Since undergraduate school I’ve had an allegiance to the so-called “dark-light principle of design” as Dorr Bothwell labeled it in the book she co-authored with Marlys Mayfield, NOTAN – The Dark-Light Principle of Design. That notion was foundational in my formal art education and still guides my mind and hand when I work out a surface today. I centered it as a pedagogical tool when teaching design workshops and, once in academia, when teaching foundation design and visual literacy. I may be criticized as retardataire for it, or my work dismissed by some because of it. I look around and what I see tells me that, for the most part, design, as subject, is not as current as message and signification. Imagery serves other purposes and other principles today, and that’s fine. The (art) world moves on. That said, another principle guides me: stick to your vision.

Electric Boogie, 1993

As I’d anticipated, figuring out how to disengage from the grid opened up expressive possibilities. There were now far fewer limitations on the poses and postures that the linear configurations in each piece could assume. That incipient kineticism, combined with more elaboration in the hue and value sequences ordered and held by the sewn fabric stripes, offered a way to re-align my thinking about the quilt as a platform (technically, a “flat form” - plat, French for flat). 

Where the quilt was concerned, I’d served a kind of self-directed apprenticeship in the 70s, I’d carried out a deliberate and rigorous series of experiments challenging many of its structural conventions in the 80s, and by the 90s I had started to lose patience with its self-referential conservatism. I’d come to feel boxed in by the design and construction methodologies that fabric work required and imposed. This new direction was a kind of restart, forward motion out of the cup-de-sac (if not dead end) I’d stalled in.

The Metaphysics of Action (Entropic Forms), 1994

What was I looking at, and thinking about, and what kind of intellectual alignments was I making at that point? I’ve never been cagey about motivation or inspiration, nor have I ever claimed the “genius” mantle of original or singular creative authorship that some who like to think of themselves as mavericks take credit for. We work in the world, in communities within that world, and our ideas form organically as a function of being a unit in the collective. An artist’s mind is like a blender into which all kinds of sensory and experiential ingredients are added, pulsed, and transformed into something with its own flavor, essence and complexity.

Quilts were offering far less inspiration than they had at the outset, although the often mystifying color interplays in Amish quilts were and remain compelling. Jan Myers-Newbury and Pamela Studstill handled color and value runs and sequencing with particular finesse, using them to articulate luminous atmospheric surfaces. I saw a similar sensibility in the work of textile artist Diane Itter who, in her hand-knotted linen miniatures, achieved a synthesis of color, pattern and material substance (the linen threads) whose integrity was unassailable. Integrity is ultimately, for me, the defining qualifier, the truth that the work inhabits, and that inhabits it.

l. to r.: Jan Myers-Newbury, Ophelia’s Dream, 1994; Pamela Studstill, Number 47, 1985 ; Diane Itter, Gingko Waltz, 1989.

Earthly Pleasures, 1995

On the wall of my studio, and in my head, I was also carrying on conversations with artists like Frank Stella, Elizabeth Murray, Bridget Riley, Andy Goldsworthy, and others with whose work I either felt an attraction, an affinity, a correspondence, or just shared sensibilities of one kind or another. In terms of process and material substance their work and mine occupied very different domains. Yet, despite the different contexts out of which the work came, and the different audiences that it would encounter, I felt a kind of solidarity, a sense that we spoke a common language or at least worked with similar vocabularies.

l. to r. Frank Stella, The Musket, 1990 ; Elizabeth Murray, Undoing, 1990; Bridget Riley, Conversation, 1992.

Andy Goldsworthy, Feathers from dead heron, 1982; elm leaves, 2002

What I was reading at the time factored into the ennui I’d begun to feel by the late 1980s, and helped to incubate the questions I was asking myself, both about myself and about my work as the 90s opened in front of me. I was now in my forties, middle age. As natural a moment to take stock as any. How other artists had faced that interested me quite a lot, and around that time I read biographies in quantity: Rodin (Grunfeld), Oscar Wilde (Ellman), Philip Guston (Mayer), Oskar Kokoshka (Whitford); Langston Hughes (Rampersad); Vanessa Bell (Spalding); Dora Carrington (Gerzina); Camille Claudel (Delbée); James Baldwin (Weatherby); Jackson Pollock (Naifeh/Smith); Georgia O’Keefe (Robinson); Marsden Hartley (Ludington); and numerous others.

Diarists like Anne Truitt, May Sarton, Doris Grumbach and Ned Rorem also wound their way into the mix. Theirs were highly self-examined lives, and they were artists who had a lot to say about living and working in the arts, and aging in those territories. I re-read some of them still. They taught me to trust the work to find its truth.

“I am an artist,” Anne Truitt notes in Daybook: The Journal of An Artist. “Even to write it makes me feel deeply uneasy. I am, I feel, not good enough to be an artist. And this leads me to wonder whether my distaste for the inflated social definition of the artist is not an inverse reflection of secret pride. Have I haughtily rejected the inflation on the outside while entertaining it on the inside? In my passion for learning how to make true for others what I felt to be true for myself (and I cannot remember, except very, very early on, ever not having had this passion), I think,” she continues, “I may have fallen into idolatry of those who were able to communicate this way. Artists. So to think myself an artist was self-idolatry...In a clear wind of the company of artists this summer, I am gently disarmed. We are artists because we are ourselves.” (Daybook, 1982, p. 44)