Hundertwasser

In February this year the Waverley Art Quilters had decided to study Hundertwasser.

Friedensreich Hundertwasser - Dec 15th 1928- Feb 19th 2000.

Hundertwasser was born in Vienna, Austria and died aboard a cruise ship on the Pacific Ocean of a heart attack.

He is known for his vibrantly coloured, radiant paintings; he preferred to place complementary colours alongside each other and also used a lot of gold and silver foil.
His main themes were vegetative growth and architectural symbols like houses, windows, fences and gates. He often combined both themes in the one painting.
From the readings I have done about him he seemed to be quite a quirky character. He is also known for his innovative architectural designs and hated sterile, monotonous houses and buildings.

I bought a wonderful little hardcover book that features all of Hundertwasser’s paintings from 1951-1976. The photos are very glossy against black pages and clearly show the use of the metallic foil.

As always when we study an artist and make a quilt inspired by what we have learnt, we are careful not to copy one of the artist’s paintings but take elements of the paintings to learn more about art and design.

I was inspired by the lovely round motifs that featured in many of his paintings.

Hundertwasser- 754 Blobs Grow in Beloved Gardens

The above image was just one of the many that feature this style of trees. The funny thing is that when I first looked at his paintings I thought that they were flowers and that was why I was inspired by them. I have wanted to do some embroidery on felt for quite a while and thought that here was my chance.

I found some lovely bright cotton fabric as a background and fused on the felt stems and flowers.

While I was doing the embroidery my husband asked me why I was making lollipops! That’s when I looked at his paintings again and realised that his round shapes were actually trees. 

It looked quite bare in the bottom half of the quilt so I added in some leaves.

I was happy with the end result and called my quilt, Hundertwasser’s Flowers.

Here is a close up image of the embroidery.

Embroidery detail

Hundertwasser's Flowers ©Linda Steele 2015

We are trying something different in Art Quilters for the next couple of years so this will be the last little quilt I'll make for this group for a while. I'll write more about our plans in another post.

Bye for now,

Linda