The Museum of the American Quilter’s Society, alias MAQS, announced recently on their website that it has invited us to exhibit our works in a dialogue setup with Eleanor McCain from August 16 to November 5, 2008.

We are of course very exited about having this opportunity once again to see a good selection of our works at display in the same exhibition – yes, this is special because most often we exhibit single pieces of artwork in competitive exhibitions – but what will be really interesting for us to experience is what impact a dialogue setup of individually very distinctive works can have on the viewer.

Sometimes we have, when leaving exhibitions where a relatively large group of artists exhibited together, had mixed feelings about the experience. In particular when the group has been interacting for years and their joint exhibition has a high degree of homogeneity and lacks dynamism.

But this dialogue exhibition featuring Eleanor McCain’s and our works – and no other artists’ – seems to provide the basis for visual dynamism that inevitably will have an impact on the viewers.

Why is that? Well, there are two reasons, and they are, strangely enough, opposite. Our ways of artistic expression is very different but Eleanor and we work at a large scale. To use the curator, Judy Schwender’s words, the exhibition at MAQS will feature “…Visions in large scale abound, taking the viewer inside the piece and the artists’ worlds. Inge Mardal and Steen Hougs’ creations embrace nature, while Eleanor McCain explores color through traditional shapes”.

We’ve never met Eleanor McCain and are looking very much forward to meeting her. We cannot imagine a better occasion than the opening on October 10 of our joint exhibition at the MAQS. Maybe she shares our curiosity about which works from our portfolio the curator will eventually pick…

Imagine this situation: You want to see some of our quilts and connect to our website, where you click on ‘Quilts’ below the image of Inge and me having a delicious dessert some fine summer’s day. The Quilt Show starts with an invitation for you to lean back, relax and enjoy the show which will automatically roll on, so you just roll your mouse over the image to have the user controls show up, so that you can stop the show while you replenish you glass of wine and make yourself comfortable in the chair. You then click on the user controls to continue the show.

Maybe you are curious as to whether we have included other quilts since you visited our website last time. “Spectators” show up, then “Idyllic Existence” – they may be new in the show to you, actually – then “Against the Wind” where you recall the play between traditional piecing in the breaker and the more representational appliqué of the seagull, the sea and the sky. Then… Hey, what was that? The next image does not show up! The Quilt Show stopped without you touching the mouse or anything. You were just sitting there, relaxed about to reach out for your drink.

You grab the mouse and roll it over “Against the Wind” to activate the user controls again so you can tell it to continue. But the user controls do not show up! You try a couple of things more, but “Against the Wind” remains statically on display.

Nothing happens. You are no longer relaxed. Maybe you even did not reach the relaxed state. Who can do this in 15 seconds? Slightly irritated you decide to check out another website. No zen that evening…

This situation is not fiction. It actually happened to Rosario the other day, so she wrote us an email letting us know that we ought to be more generous and show more than 3 of our works. She wanted to see more of our production, she wrote.

Telling you that our Quilt Show presently includes more than 60 works makes you easily understand that we got somewhat puzzled and immediately checked our website out to examine this abnormal behaviour. We found the behaviour to be consistent on both XP and Vista based systems.

Now, what had gone wrong?

Then we noticed that the Quilt Show actually did not stop entirely. Instead of the 5 seconds display time we have defined for each image the 3rd image was displayed for more than a minute.

We checked with GloDerWorks, who engineered this website for us, and they quickly found the cause of the problem. Apparently it was me! I was the cause of the problem!

A retrospective analysis tells me that I, when last updating the Quilt Show, accidentally specified 67 seconds display time for “Against the Wind”!!! A visitor will evidently experience this as were the Quilt Show stopped. If not the long period per se, then this unexpected long pause will give the visitor an incentive to move on to other websites before the display time expires and the Quilt Show continues by itself.

No major harm done, but we want our website to have a high degree of professionalism and integrity, so I should take this incident as a reminder – after each update – to do what we invite our visitors to do – lean back and relax while checking out that everything functions as it is supposed to. It has to, because who can get to a relaxed state in 15 seconds?

My apologies.

This week has been featured by Les Galettes des Rois, for which I have been invited twice – in both cases accompanied with champagne. It is something the French like to gather around in January and they use it as an occasion to say hello after the Christmas break and wish each other all the best for the New Year.

La Galette des Rois is a piece of patisserie with roots in folkloric traditions linked to Christian legends about the Three Wise Men who went to see Maria and Joseph and their new born child. Hence the plural form “des Rois”. The generic recipe for La Galette is rather basic (puff pastry, eggs, sugar, water, salt, butter and ground almonds).

And in La Galette is placed a little ceramic (or often plastics nowadays) charm – Le Fève – which for the one who finds it in his or her wedge means a promotion to become King or Queen for the day, and a golden paper crown is placed on the head as a symbol of this rank.

I discussed with my taxi driver how he grew up with this tradition and the importance of it, seen from the vantage point of a child. As I imagined the kids love it and wherever La Galette is served there is a competition to find Le Fève in one’s own wedge and become King or Queen for the day.

Perhaps this traditional pastry was originally made for the Twelfth Night only and it is due to modern times’ affluence that kids repeatedly find opportunities to compete with each other throughout the entire month of January. They have it at home, at their grand parents, in their mates’ homes, in the sport clubs, etc.

Not surprisingly some kids start collecting Les Fèves and some of them do that throughout their entire lives. As part of his heritage the taxi driver’s granddad left a collection covering 65 years of personally gained charms. Whereas they would vary from patissier to patissier there were nevertheless years with certain themes. Some years could be influenced by France doing well in football, so Les Fèves would represent aspects related to that sport. Other years France could do well in the Rugby tournament, which then would lead to a change in style what regards these little pieces.

In the opinion of my taxi driver Les Fèves originally depicted the Virgin Mary. With this information I could connect present days’ application of the tradition with religious belief and legends. Maybe the roots stretch even further back into pagan times…

Well, I probably need further studies to write something of interest on this subject, so I will leave it here only scratching the surface and answer the question on what this reflection on the French tradition with Les Galettes des Rois has to do on our blog. Where is the link to art?

With all disclaimers out and acknowledging that I’m not really schooled in art history, the link here to Les Galettes des Rois is the evolution in European art from the Middle Ages where it went from predominantly featuring religious motifs commissioned by the church, to a freewheeling all-encompassing melange of motifs in our days – and its similarity with the evolution in application of motifs for Les Fèves baked into Les Galettes des Rois.

Now, this is interesting. Imagine a thesis on “Similarities between the Evolution in European Art since the Middle Ages and the Choice of Charms baked into Galettes des Rois”.

Wow!

I wonder if it would be for an anthropologist or an art historian to take up this challenge.

In an earlier blog I referred to another tradition that has roots in Antiquity – that of wearing tiaras – and wondered what made grown up and otherwise shrewd women wear individually created contraptions as tiaras at the Quilt Festival in Houston.

I should perhaps take a look closer to home and start wondering about what make grown up and otherwise shrewd engineers and project controllers wear mass produced paper crowns if they happen to find a charm in their wedge of a Galette des Rois.

So, I believe it would be for an anthropologist to take up that challenge.

A smile is always a good starting point – for almost everything we do in life. So what better than starting the 2008 blog series with a joke?

Here it goes: In the last days of 2007 Inge and I prepared and sent applications for two international exhibitions overseas the deadline for which were here in the beginning of January. We filled in the forms, copied images to CDs, put it all in UPS Express envelopes and sent them off. Experience has taught us to always send applications and artwork express and we have learned to live with the associated expenses. In this case a couple of hundred dollars. So, the only thing left is to pay UPS when the invoice arrives and else wait with a positive and hopeful mind for the answers from the juries.

Did you catch the joke? If you didn’t, here it is: It was not at all necessary to send the application forms or the images the old fashioned way. You know – by trucks, walking feet, airplanes, more trucks and more walking feet. It could all have been done via the internet without jeopardizing formal aspects or quality of data – at negligible costs, and the shipping time would have been approximately 10 seconds.

You can continue smiling when reflecting about how the commercial world around us evolves in the direction of informing and communicating with customers around the world and facilitating shopping of everything from high end cameras, computers, graphic tablets over fabrics and artists’ gear to booking of hotels, flights and the like – and then compare it with the conservatism that still reigns in the quarters of many of those who arrange international exhibitions.

OK. Joke over.

No, not yet. There is more. When UPS drove out to deliver, there was in both cases no one to receive the envelopes. In one of the cases UPS only succeeded the 3^rd time – had they not succeeded then, the envelope would have been returned to us. So, the smile continues a little longer when thinking about internet servers which would be working around the clock, every day – equally serving artists all over the world ready to receive their applications – also on Christmas Day, 1^st of January, Easter Sunday, bank holidays, vacations or any other day when the office is not staffed.

The first blog entry in 2007 advocated for going digital – all the way – in the application process for exhibitions. The issue was debated in many forums last year, so hopes were high that 2008 would start out in line with the times we are living in, and not those we lived in.

Well, it didn’t – not even in associations who consider themselves proactive and at the forefront what regards serving their members’ interests.

So, let us with a smile wish you a good and prosperous new year – with the hope that modern times will arrive at those organizers who still require submission of applications for international exhibitions the old fashioned way. Maybe we could modestly and kindly ask them to start thinking internationally, subsequently thinking of streamlining the application and juiying process with the tools available today.

Yes, that will be our wish for 2008!