BY MARIE MABER
Correspondent

Deborah Tiryung Sidwell In an age when digital photographs, drawings and paintings can pulse with lightning speed to barrage the senses, Deborah Tiryung Sidwell searches for motifs that calm and refresh our spirits, and stitches them into vibrant quilts of meditation and release.

“Visual Spirit,” an exhibit of quilts by the Eatontown artist, is on display through Nov. 2 at the Ocean County Artists’ Guild, Ocean and Chestnut avenues, Island Heights.

A group of five quilts, “Stone Paintings: Fire in the Belly,” characterize this exhibition of 14 works.

Stone Paintings: Origin With images primarily derived from Saharan petroglyphs and pictographs (stone carvings and word pictures), some signs and symbols may seem familiar at first glance.

The phrase “fire in the belly” is a reference Picasso made to his hardworking friend, the great Henri Matisse:

“In the end, everything depends on oneself, on a fire in the belly with a thousand rays. Nothing else counts. That’s why, for example, Matisse is Matisse: the only reason. He’s got the sun in his gut.”

Stone Paintings: Fire in the Belly II With this reference, Sidwell sums up her use of primitive symbols.

“It’s all about the burning desire people have always had to communicate through images and writing,” she said. “After all, the powerful urge to communicate and be fully understood is partly what separates man from beast.”

Motifs taken from stone carvings and rock drawings that Sidwell has visited through the glossy pages of National Geographic are interpreted and invigorated through her impressive array of “hands-on” processes.

Coastal Community: Sunrise Sometimes she begins with dark fabrics that she bleaches designs into, using a hazardous process called discharge, or dye release. Other processes include hand painting, wood block printing, stamping, stitching, piecing, beading, quilting and binding.

For another person, it might all seem too tedious and time consuming; for Sidwell these are the processes that she loves.

“The actual painting, design and assemblage of fabric, quilting the layers, hand embroidery and beads are intensely creative and engaging,” she explained.

“The lengthiest time for completion was more than one year for [a very large and detailed quilt] ‘9/11 Sermon in Cloth I.’ The majority of pieces take three to six months.”

Locally, her work has been exhibited at the Monmouth Festival of the Arts, the annual exhibit of art by alumni of Brookdale Community College, the Monmouth County Arts Council annual juried show at the Monmouth Museum, the Guild of Creative Art, and the Art Alliance in Red Bank.

Sidwell doesn’t preplan her works. Soon after she begins them, they take on a life of their own.

“I rarely have more than just the bare bones of an idea when I begin working on each new piece; therefore, my creative process is intuitive and improvisational. The twists and turns in the development of a design created in this manner make the process exciting and challenging,” she said.

If she wants a certain shape or pattern in her work, she finds one. Celtic and Indian motifs, Chinese characters, spirals, spirals and more spirals augment the African figural designs.

“The spiral can be found in the wall paintings of just about every group of primitive people,” she said. “They are universal symbols, found in patterns of the stars as well as throughout nature.”

The spiral is easily seen in the nautilus shell and the sunflower, for example.

“They are eternal symbols — never ending — on the inside of the spiraling shape, the spaces become tinier and tinier. On the outside the spiraling curves become larger and larger, each end on an infinite path.”

Unlike an oil painting on canvas, works made in the media called fiber art have unlimited permutation possibilities. Unlike traditional sculpture, the forms are malleable, and unlike most fine art, its origins rest firmly in the traditions of functional craft.

“I incorporate paint, embroidery and beads along with textiles so I think I create textile-based mixed media or quilt-based mixed media,” she said.

As the wife and mother of members of the military, she’s toured the United States, gathering the inspiration and skills of her art.

“I’ve lived in California, Ohio, Tennessee, Florida (twice), Georgia (twice), Korea (twice), North Carolina (twice), Mississippi, Washington, Kansas, Arizona and New Jersey,” she recounted. “I’ve been a tourist in Japan (twice), the Philippines, Germany, Austria, Mexico and Canada (twice). I do believe that sharing a life with my husband that was centered on his 23 years of military service has profoundly affected my being.

“The military life placed me in the right place at the right time to incorporate cultures, places, textiles, paint and techniques into what I create today.

“For example, I was in the process of making my first pieced quilt while my husband and I were living in Arizona,” she explained. “An African-American national touring exhibit of quilts called ‘Who’d a Thought It: Improvisation in African American Quiltmaking’ arrived in Tucson in 1991.

“The exhibit took my breath away because the pieces exuded such powerful presence. They taught me that there is indeed permission to use color combinations in a new light in order to intensify effects as with the hot/cold – cold/hot. This is referred to as ‘hitting the quilt,’ ” Sidwell said.

“Many of us are taught as children that we must live in a world of ‘colors not clashing.’ A world that says it is garish and somehow not acceptable to place hot pink next to true orange. I was enamored by the quilt makers’ blatant disregard for any need to comply with generally accepted ‘good sewing’ standards demanded by quilt judges. There were no perfectly intersecting seams, no thought to grain line, no real orderly recognizable quilt patterns. This was all so tremendously liberating for me. Importantly, the exhibition opened my eyes to the fact that improvisation does not mean lacking order or vision.”

Some of her most precious lessons were those she learned over a lifetime of new beginnings. Sidwell has made the most of accepting new cultural influences in her life. Many would cringe at the thought of picking up roots and moving the family to a different state, but not her.

“At the simplest level, it taught me to be a strong, self-reliant woman,” she said. “If push comes to shove, I can ground my own washing machine.”