Vincent Van Gogh's The Starry Night, in the collection of New York's MOMA, is such a familiar art world icon that I fully realize, who wouldn't think Night Sky 2 was inspired by it. Like nearly everyone who encounters it, I found Van Gogh's oil on canvas spellbinding both when I first saw it in reproduction and later, when I stood before it. But it's not what I was thinking about when I segued into these blue-toned sky quilts. As I mentioned in the previous blog entry, the inspiration was actually rooted in traditional curvilinear patchwork patterns like "Drunkard's Path" and "Robbing Peter to Pay Paul" that suggested so many possible structural variations. Why hadn't anyone thought to do this, I asked myself. Why not multiply the curves and set them in motion randomly? Why not play with the way light falls on fabric, why not set up contrasts between light-reflective fabrics and light-absorbent fabrics? Why not indeed?

This quote attributed to T. S. Eliot makes the point:

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.

That sums up what I yearned to do when I started developing these sky compositions – take something (or "steal" something) that intrigued me from the catalogue of historical patchwork design and turn it to a different purpose, render it with a different attitude, allow it a metamorphosis it hadn't been granted previously. I recognized pretty quickly that a more maverick approach suited not just curved patchwork patternings but most pieced fabric constructions that conformed to the grid format. They were ripe for experimentation. They were begging to be set free. I was eager to oblige.

Above, a "Drunkard's Path" quilt of the type that fascinated me in those first years of studying the form. This one was once in the collection of my dear friend, the late Catherine Anthony of Houston, Texas. Catherine owned a shop called The Quilt Patch, and I taught for her there annually for many years. The quilt, made circa 1900, is now in the collection of the International Quilt Museum in Lincoln, NE. By the time I first saw this "Drunkard's Path" at Catherine's home, I was well along in my series of sky quilts, but no less energized by the pattern's quirkiness and electric charge.

In both the full view above and the installation view that follows it, the colors in the quilt in reproduction, while close, aren't quite on target. In both cases, they're scans of 35mm slides taken back in the day, and different film and lighting conditions always produced different tonal and hue variances. So what you see in photographic representation is more an impression of the actual color palette; close, maybe, but different.

I sold Night Sky 2 before I'd even finished it. My records indicate a completion date of March 1977, and a "sold" date of February 28, 1977. Twelve hundred bucks seemed like a lot of money to me then and I know we were excited when that buyer came along. We had bills to pay, after all, and a five-year-old soon to start school. In 2023 dollars, that's about $6100, adjusted for inflation. That doesn't seem like a lot to me now, given the quilt's size, the fact that it's entirely hand-pieced and entirely hand-quilted (by me, and me solo), and the fact that the market, as small as it is these days, might at auction as much as double or possibly triple that current "value."

Speculation, of course, and the issue's probably moot. The quilt's whereabouts are unknown. The last time I saw it was on a visit to the collector's home in the 1980s sometime, to gauge its condition ahead of an exhibition for which I was considering borrowing it. The owner was a smoker, that worked against the piece. There was some visible surface damage. No longer ready for prime time, the quilt was never exhibited thereafter, as far as I know. I had featured it on the cover of my first book, The Quiltmaker's Handbook, published by Prentice-Hall in 1978. At the time it was a slam dunk – there were no challengers for that pride of place use. It had to be you...no others would do.