It's been fifty years since I committed to the form of the quilt as a creative pursuit. At the start I had no idea that it would develop as a career–it was, in fact, a hobby really, a distraction from the stress and pressures I was feeling in my final year of graduate school (Rochester Institute of Technology, MFA 1973). My painting practice, and the printmaking that I was doing alongside it, were real work, and with one eye on the art world of the early 1970s beyond academe, I was feeling anxious, a bit out of sync, and disinclined to fall into line with the tendencies of that moment, which seemed to be moving increasingly into the realm of performance and installation. I knew as well that I'd come out of the abstract expressionist tradition, had been heavily influenced by the color field painters (Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler, Mark Rothko, etc.), and saw no clear direction for where to take my efforts in that already crowded franchise.

There were other factors at work. Marriage followed fairly quickly by the birth of a son had altered everything about the day-to-day. I'd pledged in full sincerity and with conscious intent to be a hands-on dad, and that meant being present. If I were to carry on studio work within the household, I'd need to minimize the risks that the toxic materials of the painter's and printmaker's studio represented. I'd also professed to being indifferent to, maybe hostile to, the traditional roles into which men were cast. As women were in the process of rejecting traditional roles for themselves, it made sense to me for men to assume that socio-political stance in tandem. I'd married someone who'd sewn since she was six years old, someone for whom fabric and the accoutrements of sewing satisfied a creative compulsion. I sensed that I could further endear myself to her by pursuing the curiosity I had about that world of fabric and thread. When I started seeing quilts in reproduction in magazines and newspapers at the outset of the lead-up to the US Bicentennial celebration, I understood that I might be able to bring practicality and creativity together. Tentatively but enthusiastically I set myself to figuring out a path forward.