Pamela Zave's Art Quilts

This quilt suggests the slopes of the South Island of New Zealand, with lupines and other wildflowers, in the afternoon.  I hoped to capture something of the natural interplay among form, texture, and light in a landscape, without distracting too much from my primary goal of color exploration.

 

This quilt is my most successful attempt so far to represent three dimensions of color in a two-dimensional design.  From lower right to upper left, the green hues become successively less blue and more yellow.  Dark values are found in the central steep slope, while the values become lighter as the slope flattens into the plains above and below it.  Greens toward the lower left, below the slope, are saturated; greens toward the upper right, above the slope, are unsaturated.

 

Fortunately for this design, the dark values are not independent of saturation.  Yellow-green is such a luminous hue that only a very unsaturated yellow-green can be dark.

 

In this quilt, 180 green fabrics are blended to achieve the desired effects.