The fabric I used for this quilt wasn't the best choice I might have made, but back in the 70s there wasn't a lot in the way of solid-tone polished cottons or glazed fabrics to choose from. This polyester-cotton blend fit the bill aesthetically. It approximated the 18th and early 19th-century indigo-dyed woolens with which vintage whole cloth quilts had been made. The one immediately below appeared in an online search for "18th/19th century linsey-woolsey whole-cloth quilts" and embodies some of the textural and design characteristics that fascinated me at the time, when I was first discovering quilts.

I've often been asked if Night Sky 1 was inspired by Van Gogh's starry nights. The possible resemblance surely occurred to me, but in fact, it was a particular patchwork tradition, the "Drunkard's Path" pattern, that was my starting point. I was attracted to the curved element in the design, and the waywardness it could suggest, the meandering, wavy progression of that curved feature across the quilt. The Amish version below, shown in Dennis Duke and Deborah Harding's coffee table book America's Glorious Quilts (New York: Hugh Lauter Levin Associates, Inc., 1987) captures the relaxed geometry and improvisational potential of this simple unit. It begged for elaboration.

Night Sky 1 is today in the collection of the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, MA, about a half hour or so south of Boston. I made a gift of it to them in 2005, having never sold it and wanting it to have a life beyond my personal storage, such as it was. The museum had included it in a large retrospective exhibition of my work there that year. The installation view below shows part of a different exhibition, a "collection highlights" group the museum mounted about ten years later, and in it they included Night Sky 1. The view provides a sense of the quilt's dimensions. The actual blue color isn't exactly quite as it appears in any of these images, though it's close.

Once I launched myself in this thematic direction, the marriage of curved figures and sky spaces would be a recurring component of the "themes and variations" that defined the various series of works to come out of my studio over the next couple of decades. Direct references are made in some of the quilts' titles, and in other cases the visual impression alone suffices to evoke sky. To some degree I've always had my head in the clouds, my eyes turned dreamily upward, and Night Sky 1 and its offspring document an interface with the natural world that was always as important to me as my humble studio efforts to interpret it.