The collaborative works with Terre Blumer, aka MTB and Mariat Penn included Embroidery on painted linen that hung on the wall or on clothing and her fable writing illustrated into books.
The projects were born out of conversation and engagement. Terre was surprised at how much she loved stitching. She already knew she loved to write.
Hey, she should be writing this.
Terre’s brother, Leo Pennock and I knew each other from high school in Michigan. He is a wonderful photographer and shot many images of myself in my studio and my artwork.
He is a good collector of my work also. He introduced me to Terre about a dozen years ago when Jimm and I still lived in Venice.
Terre’s husband, the great jazz pianist from Detroit Gary Blumer taught music at The Neighborhood Music School in Arcadia. They wanted an art show. I agreed and we put together a great show in 2014.
The show included pieces from my Music series previously shown at the Hollywood Bowl and the Colburn School of Music downtown LA.
Terre had not been interested in sewing, but she became interested when she saw me messing around with embroidery floss that I had bought at a garage sale. I made a simple linen dress and was just drawing some details around the neckline area with sewing. That appealed to her. Below are some of the lyrical floral abstractions that became part of the quilt.
My friend, Cathy Seidman is a quilter and I painted on linen squares and the three of us embroidered the linen pieces I painted for the center.
Cathy sewed them together and they were amazing.
This is a butterfly Terre stitched for one of the corners of the quilt.
Terre had a real genius for it and wanted more painted linen pieces
We did blue based on a series of paintings I was creating. We used flowers and the tree of life as subject matter and some lyrical abstraction based on flowers.
I sewed one of the birds on my denim jacket and wore it all over town. Got a lot of compliments. I did the same with a floral piece.
Terre is also a writer and she wrote three books that I illustrated. She called them fables. How the Zebra Got Its Stripes was made into a puppet show and illustrated with puppets on their stage.
The traveling king meets zebra when he has no stipes
