Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Parrot Pillows


Here are Bonnard (left), a red lory, and Bucky, a green conure. I made this pillow back in the early '80s to immortalize two of the parrots that inhabited my childhood home. The pillow is lasting far longer than they did (although they were both around for a fair few years).

I feel the left-hand bird works out better as a needlepoint design, but the one on the right does have a certain quality of Bucky, who tended to be a morose bird. I did acres more of the brown background than I needed to; the pillow was rectangular for a long time, but I ended up turning a lot of the extra background under when I rebacked it a year or two ago.

I think the canvas was ten stitches to the inch. I don't remember much more about it except that in those days I more than once worked on it while on the back of my boyfriend's motorcycle – which seems excessive to me now, but felt quite normal at the time.

No comments:

Post a Comment