Aerial Photographs & Art Map Quilts

This could be a Really Random Thursday post except that it's not so random because it is about quilts (in a way).

So.  I love aerial photographs.  I find them fascinating and beautiful.

Years ago, when I was in college I happened upon a large-format, inexpensive book of aerial photographs at a used book store.  I took it home and marveled at the colors, the arrangements of houses, fields, rivers, cities.  It is a treasure, buried now in a box with other rarely-used books.  These days I can use Google to search "aerial photographs" and find screen after screen of images I find interesting.

The images above come from Earth View with Google, a website where you can choose a location on earth and see photographs at both a far distance and closer to the earth.  In aerial photos I see a kind of beauty about the way people have organized and arranged the land -- farmlands divided into fields, towns and cities where homes line streets organized into communities -- and photographs where nature has arranged the land her own way.

A few months ago, at a library I rarely visit, I was browsing the shelves of quilting books and came upon Art Quilt Maps:  Capture a Sense of Place with Fiber Collage---A Visual Guide by Valerie S. Goodwin.  It caught my eye in the same way aerial photographs do.  Maps and aerial photos are similar in that they are both elevated views of a place.

I doubt I will ever make an art quilt map but I fell in love with this book and the creations I saw inside.  Here are a few pages.  You see maps, of course.  Do you also see improv quilts?

Improv, yet they capture the essence of a specific location.

Chapter topics include, among others:
> mapping out ways of working
> materials and tools for creating a fiber-art map
> background music:  the landscape layer
> step by step ways to create that background layer (paint, translucent fabric, etc.)
> materials and techniques to create lines and shapes
> fiber-art travel maps
> mapping personal memories and landscapes

Throughout the book are small galleries in each chapter showing finished quilts and how the techniques were used.  Also included:  gallery of work by the author, gallery of work by students, and resources. 

Perhaps this book will appeal to you. 

Do you like to look at aerial photographs?  Have you ever made a map quilt?

--Nancy.
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