On my mind

On a rushing-around Saturday, I am taking a few minutes to think.  It’s a gray, cool day…a gift on this extraordinarily hot, muggy summer…suitable for getting small chores done, but also for a chance to zone out with the porch breezes.

I’ve just been to the new exhibit at the Muse Art Gallery in Carrboro, where last month I and two friends hung our work.  We took ours down a few days ago, so I thought I would visit the art that is showing after us.

What I walked in on were stunningly beautiful, intricate quilts by a Dutch woman, Marga de Bruijn, who has lived in this area for forty some years.  There are whole histories embedded in her work…personal as well as global… color and line and the gradations of perspective and emotion evolve into events we should know and remember.  Quilting is a way she shows us what’s on her mind.

What I left the gallery with was a mind full of my own. I’m still thinking of the first quilt I saw as I entered the gallery corridor...Fibonacci A. easy to recognize the way strips of color and pattern contrive to spell a clear picture one cannot mistake.

 

More important, though, I’m thinking about the power of art to bring forth truth in ways that the flat, black and white icons we call words cannot.

Her quilts are about the travesties, tragedies, legends, inventions, meditations and sturdiness in the world.  Take a look at more of her storied work here:

https://www.mymusescardshop.co/muse-gallery

By construction, Marga de Bruijn spares nothing as she quilts.  Her fabrics, created by other artists whom she names as collaborators, she carefully synchronizes to bring out exactly the tone and resonance she means.  Her stitching reminds me of the notes and spaces of musical codes.  It seems odd to use such terms on such tactile makings, but these quilts do, really, sing to me.

And humble me.  I think of my scraps of paper and glue, washes of paint, cuts of metal, fallen twigs and broken pieces, and how, for me, they conspire to, at least, a semblance of thought that might or might not have risen to consciousness.  I love fine material…no doubt there.  Thread and fabric, hand stitches calm me into sewing; once in a while, embroidery becomes part of my art.

It's the deliberateness, formality of structure, intensity of purpose that Marga de Bruijn brings to her creations that amaze me, most of all the expanse of vision she creates with.

If I sound envious, be assured that it is admiration, purely.  This room full of a woman’s eye and hand…in them is an understanding and sympathy for the world I cannot help but admire.  What art, what meaning, what eye-, ear- and mind-opening because of her.