Judi Warren Blaydon
Icon: Saint Gertrude/
Patron Saint of Gardeners
When I was in art school somebody wrote this graffiti over the back door to an apartment building that art students rented:
Art is Hard
Judi Warren Blaydon works as hard at art as anybody I know. She does it with grace and style, but she takes her art---all art---as seriously as possible.
Judi Warren Blaydon
The Mountain and the Magic: A Color Not Forgotten
68 1/2" x 86"
When you hear her talk about art you realize how important it is to her and how much she thinks about it.
She's a great art teacher and a great quilt teacher. Her job, as she sees it, is to teach quiltmakers "to make a quilt that is not derivative, a quilt in which he or she assumes sole responsibility."
In her new book Collage + Cloth = Quilt she talks about quiltmakers who "aspire to pose their own questions and look to no one but themselves for the answers. She also writes about "Ideas [that] can evolve from something as casual as a ballpoint pen sketch…or as elusive as [an image from] the mind's eye or on the bedroom ceiling at 3:45 in the morning."
But she also knows how some of us struggle to get those ideas at 3:45 in the morning or anytime. The new book offers a system for design :
"An alternative strategy is to use the collage process to invent a design composition that will become the inspiration, the diagram, and the map of a quilt that will be all yours."
Favorite photos
Fractured into a collage
Blueprint for a quilt
Hiaku by Claudia Alldredge, one of Judi's students
Judi
The book is full of photo collages and cloth compositions from her students, carefully laying out the design process.
Boatyard #1 by Laure Campbell
36" x 27"
Which Way is Up? by Sally B. Davis
See more about the book here:
And read more about Judi here:
