Vision of the Night

12 x 12

The first thing that comes to my mind when I hear the word "Mystical" is the Moon. Much of my work incorporates images of the moon.  Here, I combined the "Wadjet" or "Eye of Horus" with the phases of the moon.

Horus was a sky god whose eyes, it was said were the sun and the moon.  Ancient myth  describes a battle between Horus and Seth in which Horus' right eye was torn out. Thoth, the god of magick,  restored Horus' eye. It is said the myth relates to the waxing and waning of the moon, during which the moon appears to have been torn out of the sky before being restored once every lunar month.

The base fabric background is dyed with fiber reactive dyes. The eye is painted with Pro Chemical textile paint and Jacquard Lumiere.  

The batting is Quilters Dream Puff and it is quilted with Superior's metallic and silk threads, and then mounted on stretcher bars.

Butterfly Garden

A mystical and magical place.

9"x 9"

The background was randomly strip pieced, then cut, with additional strips sewn in to represent stems.

A piece of poly batt was used between the layers for quilting.

 Bobbin stitching with snips of dyed silk ribbon and paint made up the flowers.

 And, the butterfly was stitched with one layer of white fabric, painted with inks then cut out.  The body is a stuffed piece of silk.  Everything was stitched to the quilted background and the legs were added last by zig zagging over a thin nylon cording.  

Visit my blog here for more butterfly garden photos and inspiration! 

Ethereal

I've titled my 8 x 8 inch collage painting, Mystical, in honor of the challenge theme.

Paper and acrylic paint on canvas board.

Although the three challenge pieces uploaded prior to mine are all quilts, 

I'm taking the original info on Art Squared at its word about being open to all media!

Magical

Magical is beading; magical is fibers. I go to a magical place when I work with them. The background is wool roving. The design is in Ultrasuede hand stitched in place using glass beads. The piece is 8 inches square.  Geometric designs have been used in all of history for magic.

Here is  a detail.

Squaring the Circle

Sue B here...

Mystical was a challenging theme to work with and I struggled with it for a while before I finally decided on what to do...

 

"Squaring the Circle" 12" x 1 1/2" (mounted on stretcher frames)

hand dyed cotton, machine quilted

The 'squared circle' or 'squaring the circle' is a 17th century alchemical glyph or symbol for the creation of the Philosopher's Stone. The Philosopher's Stone was supposed to be able to transmute base metals into gold and perhaps be an elixir of life.

 

 

Ancient Voices

 

Who was the man that stood in front of this rock

in an inhospitable desert where once dinosaurs freely roamed

and felt the need to leave his mark in this place?

Was he simply telling the next people passing by that he was here?

Or that he was a great warrior?

Was he leaving a sign of the spirits he worshiped?

Are these shamans from his tribe ... or was he a shaman himself?

 

The dinosaurs left their bones in great abundance in these Utah hills

120 million years ago.  This artist of the Fremont culture

made his marks between 700 AD and 1300 AD.

To stand before these ancient beings carved in stone so long ago

is magical, mystical, humbling.

You can almost hear their voices.

 

12"x12"  Commercial cotton batik, cotton batting & backing,

discharged freehand design from my photo, hand quilted.

Dinosaur National Monument, Utah

(It really is square!  Bad photo.)

Mystical

As a child I was always curious about the round darker green circles in the lawn

with some mushrooms here and there.  It seems like they usually occurred after a thunder storm. My mom told me they were fairy rings.  Fairies came at night and held very important meetings.  When I heard the theme was mystical, I immediately thought of those magical fairy rings.

  

This little fairy is early for the meeting, but you can see from the spiral of shimmer that the others are on their way.

I used batiks along with thread work and some paint to try to make the mushrooms look 3 dimensional. The trees are decorated with yarn.