Maryte Collard – Country – Artist

Feliksas

Lithuanian artist Feliksas was not very famous because he started painting in his later years and passed away rather young, at the age of 51. His full name was Feliksas Pusvaškis but he wanted to be known  only by his first name. Even on his headstone only his first name feliksas is carved.

How did I get to know about him? One morning I went to my car, parked in a back yard of the appartment building where I lived. An old lady sat on a bench right by my car. She was dressed elegantly and wore a linen hat. I said hi to her, and she responded by saying that she knew me and my cat. She has been watching me working by the open window with a white cat by my side. I told her that I was an artist who makes pictures from fabrics. “Oh, my son was an artist. He was a painter”- she responded. I sat next to her and we had a nice conversation. She lived in a house across the drivay and her bedroom window faced my studio window. Her name was Felicija and she was 92 years old. Felicija also told me more about her son Feliksas.

After returning home that day, I googled Feliksas Pusvaškis. His paintings looked like quilts! They looked like they were made from the small geometric pieces of color. Feliksas himself called his style post-suprematism.

Suprematism  is an art movement focused on basic geometric forms, such as circles, squares, lines, and rectangles, painted in a limited range of colors. It originated in early 20th century in Russia. The term suprematism refers to an abstract art based upon “the supremacy of pure artistic feeling” rather than on visual depiction of objects.

This time I couldn’t keep my promise of using only naturally dyed linen fabrics. I used comercially dyed linen fabrics but I kept my other promise- no machine sewing or quilting. I fused linen fabrics to a very thin onesided fusible to keep them from fraying. Then I cut out all the pieces and basted them in place on batting and backing fabric sanwich. The next step was to hand stitch through all three layers, and finally to sew on binding.