Here’s another of my mother’s crayon sketches. As I’ve said before, she didn’t give titles to any of these little pictures, but this one could only be called “Butterfly Collection”.
Crayon sketch by my mother, Margo Hoff
I love the juxtaposition of the rigid boxes and the delicate, fluttering butterflies, and this drawing could have been digitised directly to make a lovely little embroidery. But my mother insisted on originality in all art (as a child I was never even allowed to have colouring books) so I wouldn’t dare copy any of her work! Instead I thought of ways to use the idea of wild things enclosed in boxes, and came up with the idea of an aviary. Here’s the original sketch, made up of boxes arranged on a grid, with a bird enclosed in each one.
I digitised and stitched out each bird individually, using painted fabric appliquéd as a background, and then Cherri Kincaid once more took pity on my technical ineptitude and stitched them together for me.
As an interpretation of my mother’s idea, it has its weaknesses. For a start, the birds are very hard-edged, with none of the delicacy and spontaneity of their insprations. But then it is a different picture, with different ideas behind it, and anyway I don’t want to copy her pictures exactly. The panel has possibilities, but it seems to be the start of an idea rather than a finished piece in itself. There is more to do on this one.