Thinking About Water

I'm guessing that if I were to pose the question, "What color is water," many would do as I did, and automatically answer "blue". After all, lakes are blue, one can sail the deep blue sea, tropical lagoons are a particularly distinct shade of blue. And that is why when sorting through fabric, so many blue ones ended up on my water wall. Not sure exactly when the epiphany struck, reminding me of something I instinctively know, water is in fact colorless and clear. This quality means that what we perceive as the color of water is the color of something else being reflected back or being seen under or behind or even floating between the water molecules themselves. Think the rocks of a river bed or the sand under lapping waves, dirt muddying a river or algae growing in a pond. Even the foam produced by a waterfall or wave can make us think the water is white.

So I soon found myself searching out photos of water that I'd taken over the years. I lived within a short walk of an ocean beach for 3 years and a few of the photos I took there quickly proved my point. (You've seen a glimpse of these pasted to my sketchbook.) On this particular stretch of beach, the ocean was often grey, mimicking our many cloudy grey days, or would read grey near the close of day.

Other times it had a rich green tint to it.

And if there was a beautiful sunset going on, parts of it could turn the color of the sunset as well.

So I did my best to throw out those preconceived notions of all water being blue and moved on to a more difficult task: thinking about how water moves, whether in constant motion of a creek, concentric circles rippling out from a disturbance or frothy sprays thrown up by a fountain. How does one capture the movement of water with fabric and thread in two dimensional space? That's what I've been exploring, trying to work out since my first attempt on the Eisenberg Fountain quilt - my initial trial on a small sample version shown above. The water cascading down the stone wall was obviously clear, but you could still see how the water moved over it, in this case in two very different patterns.

See the actual building here. It's quite impressive.

But there must be less literal ways to do it. In that sketchbook I'd taken with me to Rochester, I found a note wondering if the flow of the fountain could be done with silk that had been ripped into narrow strands - an idea I'd totally forgotten. Then there's the photo of a friend's textile dabblings I've kept on my laptop in the studio for years, waiting patiently for me to run with the idea it gave me - that scattered diamond shapes might work to abstract moving water. More recently I've considered burning out areas in a sheer fabric to show motion. And just the other day, I decided to look in some files I don't often peruse anymore, and found some minimalist library posters done by Andre Chiote that I had saved. The one above is the poster done for the Aberdeen University Library in Scotland. When I saved it, I'm sure it was because of its visual connection to quilt improv block technique I've dabbled in, but upon seeing it now, looking for water inspiration, I see water moving down the face of the building. Ahh, a new way to think of capturing water movement in fabric!

And this is the value to me of starting that topic specific sketchbook. It's jarring loose some ideas as I add to it and helping me to open my mind to different ways of seeing things, while giving me a place to keep them together while I'm thinking about the next design.