Michael Raedecker. Working with thread in paintings.
Wish I'd come across his work when I was doing my scroll. Still there's plenty of time and plenty of projects to include techniques like this into!
"Working with thread is something that’s become my technique. Using it is sometimes quite elaborate ... I think of it like building ... memory from the recollection of influences from the past, in the present, maybe even building the future. I think if I had embroidered the whole image then I would go too far, it would really be too much like craft or folk art ... there are certain details which are important so they deserve more work and more detail. Others are empty. There are things happening on the surface of the overall image which hopefully make your eye float around the image ... I always try to find different means for how to use thread ... I don’t fill everything in. I leave room for the viewer to step into the image."
(Quoted in Die Young Stay Pretty [p.42].)
The technique that I used is more like that of Brendan Stuart Burns (scroll to page 6) who uses very loose hand sewn thread, and Alice Kettle, who creates textural multi-layered textiles on a sewing machine. Trying to combine the two techniques of a loose thread on a sewing machine ended up with me almost breaking my sewing machine, but it created lines that wouldn't have been able to do otherwise.
There is an interesting conversation between Alice Kettle and Helen Felcey on You Tube and a "landscape place setting" they created using ceramic and thread. Their challenge was how "to bring completely different materials together" (Alice Kettle) but they really valued working together as they realized they were able to create ideas that previously they had been unable to produce alone. It was really interesting to see the ways that the ceramics, which consisted of cups, spoon, saucers and plates, interacted with the thread, that either went under, around or sometimes inside the vessels, with drawings from the ceramic echoing the shapes stitched out in the textiles.
This is the video footage that I used for the drawing project using the landscape as a subject matter. The idea for translating this footage into a handscroll came about after listening to an interview with David Hockney on Radio 4, who talked about having seen one in the British Museum. What surprised me was that in the exhibition of his work that we went to see in London, "The Bigger Picture," was that none of his work incorporated the scroll.
Research in Wikipedia shows many different examples of Chinese Handscrolls. Chinese Handscroll of Early Autumn
Chinese Hand-scroll for the "Ten Thousand Miles of the Yangtze River" Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) Information on this website http://tech2.npm.gov.tw/cheschool/zh-tw/index.aspx?content=c_2_02 says it to be 11 meters long, which is nearly forty feet. Near to the end of the scroll of the Yangtze River there are many trees and these contain marks that are highly similar to those of Hockney when he is painting trees, so this shows a clear link.
There are five visible seams where the painting doesn't quite match and which also feature red seals which I'm assuming is the mark of the artist. This means that each panel is approx 2 meters long and were either stitched together at the end or were stitched together as the painting was being made. It was a relief to see this as I ended up sewing two panels together for my scroll, and I didn't know if that was standard procedure or was it more typical to use one continuous sheet of fabric.
The photo on the left shows the two separate panels I was working on, before deciding to combine the two together, as shown on the right.
Along The River. Qing Ming shows the working of a busy city, with many people and buildings. In the book "A Bigger Message; Conversations with David Hockney" by Martin Gayford, Hockney describes viewing a ninety feet long scroll dated from around 1770, that had been unwound on the floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He said there must have been two thousand figures in it, and in a similar way to "Along The River" he says "you are journeying through the landscape. When you get to the great city of Wuxi, you go over the wall into courtyards, backstreets...You can't go over a wall in a Canaletto."
He also describes seeing an early nineteenth-century circular panorama of Versailles, and the difference between this and the scrolls; "You had to go and stand on a platform in the centre to view it. Then if you turned round, you saw the palace and gardens and so forth. I said, 'I see why you brought us here. We're stuck in a fixed point. But in the Chinese scroll we've just been travelling through a great city. There's a big contrast.'"
