Nancy Bardach

Nancy Bardach draws inspiration from the world around her. She often transforms complex realities into moving abstracts. Lines become translations between reality and mood. Her work is characterized by abstract imagery, brilliant coloring, and meticulous piecing. A retired architect, she also derives inspiration from architectural design to make choices about mass and perspective.

Her various series make use of color, texture, mood, and environments, all interrelated by an overarching concept.

Oh! Rock-a My Soul! (or Revelations)

56 x 82 inches, 2008

Artistic journey

I started as a home seamstress making small corduroy dresses for my first-born. I found the cut-outs from the dresses—the reverse images—became quirky shapes to appliqué on a small quilt.

My serious start was in the early 1990s, when I discovered art quilts at an East Bay Heritage Quilters show in nearby Oakland, California. Mary Mashuta’s work especially helped me realize that this was a true art form, and that I liked its potential. After retiring as an architect in 2006, I became more devoted to making quilts and had more time for designing. I now regard myself as a full-time fabric artist.

Rising to a challenge

I believe that design challenges are the fertilizer for much of our creativity. Look at Gothic cathedral history, a play between higher aspirations and the realities of stone construction that results in magnificent narrow high windows and the massive beauty of buttressing.

Challenges set limits on our “wild” creativity. Playing with design ideas within those limits, and redoing the outcome several times either in imagination or liter a lly, often inspires tighter, better solutions to design tasks. In architecture the limits of client, program, building materials, and cost might evoke the most brilliant design solutions, as they channel and focus your imagination.

Idea to reality

Part of my inspiration comes from the constant enjoyment of my visual surroundings. My most exciting translation of an idea into reality is Oh! Rock-a My Soul! in which the movement and beauty of the Alvin Ailey dancers entering the stage, skirts a-swirl and pinwheeling, light playing on their rows, inspired a great quilt. Published and shown several times, it is an early example of my studies in light and motion.

Other visual translations include Second Balcony, a glimpse of the opera house in San Francisco. It captures the moment just before the curtain rises, the

above: Second Balcony 24 x 18 inches, 2012 right: View from a High Place 30 x 40 inches, 2013

darkness broken only by the lighted sheet music and glow reflected in the instruments.

As a commission, I made View from a High Place, a more realistic view of San Francisco Bay with the Golden Gate Bridge, the Marin Headlands, and a bit of San Francisco’s shoreline. The horizontal quilting of the water and sky adds movement and rough beauty to the natural colors and forms.

Evolution

In general, my work has evolved toward more serious artwork. I try to do excellent compositions and craftlike executions of my design ideas. The technique I am wedded to is piecing, usually with free-hand curved lines similar to what artist Nancy Crow teaches. My materials are richer now. I like to add silks along with hand-dyed and painted fabrics done by other artists. My preference is to piece designs, not to do surface design work.

Complexity in my compositions is well represented by A Song of Ascent, created for the SAQA exhibition Stories of Migration and exhibited at The George Washington Museum and The Textile Museum in Washington, D.C. This piece, evoking the struggle of small boats on a large ocean, needed large scale and drama. To make the water read as vast, I outlined a series of swells with ¾-inch strips of dark blue, set closer together in the distance, wider in the foreground. I filled in these spaces with many colors of water and foam.

Sewing in sections, I kept bending the straight segments to achieve a curved effect for both the horizon and the wave swells. Landforms on each side help tie the narrative to a human scale, as refugees flee the war-torn land on the left and work to reach the green shores ahead. Small boats were appliquéd later. The final touch was long-arm quilting by artist Angie Woolman, with a pattern of continuous wave-like texturing designated by me. Her contributions made the sea read as a whole enormous area, creating an effective and cohesive image.

New directions

I take up ideas from my world and mood. If I’m excited by an idea or image, I go to the studio and start pulling it together. I proceed improvisationally. Occasionally I’m inspired by an upcoming exhibition theme or by a request from a friend or relative. I often find that the works I do quickly, in a wave of creative time, are better than those on which I linger. I sometimes create or accept deadlines to challenge myself to work faster.

I often work in series. Reworking an idea several times can lead to new insights. The linear works from my Agglomerations series are a good example. This series influenced my piece Ad Infinitum, with its

grids of refugee tents, and my piece for a Frida Kahlo-themed show, Aztec Altar ( not shown).

Studio day

I vary my routine depending on which part of the process I am doing. If creating, I will stand at my design board for six hours or more, alternating that task with sewing or re-cutting. There is a lot of contemplation of the work, too. If I’m in the final sewing assembly stage and I find it boring, I may listen to music or an audio book.

The home-machine quilting stage takes more concentration because I freehand many of the curves and lines that I sketch on the surface. Quilting is broken up into short intervals of two or three hours so my lines stay elegant and random. For this stage I may work for a period in the morning, take a long break, and return for a later session. I do work at night on machine quilting as well as mundane tasks, but not on the initial design work, where color is so important.

Looking ahead

I would like to be a better artist. This goal is what makes design work so worthwhile— the sense that you are improving and becoming more sophisticated, doing better and better work.

nancybardach.com

above:

A Song of Ascent

64 x 140 inches, 2016

left: Ad Infinitum 75 x 45 inches, 2015