The Paul Klee “Bee Inspired” Prompt

Turkey Tracks: October 29, 2020

The Paul Klee “Bee Inspired” Prompt

The challenge “prompt” for this month’s block for the Mt. Battie Modern Quilt Guild’s ongoing “Bee Inspired” challenge—based on the quilting group of modern quilters called “Bee Sewcial” (see #beesewcial on Instagram for their work)—was Paul Klee.

What a fun challenge—which prompted me and I’m sure other members to take an online research trip to see Klee’s paintings. Klee (1879-1940) was a Swiss-born German modern painter whose work took place in the early 1900s. He was deeply interested in color theory.

I chose Klee’s “Characters in Yellow” for my prompt.

But I didn’t want to make the block in yellow as yellow stands out in a quilt like a flashing neon sign. So I used reds.

Klee loved geometric shapes. And in this painting he used analogous colors. And he kept his shapes intact for the most part. No one knows who the “characters” he depicted were. And it does not matter. That’s the whole point really.

I used the method I learned in The Color Collective for this quilt:

Tara Faughnan created this method, and created the visual impression of the blocks floating over the darker background by slashing the geometric shapes and installing strips of the background color. Here, too, the color palette is analogous.

So the “Modern” experiments with shape and color continue… And now Klee’s painting looks…static, fixed…to my eyes anyway.

I love my quilty journey.