March 1, 2012

Seeing Spots and Dots

 I love dots. In our bathroom alone, there are dots on
our shower curtain:
on our bath mat:
and in a framed doodle i painted using a strong brew of tea:
I love them so much that i think i could design using only dots and never tire of the possibilities!

Are you familiar with Yayoi Kusama? She is one of my favorite dot artists. Recently, she did an interactive installation called "The Obliteration Room" at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art in Australia. It started out looking like this:
 Then over the course of two weeks, each child visitor was given colorful dot stickers and was invited to collaborate with the space. After thousands of visitors, the room soon looked like this!
 There is a wonderful series of photos that shows
the progression over time on Colossal.

Another of my favorite dot artists is Georges Seurat. Long before pixels, his pointillist paintings are composed of small dots of pure colors that are placed next to each other. For instance, blue dots next to yellow dots that when viewed from afar, our eye actually mixes the colors so we perceive them as green. Amazing! Someday, i hope to stand in front of this one at the Art Institute of Chicago:
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884
And then there's artist Paul Klee, who once said, "A line is a dot that went for a walk". It was my high school art teacher who shared that with me and the humor in it stuck. I think of that every time i open my sketchbook and touch my pencil point to the paper. So i like to think of a drawing as a dot on an adventure...and each collection of designs as a journey. Packing now. Bon voyage!

13 comments:

  1. Kate I will be taking a little road trip and visiting Queensland Gallery of Modern Art among other places next week, I wonder if this installation is still on show, I hope so as I would love to see it.

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    1. Lucky you!! The installation is up until March 12th so you should just catch it in time. Would love to hear what you think after you see it. Have fun on your road trip!

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  2. I love Seurat. We had to do an art project based on his style waaaay back when I was in high school. I think I still have the picture I used for inspiration in my draw......oooops =D

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  3. lol love the line.
    My vision is actually pointillism. I have no idea what actual solid looks like as it's always looked like a slightly fuzzy tube tv. So I think dots rock! lol

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    1. Well no wonder your quilts are so beautiful! And i think you rock no matter what :)

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  4. I love dots too- especially quilting them- or pebbles or bubbles as others call them- just finished a pillow with teeny tiny dots all over it and blogged about it at sewwrongsewright.blogspot.com- I think you would like it since you are such a fan of dots!

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    1. Just visited your busy blog and left a comment over there :)

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  5. looking forward to each of your adventures!!!!! :)

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    1. an adventure is only good with company, so you'll have to come along too!! :)

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  6. I adore dots and always have! I love it when fabrics have dots around leaves or other shapes to great shadows. Today I was admiring a local artist's work in a restaurant who does a Seurat type of work. Dotty!

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  7. Kate, if you like dots, you'll love bamboo tile. It is a white tile with bamboo rings. I saw it on Yard Crashers.

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