9 – What is reality?

For my next quilt: Topic: fear
Setting: amusement park
Style: believable reality

Have you ever thought about different kinds of artistic reality? Photorealism strives to present the absolute truth, but is it? Has the artist made choices of what to omit or rearrange for a better composition? Imaginative realism creates the kind of believable reality that I want to achieve now, where space and objects are plausibly rendered, even though they might not actually exist. Remembered realism creates a scene as the artist recalls it, which may or may not be other people’s reality, as I found out when I made a quilt about my parent’s greenhouses. What I thought depicted the nurturing environment that I had grown up in was met with nothing but criticism from my folks – “I never grew those kinds of plants, the greenhouse steam pipes aren’t in there, why did you put Dad in a coat like that”…their remembrances of actuality interfered with the reality that I had created and made it unbelievable to them. (Years later, they were much more willing to accept my version of reality when they heard how much I had sold the piece for!)

The quilt above is named “Dad and Me.”

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