of this, I have added an additional short section on pet and animal portraiture.

In Chapter 1: Selfies at Home, we will look at self-portraits in a variety of settings. Being able to draw the outline of a face and place features inside it enables us to capture a likeness – using a suitable range of colours and textures makes it easier to visualize. Starting with a good likeness enables further experimentation.

Throughout history, textile portraits have been used to represent social, political and cultural trends and ideas, and artists have taken to stitch to get their message across, as we will explore in Chapter 2: Representation and Culture. By using local and personal materials, these images and their meanings are made clear. With examples from artists around the world, this chapter will reflect upon and engage the maker with ideas for self-expression.

One of the joys of making in textiles is the variety of styles to be discovered in artists’ works. Portraits enable us to find ways of telling personal narratives with unique interpretations, as we will discover in Chapter 3: Stylized Imagery, which also features projects in 3D, including making textile dolls.

Old photographs can be an emotional and richly rewarding resource for makers, as we will review in Chapter 4: Place and Time. Capturing an image and place together using portraiture as a subject creates insightful and unique pieces. By using vintage textiles and various photo transfer techniques, I will illustrate how it is possible to create your own ‘Moving Memory’ piece.

Chapter 5: Narratives is about using ephemera and sourced imagery to create special textile projects and gifts. Combining paper and textile is a popular choice and I will be presenting a variety of approaches here. Adding text or creating work around a piece of writing is a popular source of inspiration for textile artists. Covering an object with portraits and related imagery will also be covered in this chapter.

The final short section of the book is entitled Pets and Animals and is all about using animal imagery in textile work. Some practical suggestions and tips for capturing birds, animals and pets in cloth will be explored with projects that will hopefully inspire you to start your own creations.

Anne Kelly in her studio.

‘Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.’

Oscar Wilde, Irish writer

Anne Kelly, self-portrait in studio.

Anne Kelly, Tools for Selfies, 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, Self-Portrait (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, Self-Portrait, 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 Self-Portrait, 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, Mother and Child, mixed-media textile (detail).

Joetta Maue, Mother and Child, 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. Summer Holiday captures that place and time, and I used a series of portraits taken from sketchbooks made at the time.

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

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

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

Anne Kelly, Summer Holiday, 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, Family Portrait, mixed-media textile.

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

Anne Kelly, ‘Ruth’, Family Portrait (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, Dream Portrait – Horse, mixed-media textile, framed.

Anne Kelly Dream Portrait – Dog, 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: