“Whatever the many failings of my work,” he concluded, “let it stand as a manifesto of my love for the time in which I was born.”
The above quote grabbed me from a NYTimes article about John Updike.
Someone recently asked me what kind of quilts I made and as I tried to explain this no-where land between “Traditional” and “Art Quilt” I finally said — I don’t really care how people describe me. I am a contemporary quilter. Someone down the road in time will figure out what we were all doing. In the meantime I seem to do my own thing and occasionally serve to explain a couple of things to the people who don’t want to claim me or what I do. One, that “traditional” is a reflection of people doing what they wanted to make things, express themselves using the materials and tools and ideas they had. And two, that all this “art” stuff has been done before: printing on fabric, putting photographs on fabric, surface design, embellishments etc. Not new. Been done before. Stop thinking you made it up. Or at least stop being rather snobby about it. And three, just do the work until it is your own.
