Back in November, the Montreal Modern Quilt Guild organized a visit to the Guido Molinari Foundation. Guido Molinari was a renowned abstract painter from Montreal. He died in 2004. But, his gallery is still open to the public. Before his death, he created a fondation to continue perpetuating his art and abstract painting in general. Our group was welcomed by the executive director of the foundation and his assistant. When we were there, the exhibit was on a series of paintings and screen paintings by Molinari, named Quantifiers.  Like in most of his work, he explored color and their interactions with each other. In this series, it was subtle changes of tones. And how the width of different strips could change our perception of color and create rhythms. All our group really enjoyed the guided tour and the passionate and generous explanations on Molinari’s life and work. And even though the people from the gallery were surprise to receive visit from a quilt guild, we could all see how his work could translate into quilts.

Following that visit, our guild proposed a new challenge to us: make a quilt inspired by Molinari. I have been looking at his work since then and I finally settled on a series of paintings named “Structures triangulaires” as my source of inspiration. You can see one of these paintings exposed in Musée d’art de Joliette in this post. He did a series of paintings with these simple triangular structures in which he permuted warm and cold colors to create the perception of more complex structures. The paintings were composed of 4 rectangles split in half by a diagonal, creating half-rectangle triangles. By playing with the layout of the different triangles, he created different variations. You can read a good explanation in the last section of this article from La Vie des Arts (in French, link to the PDF)

This made me think of my half-rectangle triangle (HRT) table runners (see here and here) and the tutorial I had written for Sew Mama Sew! So, I decided to explore that concept. I combined different variations of layout for 4 HRTs I had seen from his work to create an even more complex structure. I’m settled on a layout. I did some new templates for the HRTs as their size will be different than the ones used in the tutorial. I did some test blocks. And I chose my fabric (Kona cottons in Lagoon, Ultra Marine, Coral and Bordeaux). So, I’m now ready to take on the challenge!