Swarm - new art cloth

Sorry about missing the last couple of days of blogging, there was nothing blog-worthy going on over here! Today I hung up a new piece, Swarm, outside my studio. It just returned from a show at the View Art Center in Old Forge NY.

The piece is art cloth (no batting or backing) that started as plain white heavy cotton. First I painted it with a diluted acrylic ink wash. Second I blockprinted with a mustard acrylic paint a series of geometric blocks that I'd made previously. Next I screen-printed a swarm of beetles with a thermofax screen and an opaque navy acrylic paint And finally I added some hand stitching with coral linen floss. It's 18" x 36" overall.

I've been on a beetle kick for a number of years now. I find their forms so intriguing, and they've come to symbolize how I feel about climate change. Beetles are at once formidable and fragile, much like the earth herself.

Tomorrow I'll show you my recent gigantic beetle piece - each beetle is over two feet long!