Our insecurities can get the better of us. I’ve always thought my own too successful for their own good.

In the early 90s I stumbled over the question posed to me a few too many times, “Are you still making stripes?” the hard emphasis on that word “still.” I didn’t like its implication that I was repeating myself tiresomely, that I was finally trapped on a kind of treadmill where I was stuck cranking out the same thing, over and over. Truthfully, that’s what I’d started feeling. Is there anything else I can say with this, I was asking myself. Where else can this go? It seemed I already had self-defeating mind games on repeat and that still question added insult to injury.

Processional, 1992, 68” h x 118” w; private collection

The repetitiveness of the making processes was a piece of it. Cutting and sewing all of the stripes! I had hired a family member to help me with those, but I was still sewing a lot of them myself. The nature of that kind of piecing, a system that demanded extreme precision, and the inherent tendency of cotton and silk fabrics to shift and stretch in handling, cutting, and sewing, necessitated a lengthy and physically demanding basting process. The extent of that basting had begun to wear on my elbows and shoulders. If I were going to continue to put my joints at risk in contortionist postures at my worktable, I needed to feel that there remained unrealized surface configurations to explore. I wasn't feeling that.

Because woven fabric stretches and slides and shifts, it tends to work against precision. Often, seams that I intended be perfectly straight were imperfectly aligned. Consequently, I had to do extensive pinning and basting to correct those sorts of irregularities, sometimes to the point at which nearly all of a quilt’s extent was basted to its underlying layers prior to quilting. It could be both challenging and exhausting.

The backing fabric was stretched taut across my worktable(s), and then the upper layers basted through the backing. With that backing taut, I could adjust the positioning of seams and fullness of the top layer and have them stay in place through the basting and eventual machine quilting. It was slow going, and stressful where fingers and joints were concerned.

That the work was selling, and selling well, added to my ambivalence about how to proceed. The fruits of my labor had certainly helped us to fashion a satisfying lifestyle, and the work and living environments that we felt productive in. Why would I want to change now, when things were going well and my work was being rewarded by a level of recognition and affirmation that many artists fail to achieve? I was in an enviable position. Why mess with that?

Galerie Jonas, Petit-Cortaillod, Switzerland, June 1995



Why not mess with it? Though I felt I was on pretty secure ground where the work of fifteen years had led me, I wanted to feel more challenged intellectually. I could see something different in my mind’s eye, blurry at that point but intriguing. Something simpler, more elemental; a kind of reduction, a downsizing of color and form and attitude – a tabula rasa where risk could re-enter the picture. I loved the seductive runs of color that the carefully calibrated stripes allowed, but that had become part of the problem. They could be too beautiful, in a way, almost precious. I was ready to think differently, to cut cloth differently. Just at that point Medieval pattern makers and colorists stepped in to show me a way forward.

Facing pages of a Medieval manuscript (l.) and a polychromed wall panel in the Maison Jacques Coeur, Bourges, France (r.)

Painted columns in Notre Dame la Grande, Poitiers, France (l. and center) and detail of a late 16th century Russian icon in the Russian Museum, St. Petersburg (r.)

Ikon, 1996, 79” h x 74” w; private collection

I’d been traveling a lot overseas, in both Europe and Asia, and strong, graphic patterning in all forms grabbed me. Whether it was in a Russian or Greek icon, or patterned wall painting in a medieval church or chateau, or a bold alert of diagonal black and yellow stripes on the backside of a refuse truck, it stopped me in my tracks. And that visual power, that capacity to signal and arrest attention, was too compelling to ignore. I started digesting it, re-imagining its function and context, translating that communicative and performative function in fabric.

Views of Parallel Conversations in progress in the Somerset studio, spring 1997

I was done with nice, at least for the time being. My energies needed to go into surfaces with some shock value, patternings that could get in each other’s way, that could elbow their partners and vie for attention. Not only would the patterns be heraldic, but the colors would be as well. To heighten their intensity I even introduced woolen fabrics, a type that I’d ignored for the most part. They had a robustness and physicality different in feel from the cottons and silks I’d always worked with. They held color differently, and like the graphic patternings, they were helping me subvert expectations.

Above, Yellow Brick Road (l.) and Zipper (r.), 1996 and 1997 respectively and both made entirely of wool challis, a fabric traditionally found in Amish quilts. Below, quilting-in-progress on Zipper, 1997.

My reading at the time was also playing with my thinking. It was challenging how I considered not only my studio practice and the objects that I made, but also the peripheral activities I was engaged in, workshop teaching not least. I read and re-read Suzi Gablik, Ellen Dissanayake, Carl Jung, Derek Jarman, Doris Grumbach, James Hillman, Peter Dormer, Joseph Campbell, Jon Kabat-Zin, Anne Pruitt, and many others. I was looking for direction. I’d reached my mid-forties and I was searching all over again. Not unlike how I feel as I write this, having recently entered what Grumbach euphemistically called “the end zone.” Where to, next?

Crash Site, 1996, 50” h x 76.5” w, cotton & wool; collection, Museum of Arts and Design, NYC



In Daybook: The Journal of An Artist (p. 41) Anne Truitt remembered this insight held by her friend the sculptor David Smith: “The fifteen years that [he] thought it took to become an artist are spent partly in learning how to move ahead sure-footedly as if you did actually know where you are going.” And then, it seems that when you get to where you thought you were going, to where you wanted to be, you may find it isn’t the place you expected. Or that you’re back where you started. That’s when un-learning may be the best strategy.

Back at that juncture I had to un-learn in order to get my bearings. The good thing is that no one would tell me what to do nor how to do it. Master of my own ship as much in deep fog as in bright sunlight. “ Art allows us to find ourselves,” wrote Thomas Merton, “and to lose ourselves at the same time.” Indeed.