Rhonda Bracey: At Random

My initial thoughts revolved around tongues, taste buds, and food. Then to the main taste sensations — sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami (savoury). Abstract was still my biggest issue.

Here are the scanned pages of my notes jotted down over several months.

Because my handwriting is crap these days, here’s the deciphered version of the page above:

• Rolling Stones album with tongue
• Food
• Sweet and sour
• Taste buds – cellular level
• Sour – lemon, lime, orange
• Lemon meringue pie — sweet and sour
• Blissful taste — yellow, orange, red bursts (no, I have no idea what I was thinking when I wrote that one down either!)
• Sour taste — blue/green
• Bitter/salt — black, purple, white, grey
• Associate experience with something known, such as facial expressions in response to taste

Double page spread translation:

• Square quilt (from Strativarious [book]) in yellow, orange, green with stitched words/shapes for lemons, limes, oranges
• Blindfold examples as precursor to the reveal in September 2013 — lemon, lime, orange, licorice?
• Sour, sweet, bitter, umami (savoury)
• Words
• plate with bowl, chopsticks, food etc. in 3D?? See Quilting Arts magazine, Feb/March 2013 p68 for ideas
• Chilli/chocolate
• Texas – chocolate [brown] whole cloth quilt (idea from Rayna Gillman)
• No taste — flu, colds
• Wasabi, chilli
• Symbols, images, colours

And no, I don’t know what the Venn diagram means either 😉

Final page translation:

Cell structure [of]:

• orange, lemon, lime
• taste buds
• milk fat
• sugar crystals
• chocolate

After making these notes over some months, it became obvious to me that either something cellular or to do with chocolate or citrus was likely going to be the end result.

I hunted through my photos of fruits etc. and scoured the internet for interesting images of cells and free photos of food etc., all the while looking for inspiration.

I narrowed the images down to a few, then played with manipulating them in PaintShop Pro, as well as trying to envisage how I would create a quilted piece from those digitisations. Some immediately eliminated themselves as just too hard, while others were still possibilities.

Here are some of the images I studied closely and some of the digital creations I made from them and from words (using www.wordle.net). For each of the fruits, I’ve shown the original photo first, then the digital creations from it (I went through MANY iterations of each before saving a result I thought would work). Note: The final decision is not on this page — it’s just to show some of the processes and ideas I had while coming to a decision (in late March/early April).

Apples

Kiwi Fruit

Strawberries

Peaches

Words

See also:

• The challenge: https://sandgroper14.wordpress.com/2013/09/20/2013-challenge-the-challenge/
• Coming to a decision: (this post)
• The decision: https://sandgroper14.wordpress.com/2013/09/20/2013-challenge-the-decision/
• The process: https://sandgroper14.wordpress.com/2013/09/20/2013-challenge-the-process/
• The finished product: https://rhondabracey.com/2013/09/20/2013-challenge-the-finished-product/