Inspirations from France!

As you read this I am flying home from my week in France, and a wonderful excursion among some of the textile wonders of the world!

One thing I really love about Paris is that you always find costume exhibits alongside the art exhibits.

Currently at the Museum of Decorative Arts, you will find the Fashioning Fashion exhibit, showing the history of fashion from 1700 – 1915. (This is a museum in the Louvre complex)

At the D'Orsay Museum there is currently an exhibit of costumes seen in Impressionist paintings.

I also saw opera and ballet costumes on display at the Garnier Opera House – although apparently I just missed an exhibit of Christian Lacroix costumes there.

Last weekend I had a wonderful time at the Lyon textile museum, viewing several centuries of silk weaving and textile history.

One thing's for certain – the love of fabric and embellishment has been going on for a long time! It doesn't take a fabric-lover to gasp in amazement at the most exquisitely-rendered textile masterpieces of the last few centuries.

I got several comments about the midweek Creative Nudge, regarding plagiarizing vs. inspiration. When I came into the quilt industry from the fashion industry, and from a background in fine arts, I was surprised at how proprietary quilters are about their work. In the art world, and the fashion world, it is a given that everything has been done before, but what's new is how things are recombined and recreated. I was shocked when I heard a story about someone copyrighting a historic quilt block, and suing others who then tried to work with this historic block.

The more you study art, the more you see how artists inspire each other through the ages. You can be inspired by a neighbor's work from last week, or you can be inspired by a French artist 200 years ago. There is nothing wrong with being inspired by another's work. In fact most of us are unconsciously inspired by generations of viewing art and quilts and fashion and design… and after washing around in the brain for awhile we spit it out in a new combination that looks new to us…and everyone else.

Study art history, and you'll read about the lineage of artistic inspiration. Every artist had a mentor who influenced the student's work, and even when the great genius artists created a new style, they were inspired by other artists or art forms. We keep inventing new ways of seeing, new ways of expressing, and new ways of naming our art. In this age where we are bombarded by more images and more information than ever before in the history of mankind, we set ourselves apart by creating a new way of combining colors and rendering motifs. In a time when recycled art is a huge trend, those of us clinging to rigid ideas about copyright should consider the magnitude of all-that-is in the mega-reality of digital images stored in the giant database of the internet. Creative people don't copy – they re-imagine an inspiration and make it their own.