I’m calling the quilts in this blog entry the “offspring” of the diptych The Sixth Exercise that was the focus of the previous blog installment. By the time I made these my way of working was pretty well-established. I would typically try out numerous variations of particular stripe configurations and proportions, always by way of answering the question “What if I did this instead?” I liked tweaking an idea in different ways, carrying the basic premise along until I felt that I’d exhausted the possibilities worth pursuing.

La Tempête. Collection, International Quilt Museum, Lincoln, Nebraska

That’s how La Tempête (1983) came about. A fairly large quilt at 79” high and 87” wide, it uses the structural format and compositional strategy of The Sixth Exercise and expands it to more familiar dimensions. The storm its title references is that front that moves in slowly, almost unnoticed, and in which clouds re-shape themselves in response to the up- and down-drafts that the wind and its gusts set in motion. My work then – and as much now – comes out of reflections on my feelings about something, whatever that something might be. The emotional undercurrents that drive each of us have always driven my work generally, and they can often be seen as visual analogues to emotional or psychic states that I’ve experienced, and that expressed themselves in these compositional surfaces.

Maybe that sensibility comes out of my 1960s art training, in an undergraduate program in a small state university where most of the students, regardless their majors, were first-generation working class kids taking a big step into futures that their parents and grandparents could hardly have imagined. In the art world it was the tail end of Abstract Expressionism, its light fading fast, and our faculty, a generation older than us, had lived through that movement and in their turn been formed by it too. Bauhaus pedagogies were also still very much active in the studio spaces we studied in, and they informed our work significantly. It looks from today’s vantage point like a very conservative art and design training, which it was. The world and societies beyond our ivory tower were convulsing in the late 1960s, though, and a lot would change both within and beyond the ivory tower by the time we finished our degrees.

Detail view, La Tempête. Collection, International Quilt Museum, Lincoln, Nebraska

“An artist may consciously try to avoid self-imitation,” writes composer Ned Rorem in The Nantucket Diary of Ned Rorem 1973 - 1985 [©1987, North Point Press, p. 409], “yet it’s not for him to know, finally, whether in fact he succeeds. There is no new thing under the sun. Not to say the same thing twice is impossible, although it can be said in different ways. The best of us have no more than four or five ideas during our whole life; we spend that life chiseling those ideas into various communicating shapes.” 

Rorem touches on something that planted itself in my artistic consciousness when I was that inexperienced and naive undergraduate in the late 1960s. Great colorists like Kandinsky, Albers, Matisse, Münter, Frankenthaler, O’Keefe and others were the suns in whose shadows I would have to plot some kind of direction for myself, if color were going to be my subject matter. They’d already sucked most of the air out of the color room, so chiseling out four or five ideas to build a career with would be a real challenge. Looking back, it took chutzpah to even try. That I made an unexpected left turn down this fabric byway may have been my good fortune moment, or a serious artistic and career miscalculation. The jury’s still out.

City Rhythms, 1983, 58” h x 58” w. Collection, International Quilt Museum, Lincoln, Nebraska

The Rite of Spring, 1983, 67” h x 67” w. Private collection.

Blue Undercurrents, 1983. 70.5” h x 69” w. Collection, International Quilt Museum, Lincoln, Nebraska