“Growth does not have to be systematic. The way of the artist is a meandering path.”

- Enrique Martinez Celaya, in ON ART AND MINDFULNESS *

After working hard to move my work away from the order enforced by grids, I was back to them wholeheartedly. Cross patterns, tiling patterns, checkerboards, chevrons, zigzags, weave patterns, herringbones, offsets, overlaps and shifts – as long as the visual rhythms were intrinsic to the patterns’ structures, insistent and specific, as long as my eye was forced to read and to follow, space after form and space into form, unit after unit, I was seduced. “It seems accurate to say that rhythm is the earliest and most inherent environmental fact of which we are aware,” writes the cultural anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake. “Existence equals pulsation.” **

These pulsing structures themselves would now be my subject, and whatever color occupied these figure-ground interplays would be equally of itself, naked and assertive.

Allanbank Caravan, 1997, 39” h x 61.5” w; private collection

Yet, I needed nuance too. I was attracted by edges and boundaries, but I sometimes wanted them to break, to approach dissolution, as a way to generate some ambiguity, to counter the pattern’s precision with some hint of imprecision. I’d had a short-lived and unsatisfying dalliance with painting on fabric in the mid-80s, and ten years later I wasn’t keen to again pick up brush and pigments.

Amish Bars (l.) and Straight Furrows (r.), both 1985, each about 49” x 47”. At the time I made these experimental pieces, I was considering using opaque textile pigments to disrupt the sewn stripes I was preoccupied with. The experiment was short-lived.

Enter my friend Mickey Lawler, whose home-based business Skydyes had been successfully supplying non-traditional-minded makers with painted, highly textured alternatives to commercial printed fabrics (see image below). These were earthy and organic pima cotton surfaces that, despite being entirely non-figurative, recalled moist, fecund, moss-carpeted forest floors, or cold, sharp marble church facades, or the enveloping, invading atmospherics of clouds and fog. The colors in these fabrics held the evidence of their liquid origin, and combined with the sensations produced by the textures, offered a mechanism to make poetry of pattern. Eventually, I’d commission Mickey to

make unique one-offs in response to lists of specific adjectives and other descriptors that I provided her. When those “asks” leaned toward such colors and textures as what I described to her as “murder scene red,” Mickey absolved herself by giving me a workshop in her techniques. At that point I was on my own. For the next five years, painted fabrics (both Skydyes and my own) would be critical components of my visual vocabulary.

Venetian, 1997, 47.5” h x 67.5” w; private collection

Through the 90s I traveled a lot overseas, especially in Europe, and each trip brought exposures that inspired me in different ways and for different reasons. The built environment was especially powerful in provoking visual impulses and juxtapositions that would hold their own in the ensembles that came together on my studio wall. Like the piece so-named, these “parallel conversations” allowed for both dissonance and concordance, and that sometimes uneasy tension between the two states served as a kind of rebuttal to the sensuous harmonies of the strip-pieced color runs I’d decided by then to jettison.

Top left, Chateau de Peseux shutters, Canton de Neuchâtel (Switzerland); top right, half-timbered houses, France; bottom left, a “pentimento” wall, Barcelona; bottom right, a painted caravan doubling as the artist-host Pauline Burbidge’s guest room, near the Scottish borders, mid-1990s. Its polka-dotted interior can be glimpsed in its second-from-right window. This was the direct inspiration for Allanbank Caravan (leading post photo above).

There was also much in the art and studio craft worlds that I was similarly crossing paths with, and that was feeding the mental gymnastics driving my work. That had always been so, and likely because of the amount of traveling I was doing by the 1990s, and the access that gave me to museums, galleries, and significant architecture far and wide, my exposures were abundant and stimulating. NUNO shops in Tokyo were treasure chests of cutting-edge textile design, their woven and knit yardage and scarves unmatched for inventiveness and technical complexity. I discovered the work of the English ceramist Elizabeth Fritsch around that time and fell in love with her sly, spatial subversions and the mystifying geometric delineations and patterns they sport. The painter Sean Scully's work, sober and muscular, architectonic yet somehow enigmatic, filled me with admiration. To this day Diane Itter’s hand-knotted constructions amaze me for both their intricacy and their ambition, held within near-miniature dimensions. The works of these makers and many more raised questions and provoked reactions, and my attempts to synthesize and respond played out whenever I was back in the fertile solitude the studio secured.

(top left) 3 knit scarves by NUNO; (top right) three spouted vessels by Elizabeth Fritsch; (bottom left) painting by Sean Scully; (bottom right) “Quatemalan Feathers,” hand-knotted construction by Diane Itter, 1989

A Slight Resemblance, 1997, 52.5” h x 54” w; private collection

Red Crosses/Black Bars, 1997, 40.5” h x 55.5” w; private collection. At right, installation view of the piece in Truman Hall, the US Ambassador to NATO’s residence outside Brussels, Belgium, as part of an Art-in-Embassies loan exhibition in the 1990s. On the wall to the right of the display cabinet are two framed works by Diane Itter.

In 1999 I showed a group of these Iconographies as I called them and the exhibition, at Galerie Jonas near Neuchâtel, Switzerland. In the accompanying catalogue I said this in an essay on this then-recent direction: “So for me pattern and its repetitions and variations are pregnant with meaning. These patterns are analogues of neurological systems, or spiritual roadmaps functioning as inducements to meditation, or contrasts of forms and counter forms that sound an elemental beat and bring us to our essential core. They can be grave or sprightly, can reveal themselves as extroverts or introverts, and can repel or attract, depending on their relative scale and proportions and the way that colors play within them. It is this flexibility and adaptability that I find so compelling.” ***

Hive, 1998, 44” h x 65.5” w; private collection



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*Martinez Celaya, Enrique, On Art and Mindfulness, Whale and Star Press and Anderson Ranch Arts Center, ©2015, p. 19.

** Dissanayake, Ellen, Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why, Seattle: University of Washington Press, ©1995, p. 83.

*** James, Michael, from an essay in Iconographies, a catalogue ©1999 published by Editions Victor Attinger SA, on the occasion of the exhibition Iconographies at Galerie Jonas, Petit-Cortaillod, Switzerland, 27 June to 25 July, 1999.