A post in an occasional new series – looking back at artworks or mediums I worked in from earlier in my artist years.

Here I show you a fabric wall hanging from 1999.

It’s called “Along the Beach Road” and I made it from my memories of various views of the New Jersey shore in the southern part of the state. As I remember, around this time, we did a show on the boardwalk in Cape May and took the opportunity to drive around and snap some photos. This wall hanging is purely from my imagination, though. It’s maybe 24″ x  28″ ,more or less? Or maybe a little bigger? Back then I did not keep records on these statistics as I do now.

This piece received a lot of attention, as I remember. For one thing, it won Best of Show at the Lansdale (PA) Festival of the Arts in August 1999.

In April, 2000, I entered three wall hangings in a juried show at the William Penn Charter School, a private school in Philadelphia that at the time had an art event to benefit the school. My work was accepted and I remember receiving very nice compliments from the judge, which really encouraged me. Here I am with my three pieces on display.

To create my fabric work, I laid out a base level of canvas fabric and pinned the cut fabric pieces to it. I then machine-sewed them to the base, using either free motion stitching, (such as you see for the vegetation), or closely spaced zigzag stitching (for areas I wanted outlined, such as the roofs of the buildings). In neither case did I turn under fabric edges – they are all left raw. In this way you can see that I worked as I later did in paper collage.

Like pretty much all of my fabric work this piece was sold long ago. But I do have many good memories of it, as you can see, and it was art that I was proud of making.

A post in an occasional new series – looking back at artworks or mediums I worked in earlier in my artist years.

Here I show you a fabric wall hanging from 2000.

I worked in this medium when I first started making art. I constructed appliqued fabric wall hangings, at first using hand stitching and later switching to free-motion machine stitching. My fabric work spanned the time frame from about 1995 to 2001.

This piece, Garden in the City, was made for an exhibit as part of Art in City Hall, Philadelphia, PA. I submitted an application to participate, was chosen, and was assigned a community garden in the city to portray. My location was Glenwood Green Acres in North Philadelphia.

I went out to the garden in June 2000 to take photos. The location was in a neighborhood that had been in decline for some time. It was a typical Philadelphia scene – factory building towering over streets of small rowhomes originally built for the workers. At this time, the factory in the photos was abandoned and the garden was on the site of another factory that had been demolished. The Amtrak rail line goes right behind the garden.

I created the wall hanging over the fall of 2000 and it was exhibited in early 2001, January, I think. Philadelphia’s City Hall is an enormous building in the middle of Center City and is a landmark location for us here. Now most of its functions are handled in more modern surrounding buildings, but City Council still meets there.

The exhibit area had large cases on two different floors. My artwork was about 30″ x 40″. I was also just starting to work in paper collage, and I included two collages with the fabric piece. I can”t find photos of them or I would show them, too. I do remember that one of the collages featured the lovely cabbages you see in a photo above.

Here is the piece:

Philadelphia has many community gardens and Glenwood Green Acres still exists. The surrounding area is changing as redevelopment amends the area but this garden looks pretty much the same 20 years later, from the pictures I can find.