An Ode To A Lady
Prayer and penance made some sense to me today. Or at least, why people turn to these in times of great need. My stitching project gifted me a day unwasted by grief or anger or despair. As I worked on a piece of background in The Lady with a Fan, I cursed and fumbled and twisted my way through a shower of confetti (single stitches scattered in a blank universe). I imagined the original artist working on this background in quick, easy, almost careless brush strokes. Did he imagine in turn that a century later, I would be filling in the same colours stitch by soul searing stitch? Gustav Klimt, you genius, you heart breaker. Then the rhythm kicked in and I was filling in vast nano spaces, aching fingers and eyes forgotten as the splash of colour grew on the blank canvas. A lotus bloomed and a patch of dark blue appeared. When chapters are completed, when the pages of notation turn into melody, when imagination becomes execution, I dared to share such a time space today with writers and songsters and creative minds. Cross stitchers joke about repeated stabbings but secretly we know why we are compelled to pick up a needle, thread it and put a stitch down. We do it so that we may begin to understand Klimt and Bach and Tolkien. Bach wrote his music with a profound knowledge of mathematical cycles and rhythms. I do not doubt that Tolkien created his vast universe with an innate sense of the cycles of time and space in which worlds coexist. And Gustav Klimt? The man who painted in shades of gold? He used colour to suggest pain and joy and beauty, the cycles of human existence. And today, recreating his beautiful Lady, I touched a little bit of that perfection with my stitching.