The Sublime Heritage of Martha Mood, 2 volumes - Hardcover

Henderson, Lester Kierstead

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0960190627 ISBN 13: 9780960190621

Publisher: Kierstead Publications, 1980

Synopsis

Martha Mood, artist, photographer, and teacher, was born in Oakland, California, on June 21, 1908. After the war she married Beaumont Mood, a Texas photographer she had met in Hawaii, and settled with him in Dallas. She began ceramics lessons in 1946, but her artistic activities were curtailed by an auto accident in 1947. She suffered serious injuries to her face and jaw that required extensive plastic surgery. In 1952 she and her husband moved to San Antonio, where she developed her métier as a stitchery artist. Initially she worked as an art teacher in public schools and at the San Antonio Art Institute. Her involvement with appliqué stitchery was prompted by the fortuitous gift of fabric samples from a designer friend in 1959, at a time when Mood was reading a book on the creative possibilities of stitchery. Her earliest work was quite simple, merely glued arrangements of fabric shapes that nevertheless demonstrated her mastery of composition with color. She later began to experiment with embroidery, which gave an extra dimension of color and texture to the surface of her appliqués. She used a mélange of "found" fabrics such as denim, velvet, silk, lace, old blankets, and used clothes in her wall hangings and amplified the textural richness of her embroidery by using yarns of different width, braid, and twine. Flowers, children, nudes, and wild and domestic animals were frequent themes in her wall hangings; she also made ecclesiastical banners and abstract works inspired by Matisse's cut-outs and the cubist collages of Picasso and Braque. She traveled around the country to conduct workshops on stitchery and exhibited her work in more than thirty exhibitions in seventeen cities. As her reputation grew, she was commissioned to make appliqués for clients such as Mr. and Mrs. Lyndon Baines Johnson, Mr. and Mrs. John B. Connally, Mr. and Mrs. O'Neil Ford, and other prominent Texans.

About this edition

• Publisher: Kierstead Publications
• Publication date: 1980
• ISBN 10: 0960190627
• ISBN 13: 9780960190621
• Binding: Hardcover