"Daphne's Sisters: Page of Paring Knives (swords) in the Kitchen Tarot."
by Susan Shie Contact me
"Daphne's Sisters: Page of Paring Knives (swords) in the Kitchen Tarot."
©Susan Shie 2023. 59"h x 62"w. inventory #527. Peace Cozy #87.
chose tarot card 2-17-23. decided theme 3-22-23. made sketchbook drawings 3-26 to 29-23. made quilt 4-1 to 6-8-22.Materials:
white kona-like cotton from Test Fabrics, airbrush paint, Posca
paint markers, Aurifil cotton machine
thread, Artfabrik variegated hand dyed perle cotton embroidery thread,
one
Green Temple Buddha Boy bead. Pellon bamboo and organic cotton batting.
Lunn Fabrics hand-made batiks on backing and border.
Techniques: Whole cloth painting. Black line freehand drawing and color areas painted with Aztek double-action airbrush and airbrush paint. Smaller writing done with Posca paint markers, because my wrists were both broken over time, and I no longer have the strength to use my airpen for small writing with paint. Mostly machine sewn, with one row of hand stitching of perle cotton thread (on the border's outside edge.)
Susan Shie. Turtle Moon Studios.
2612 Armstrong Drive, Wooster, OH 44691 susanshie@gmail.com 330-317-2167 www.turtlemoon.com
I am a social justice activist painter and fiber artist, mixing current events, history, personal experiences and ideas into my art. I airbrush whole cloth works which I then write on and sew. I also make many large, double-page, finished drawings in my hardbound sketchbooks, and those look a lot like my quilts. My artwork and writing are all spontaneous first drafts on the cloth. I don't like to look at my sketches, while I'm drawing with the airbrush and paint, to create the piece's images on the large cloth, because I want my images to remain very spontaneous. I let myself sneak looks at the sketches, just to remind myself what goes where, sort of. I love the feeling of drawing and writing on that big, scary, blank piece of white cloth, using my airbrush and black paint, and "letting 'er rip!"
Many large detail images of this piece are below this artist's statement.
My statement about this art quilt:
On Feb 17, 2023, I close for this
quilt, the Tarot card the Page of Swords, which are Paring Knives in my Kitchen
Tarot deck. (Including this piece, I only had 5 more Kitchen Tarot
Card Quilts to make, out of the 78 cards in a Tarot deck. I’ve been making these quilts for the Kitchen
Tarot since 1998, so this is getting exciting now! 25
years of making this project so far!!! The
“end” is in sight now!! Maybe 2 more
years, to make the last 4 pieces! (OK,
maybe 3 more years!)
So, back to THIS Kitchen
Tarot quilt: Daphne’s Sisters! This
piece is about four women: Daphne Page,
who died of cancer on Nov 8, 2019, after becoming friends with the other three
of us, by being together in my drawing classes online. My cousin Candice and my friend, and another
quilt artist, Susan, Daphne, and I started texting together as a group, when
Daphne found out that her cancer was back and that she was going to die. After the beautiful and intense months we
spent texting privately, daily, Daphne died, and the other three of us decided
to keep our text group going. We became
Daphne’s Sisters, and also sisters to each other now. And we are still going strong, almost 4 years
later.
I chose my topic,
and THEN realized that it fits perfectly with the card I'd selected for
this piece. That's because our Daphne's last name was Page, and
this card is the PAGE of Swords. But honestly, I didn't see that
great connection, when I decided this would be about Daphne's
Sisters! So I love that great coincidence!
This quilt is full of stories
about each of us, including Daphne, who is the angel hovering over us in my
painting here. Because this
quilt is based on the Tarot card, the Page of Swords, the rest of us are
chopping food together, using ... paring knives! The image of us
sharing this activity is a symbol of how wonderful it would be, if we
could
hang out together in person, like girlfriends who live in the same
neighborhood and get together all the time. Here we’re chopping up
food and talking together, with our pets swarming around us, and Daphne
hovering over us, like she always does.
And I put our husbands in, too, as little heads in the middle
left of the
piece. They don't know each other, either, except my Jimmy and
Candice's Dave were together when Candy and I were together, and they
liked each other a lot, I think.
In the Tarot deck, Pages can
represent those who are young or young at heart, or who are discovering a new aspect of
themselves. I think that fits the women
I made this piece about: Daphne’s Sisters, and Daphne herself, too.
I’m not very good at interpreting
Tarot cards, but it seems to me that the three of us and Daphne herself show a
lot of eagerness to learn and grow. We share a lot of the same interests in
events and politics, and Daphne was the feistiest of us all, in that
department! OH, we miss her!
Telling things here
about the four of us, I also added a lot of current events to my stories,
including things as diverse as the fight in the US Congress, to settle on a
budget for this year, without bring our nation to an economic standstill;
Russia and Ukraine’s war struggles at the time of making this piece (including who
blew up the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam in southern Ukraine); and
some really cool news items, like my granddaughter Eva's high school
graduation on May 23!
There are 4 open sketchbooks,
floating in this painting, because in my classes, we all use large, hardbound
sketchbooks, to put our drawing assignments into, along with anything else we choose to
put there. I wrote about various current events
in the books and the sharks here.
The sharks are my newest art symbols, and
since each one has one of my Resistance Beets on it, they are women sharks,
with liberal opinions. Resisters. The shark above our husbands’ faces, has my story on it,
about May 30 being the 34th anniversary of the terrible slaughter of
Chinese students, protesting for Democracy in Tiananmen Square in China in 1989. That’s one example of the many events,
outside of our Daphne’s Sisters’ stories, that I included in this piece.
I put Greta Thunberg in the
bottom right corner of this quilt, because I was excited about her new book “The
Climate Book,” which I have yet to read.
It includes essays by around 100 climate scientists from all
over the world. Greta is fed up with the
UN’s ongoing inability to do anything about saving the Earth, and won’t go to their COP
climate conferences now. She says the attendees are all
greenwashed. Many climate experts fear
that we can’t stop the escalation in Earth's heating up now. I hope somehow that can be changed! Money stops our people in power from doing
anything. It’s all about
profits. You and I need to get a lot more involved. All of
us. The whole Climate Change problem comes from fossil fuels,
which need to stay in the ground!
I put a big Mother Earth face
as the Full Moon, up in the top right corner of my painting here. What a beautiful world we Baby Boomers grew
up in.
I write a haiku, as I think
it up, on each of my drawings, and I’ve done that for many years now. Recently, I also started writing haiku on my
quilts. Here’s the haiku I wrote on Daphne’s purple angel
gown:
“Oh, to meet Daphne.
Still, we were so very close!
Oh, to bring her back!”
It’s true! We never met her in person. And we’ve never meet Susan in person either! I’ve known her from the Green Quilts Project
of earlier art quilt projects' times, but we’ve never met. Candice and I are double cousins, so we’ve
known each other since we were tinyn!
But what matters is that the four of us, and now the three of us (plus
Daphne as an angel) FEEL as close as if we hang out together in person all the
time!
And THAT’S what I wanted to
show here: the amazing closeness we have.
So take that, haters of the internet.
It has its really good points!
!When a quilt I'm making is almost done, even after I'd done all the
quilting, I have to choose where to put the Peace Cozy. This one,
#87 in my use of them, ended up on my own forehead. It's the Peace
Symbol on a little 1" or so piece of light green cloth.
There honestly wasn't any other place I could put it, without it
covering some of my writing by then. (Remember, my "rule" is that I
can't plan ahead, where the Peace Cozy will go!) So I gave it to
myself, putting it right on my forehead, where I can see it, when I look
in the mirror! :) I am happy to be wearing that blessing of
Peace!!
I hope you like this piece and can read the writing in the detail pix below!
Power to the
People.
– Susan Shie, Wooster, Ohio
July 19, 2023
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Turtle Moon Studios: Outsider Art
Quilts and Paintings
Susan Shie
| Home | | Classes | | Gallery | | Green Quilts | |Links |
| Resume | | Stuff to Buy | |Turtle Trax |
| Visit Jimmy's Leather Studio
Web site design © Susan Shie and Jan Cabral 1997 via Key to the Web. All subsequent web site work, ©Susan Shie 1997-2023.
This page updated by Susan Shie, July 20, 2023.