A couple of weeks back I took a day trip to Bath to meet up with a friend and catch this wonderful exhibition.
Coming up the drive to the American Museum we were greeted by some beautiful yarn bombing – the tree was decorated with fabric covered plant pots (looking like lampshades) and pompoms and crochet.
And inside the exhibition just got more and more colourful.
The Colourful World of Kaffe Fassett showed over a hundred pieces of textile, mosaic, painting, tapestry, knitting, quilting and beading spanning Kaffe Fassetts creative life to date.
He says himself of this exhibition “I want my message to come across in this mood altering show – I’m flying high on colour.” And it’s so colourful and in your face that it’s going to be like Marmite – love it or hate it. I LoVeD it of course because of the colours.
The main reason that Kaffe Fassett is a hero of mine is because of his mastery of colour – whether it be in paint, yarn, cloth or ceramic – his colour aesthetic is beautiful to me.
He can harmonise or punch you in the face with his colour choices.
He has had the biggest influence on my own work ever since I discovered him whilst I was at college and he still does today.
The exhibition has lots of his personal treasures incorporated in it and I loved drooling over the little pin boards of his inspirational materials to see what was there.
Hard to believe any one actually wore the knitwear back in the day (let alone could afford to knit it in all those colours) but they are truly works of art and it’s difficult to conceive that he made some of them up as he went along.
He can even do beige well!
My favourite room was this green room housing all things vegetable.
I remember back in about 2008 chancing across his cabbage painting in my box of cuttings and being so creatively inspired that I got my paints out after a decade of them languishing in the loft while I brought up the kiddo’s and went back to work teaching.
So it was a special moment to revere it in the flesh.
His colour palettes have something to teach either up close or as a whole curation of items of work.
I could sit and paint  juxtaposed colours for months and still only record a tiny amount of the inspiration there is here – Kaffe describes the exhibition as “an opera of colour” and I feel like I can hum a tiny bit of the chorus!
I often go to exhibitions and take hundreds of snaps and never quite get around to digesting what I’ve seen through to some actual work, so I’ve tried hard this week to take time out of proper work to just play around with paint and paper using the photos as a prompt.
You can never tell what ideas will get sparked.
There was also the American Heritage Exhibition and the Folk Art room which I will show you some pic’s of another time.
It was so hard to edit these photo’s down but here’s just one more quilt to finish on.
