Art can help the heart heal after loss. This topic seems painfully appropriate for this time. I have posted here before about my fabric collage dog portraits. The first two I made were memorial portraits; making them helped me deal with the grief of losing much loved dogs. I recently completed a new piece, my first human portrait; making it helped me deal with a deeper grief, the death of one of my brothers last year.
My brother was a hero to me. When he saw a problem, he just went and fixed it. He managed to get things done in his conservative little GA town without getting run out on a rail; I always joked that he was the one in our family with social skills (there are a couple more brothers). His animal rescue work exemplified this aspect of his character. He and I shared a love of (obsession with?) dogs. He and his wife started an animal rescue group many years ago. He volunteered at the local animal shelter and got trusted enough by the staff that he was allowed to start taking animals to PetSmart for adoption days, the first time this old-style shelter had ever done off-site adoptions. He got to be friends with the Sheriff and ten years ago they joined together to start a Jail Dog Program at the county jail; his rescue group pulled dogs from the shelter that were likely to be euthanized; inmates in a special cell block worked with the dogs (with guidance from my brother and volunteer dog trainers) to get them adoptable, and my brother’s rescue group found forever homes for the dogs. The program has been a great success.
The first step in making a memorial fabric collage for him was to find the right photo to work from. Looking through a lot of old family photos was sweet and sad and somewhat therapeutic on its own, but none were right. I finally found a photo that spoke to me, from a story in his local newspaper about him and the JailDog program he helped found.
This newspaper photo wasn’t as high-resolution as I usually work from and the color was a bit off, so making the line drawing took a little more trial-and-error than usual. I use Adobe Illustrator with a Wacom tablet and stylus to make my line drawings. In this draft version, you can see two slightly different sets of lines (on different layers) showing two different tracings.
To honor my brother’s dog rescue work, I decided I would test my new (and still limited) skill at free-motion surface stitching to add some happy dogs in the background, sewn in a color that wouldn’t stand out too much so they wouldn’t draw attention from his face.
Picking the fabric was much more difficult than it had been for any of my dog portraits. It’s hard to find a bright-to-shade gradient of fabrics for light skin tones; some are orangeish, some are pinkish, some are greenish, and no three seem to go with each other. Batiks are usually good for a gradient, but there aren’t many monochrome peach or tan colored batiks. The textures are problematic as well; fabric patterns with dots or blotches can come across as diseased, linear patterns look like wrinkles or scars, etc. Let’s just say that it took lots of time and many (!) visits to fabric stores and websites to get a workable set of fabrics.
I use Lite Steam-a-Seam 2 to attach the fabric pieces to a muslin backing. This lightweight fusible interfacing has a little adhesive on both sides, so you can stick a piece down then peel it up and re-position it or replace it until you fuse everything with a steam iron. I took more care assembling this piece than any other piece I’ve ever done; I replaced every single piece of fabric on his face at least twice and some as many as six times (the major re-draw happened mid-way through) before I was satisfied.
There was more to him than dogs, of course. He had been an artist in earlier years. He mostly did sculpture; his style was modernist, powerful and a little rough-hewn. I wanted to capture a little of that style in the fabrics I chose. I was very lucky to find a border fabric with that feel and in colors that worked well with the piece!
I fused a thin cotton batting between the assembled piece and backing of the dark blue background fabric. I then folded over the frame fabric and fused it to make a finished edge.
It was time to get brave and add the happy dogs. I traced each dog onto quilting paper and then practiced each one. I tried different thread colors to see which would just show up against the dark blue batik. We were under ‘shelter at home’ orders by this time, so my thread choice was limited to what I already had. The thread I chose doesn’t show up well in the photos, so here are two of the practice dogs in a too-bright thread.
It was a little harder to maneuver the whole piece than the little test sandwiches, but all five dogs turned out good!
The very last step was to add a white light reflection dot to the eye with acrylic paint to bring it to life (shown in the top picture). It’s always astonishing what a difference this makes!
I decided not to stitch the portrait itself; I looked at examples on the web of surface-stitched portraits of people and I really didn’t like the effect – too busy and eye-pulling, and too much like wrinkles. The fusible interfacing forms a pretty strong bond but not strong enough to withstand handling over time so I chose to get the piece framed like I’ve done with my previous portraits. It took some effort to find a really excellent frame store that was able to take in work during the shut-down!
I love how it came out; the completed piece really captures something of my brother’s personality and character.
My sister-in-law didn’t know that I was making this for her. I told her to expect a FedEx delivery that she’d have to sign for but she had absolutely no clue what was in it. Her excited call to me after she unpacked the shipping box made all the time and effort totally worthwhile!
Working on this tribute piece really helped me through some tough times – not only my brother’s death but a recurrence of my cancer and the terrifying start of the COVID crisis.
Art therapy is a well-established therapeutic approach that can help people express emotions without words, process complex feelings and find relief. For me, making a fabric collage portrait helps me focus on beauty rather than pain, and to turn grief into sad but loving memories. It shifted the lasting picture in my mind’s eye away from painful last days back to the person who meant so much to me for all my life. This portrait is now the image that comes to mind anytime I think of my brother.
I started doing fabric collage portraits as a way to deal with the death of my much-loved dogs; I now know that it helps with even greater losses.
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