Anni Albers and her triangle era

Sometimes the universe sends you exactly what you need to see

I’m writing this newsletter from a ranch outside of Austin, TX, where my partner and I just witnessed the total solar eclipse through the gauzy veil of 100% cloud cover. As we watched in the mid-day darkness, we pondered how wild it is that these celestial bodies just happen to be the right size and orbiting at the right distance from the earth so that the moon can perfectly cover the sun. Talk about serendipity.

Speaking of which, when I travel to a new city like Austin, I like to leave a healthy portion of time for exploring by chance. We arrived on Saturday morning with no plans other than to eat tacos and watch the eclipse at 1:35pm on Monday afternoon, so that left us with ample time to wander the city without an agenda.

We decided to check out the Blanton Museum of Art as one of our first stops, and as luck would have it, the featured exhibit this month is a collection of weavings and prints by Anni Albers, considered the most important textile artist of the 20th century.

The show focuses on her transition between paper and thread and how she switched between mediums to explore abstraction. My favorite pieces from the show were her triangular motifs. Albers was preoccupied with triangles for nearly two decades, and these repeating shapes represented pure abstraction for her. It’s not a far leap to imagine any of these designs as quilts.

Her triangle abstractions are carefully arranged to appear simultaneously both ordered and random. The two prints above vibrate and move when viewed up close; the edges of the triangles push the eye around the page. But when you step back, they flatten and the chaos transforms into a uniform texture.

One of the most striking designs in the show is Second Movement I, which also transforms as you move closer or further away. Up close, all you see is sharp edges and random shapes. Further away, a grid of light and dark patchwork squares emerges from the chaos. What a spectacular quilt this would make.

Second Movement I, 1978 (up close)

Second Movement I (further away)

Albers compared these works to natural phenomena like the crystalline structure of metal alloys or the patterns of plant growth. This may sound familiar to newsletter subscribers; finding beauty in the randomness of natural events was also a preoccupation of Ellsworth Kelly, the subject of previous newsletters and the inspiration behind a previous quilt (which should be back from being long-armed any day now).

But unlike Kelly, who relied on random chance to make his abstractions, Albers meticulously planned hers with graph paper sketches, sometimes hundreds of them for a single print. If you look closely in a few of the sketches, you can see her process as she went back in and filled in additional triangles or darkened certain areas to create other shapes.

I also love the note scribbled at the bottom of one page: “Wrong!” How many of us have written this exact word or spoken it to ourselves as we create? And here it is on display in a museum, just part of the process of working through an idea and building layers of work.

Note to selfBack to serendipit

Back to serendipity: sometimes the universe sends you exactly what your creative process needs. This exhibit was a green light for two ideas that I’d been mulling over: first, putting more energy into planning the illusion of randomness, and second, creating motifs that transform as the viewer moves closer or further away.

The seeds for both of these ideas began emerge last week as I was constructing my latest quilt, below. The log cabin blocks are pieced together randomly without planning the orientation or direction of the spiral. As a result, the colored shapes that emerge have irregular edges and more movement than if each block was constructed identically. I like the result, but there are a few spots I’m not quite happy with. Until now, it felt right to put all of my creative energy into construction and none into planning or decision-making, but I’m sensing that balance is beginning to shift.

Tom’s quilt, in process

I also like the way this quilt changes when you view it up close or from far away. When it’s on your lap, the textures and patterns in the fabrics stand out. From across the room, the larger, colored shapes emerge and the textures recede. I like that perceptual shift as the details transform into bigger shapes.

After seeing Albers’ Second Movement I, I’m inspired to explore this idea further and experiment with motifs that change with distance. I’m also sensing many half square triangles in my future... perhaps this will be the start of my own triangle era?

Until next time,

Stacey