Feliksas

Artist

The last challenge for Fifteen by Fifteen quilt challenge group was In the Style of the Artist of the selected country. For this year’s challenge I selected my own Lithuania, and I decided to make a quilt in the style of Feliksas.

Feliksas was not very famous artist because he started painting in his later years, and he passed away rather young, at the age of 51. His full name was Feliksas Pusvaškis but he wanted to be known only by his first name. Even on his headstone only his first name Feliksas is carved.

How did I get to know about him? One morning I went to my car, parked in a back yard of the appartment building where I lived. An old lady sat on a bench right by my car. She was dressed elegantly and wore a linen hat. I said hi to her and she responded by saying that she knew me and my cat. She has been watching me working by the open window with a white cat by my side. I told her that I was an artist who made pictures using fabrics. “Oh, my son was an artist. He was a painter”- she responded. I sat next to her and we had a nice conversation.

The lady lived in a house across the drivay, and her bedroom window faced my studio window. Her name was Felicija and she was 92 years old. Felicija told me more about her son Feliksas and got me curious.

Style

I googled Feliksas Pusvaškis after returning home that day. His paintings looked like quilts! They looked like they were made from the small geometric pieces of color. Feliksas called his style post-suprematism.

Suprematism is an art movement focused on basic geomettric forms, such as circles, squares, lines, and rectangles, painted in a limited range of colors. It originated in early 20th century in Russia. The term suprematism refers to an abstract art based upon “the supremacy of pure artistic feeling” rather than on visual depiction of objects.

Quilt

This painting of Feliksas was the base for my quilt:

I used only a small portion of itbecause there were way too much going on in the painting:

This time I wasn’t able to keep my promise to use only natural linen fabrics, but I kept my other promise- no machine sewing! I picked up comercially dyed linen fabrics from my stash, and fused them with a very thin onesided fusible to deminish fraying, because linen fabrics are woven rather loosely.

I seldom make sketches, usually I design as I go. This time I made a paper sketch:

Next I cut all pieces from the fabric but I had to plan on what sides they will overlap each other. I layed them on the two remaining layers of the quilt sandwich- the batting and backing fabrics:

When all the pieces, except the eye, were cut out and layered, I basted them in place:

Next the hand stitching began. I had to be careful not to hand stitch over the marked 15×15 inches square because I didn’t want to cut the yarn when later I needed to square up the quilt for binding.