Description of my Piece

For my piece I chose to make images in response to Alicia Merrett vibrant quilt ‘York 1611’. Which depicted a map of York that showed the features of the city that had survived today. For me, I was really attracted to the colours that were used and was one of the key elements I wanted to use in my work, the contrast between the blues and greens with the reds, oranges and yellows was something I wanted to get across in my work. For my response, my idea was to depict historic places around York and how nature could interact with it. I worked from photographs that I had taken around York and drew the images digitally. My first image of the Monk Bar is drawn entirely orange with a clear blue sky dotted with flying birds. The bird idea came from York’s heavy population of Pigeons and maybe the occasional seagull that has journeyed down from Scarborough. My other two images are of the Statue of Constantine the Great outside of York Minster. Instead of another blue-sky background I used a bright yellow to make it feel like the Minster is behind it. For the nature element I added moss, birds and insects.

Reflection of the Project’s Journey

When deciding on what quilt I was going to respond to, it was ‘York 1611’ that got me inspired. With its bright, contrasting colours and texture I was able to come up with my idea. When making I started out with doing block colour buildings with lined details, while it was colourful, I did not reach the level of texture I wanted. Also working digitally hindered that as well. Instead of block colours I changed to working with rough lines to create the shapes, using a scratchier technique to create texture. Early on, this method dulled down a lot of the colour but as I kept building up layers and layers the bright colour eventually came through. Initially I was going to only do the one image that was going to be incredibly detailed and accurately drawn, then when I thought about it again this would be boring to look at. Doing the smaller group of images gave me more inspiration and let me enjoy the entire process of the project a lot more. When first hearing about this brief I was not very excited about it, but when I started it, I ended up loving it. It was nice doing a project that was so different to other work I had produced previously.