I was reminded recently of a publishing/product development enterprise called “Creative Publications” that was doing interesting things aimed at the K-12 education market back in the 70s, 80s and 90s. (They appear to have been absorbed by McGraw-Hill, from what information I can find online.) Sometime in the early 80s they produced a set of small posters of my work. I think there may have been ten or a dozen different images, early works that included pieces like Necker’s Cube Quilt, Night Sky 2, Suntreader Monophony, and Moonshadow, among others. I was paid a small royalty from sales of the poster sets, in addition to receiving some dozens of the packaged sets free, that I either sold myself or gave away. They landed in many elementary and middle school classrooms across the country, and many former teachers over the years have told me that they hung them for their students’ edification, whether in homerooms or math classrooms or art studios. Nice.

While I’m no longer certain, I think that the Creative Publications poster set brought my work to the attention of a private school in Kansas City, The Barstow School, that landed me a commission to complete a pair of works for their library. The Sixth Exercise took up a substantial piece of my time and effort in 1982, though it was a productive year overall, one in which I completed nine pieces, the two panels for Barstow included. I can’t tell you what I was thinking that prompted the title The Sixth Exercise. Whatever the source was, it launched a series of pieces that would keep me preoccupied well into 1983.

The Sixth Exercise, completed 1982; size estimate 48” h x 68” w each

The Interweave quilts that preceded this commission had me exploring numerous structural possibilities for sets of same-sized stripes. Here I decided to sandwich narrow stripes with wide ones, giving the narrow ones roles as linear markers and color highlights. While a regular grid structure scaffolded each surface, the play of curved figures with line elements set at 45 degree angles to the grid, in an asymmetrical composition, produced the kind of choreographic dynamic that interested me. I thought it was provocative at the time, and wanted it to be anything but “nice.” Quilts, I felt then, were just too nice.

The Sixth Exercise, left panel; size estimate 48” h x 68” w

The one displeasure I always felt with the commission process was the requirement to create a detailed maquette of the work for the client’s consideration and then, assuming the commission was awarded, to reproduce at full size and as closely as possible, that original concept. It could be done, and each time it was done, but it often felt that all or nearly all of my intellectual and creative effort had preceded the making of the actual work. Maybe I exaggerate a bit, as no paper maquette could be perfectly matched in fabric, but it felt like a constraint. At least to a type-A perfectionist who wanted at minimum to meet, and at best to exceed, every client’s expectations.

I did realize, of course, that maquettes took the load off, so to speak. A much smaller investment of time and materials produced a "map" that relieved me of the pressure of inventing a visual surface responsive enough to a clients' aspirations that they would be pleased. If I followed the "map" they'd already given the nod to, there was little chance they wouldn't be pleased. And, likewise, a better chance that I too would be satisfied. Whether working in maquette form, or building in fabric directly on my studio wall, I always worked to challenge myself, shifting parameters, asking myself “why not this, versus that?” or “what if...?” Understanding the full potential of a particular choice here, an alternative choice there, kept me bound to the practice and the discoveries it might reveal.

Work progressing on the paper maquette of The Sixth Exercise, early 1982. I painted stripes using gouache, an opaque watercolor, on a lightly textured watercolor paper, and then cut and collaged the design units. I would later replicate the painted stripe panels as closely as possible in fabric, scaled up to the required strip sizes. Yes, it was a lot of work that I credit now to youthful energy and a keening ambition.

In the year that I made this diptych, Anne Truitt’s first journal, Daybook: The Journal of an Artist, was published. Much of what she wrote about resonated deeply with me, and it was a kind of “coup de foudre” experience to discover this sculptor who was also a highly sensitive and introspective diarist. I’ve re-read Daybook twice since then, and connect each time with the many passages that I underlined or bracketed or starred. A lot of what I was thinking about then was reflected back at me in the pages of her book. The conundrum I faced whenever I made a commissioned piece, whenever the client wasn’t an abstraction or future possibility, but was present and came with a check in hand, is something that Truitt touched on indirectly here:

Artists have to please whim to live on their art. They stand in fearful danger of looking to this taste to define their working decisions. Sometime during the course of their development, they have to forge a character subtle enough to nourish and protect and foster the growth of the part of themselves that makes art, and at the same time practical enough to deal with the world pragmatically. They have to maintain a position between care of themselves and care of their work in the world, just as they have to sustain the delicate tension between intuition and sensory information. [Anne Truitt, Daybook: The Journal of An Artist, p. 24.]

I felt that “delicate tension” she wrote about when developing and working on The Sixth Exercise and other commissions that preceded and followed it. As with much else, it’s complicated.

Finally, though, the work is complete and it goes out into the world, where its life really begins. Despite his doubts or misgivings or uncertainties, the maker’s relationship to it is permanently embedded in every mark or figure, or, as in the case of quilts, in every fabric shape and every stitch. Now the work is freed to build new relationships and to prompt new conversations that its maker can’t imagine and can’t direct. Students and teachers and staff at the Barstow School interacted with The Sixth Exercise panels, whether purposefully or incidentally, in passing, and may yet be interacting with them, though I realize that some forty years later, it’s unlikely these works remain in their original situation. Maybe something “stuck” with some of these viewers, maybe something in the works spoke to them somehow. While I can’t know what these viewers might have thought, I hope that works like these at that point in time at least shifted their perceptions of what quilts might be and how they might function.