“The crucial point of context between a person and a work of art is intensely personal. People can be encouraged to know and believe this, and to trust their own reactions, their visceral responses. Certain kinds of art appeal to some people more than to others. This is fine and just as it should be. Looking at art is essentially a learning experience, but the content of that experience is an increase in the knowledge about one’s self in the last analysis.”

- Anne Truitt, in Always Reaching: The Selected Writings of Anne Truitt, edited by Alexandra Truitt. Yale University Press (New Haven and London, ©2023), p. 184.

Offering, 2004. Digitally-developed & digitally-printed cotton; reactive dyes; machine-pieced & machine-quilted. Collection, Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC. Photo by Larry Gawel.

It makes sense here to paraphrase Anne Truitt. My rewording then is to say “The crucial point of context between artists and their works of art is intensely personal...Making art is essentially a learning experience...the content of that experience is an increase in artists’ knowledge about themselves, in the last analysis.” Obviously, you may say. But can we artists be trusted to know ourselves, to really know ourselves?

D. H. Lawrence: “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.” Okay critics, “Olly-olly-in-free!” The challenge is, at least in this field of textile art (“quilt art”), there are no critics, or few who would dare to opine. The word criticism is, if not verboten, suspect. So...can this artist be trusted?

A year ago I had the idea to acknowledge my half century working in this field, principally because I figured that if I didn’t do it, no one would. Narcissistic, you say? Ego driven? Perhaps. I doubt many artists can truly understand their work, or contextualize it with any kind of objectivity. That takes their passing, along with the passing of many years and eras, the sharpening of history (art history and/or “studio craft” history, in this case) another fifty or one hundred or two hundred years out. If the work survives – and that’s not guaranteed – will it even be worth considering in some future whose interests and preoccupations we can’t even begin to imagine? Will there be someone, beside the artists, who even cares?

Interference Effect: (Betrayed) Lover’s Knot #2, 2005. Full and detail views. 52.25” h x 163” w. Digitally-developed & digitally-printed cotton; reactive dyes; machine-pieced, machine-appliquéd & machine-quilted. Collection of the Racine Art Museum. Photo by Larry Gawel.

On insecurity

I was recently reading through some journal entries from the 1980s and 1990s, and recurring doubts about and lack of confidence in my ability to make significant work surfaced on numerous pages. “...I entered a period of self-doubt after finishing up the last work in February, and haven’t been able to shake it. I seem to reach this point at the end of a ‘series’ of works – I play with an idea until it’s become facile – I feel it’s too easy to do – and then as a result all of my work looks facile to me – depthless, decorative, and so I find myself facing the wall I’ve created and not knowing how to get over it.” (April 30, 1984); “I know I’m too concerned with audience and how others will respond. Yet if so, why am I starting stuff completely different, that I know won’t find wide acceptance? Maybe this battle took place many times before, facing other new work, and I’ve just forgotten or don’t recognize it. Well, something’s bound to click.” (January 4, 1985); “Mixed feelings all summer long about my work, and lack of sales and lack of apparent outside interest always rattles my self-confidence. Plus I need a real vacation but can’t afford to travel, and certainly can’t take ‘days off’ here, because here I work.” (August 21, 1986). You get the picture.

Grid with a Colorful Past. 2008. 35.5” h x 46” w. Digitally-developed & digitally-printed cotton; reactive dyes; machine-pieced & machine-quilted. Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photo by Larry Gawel.

There were certainly times when I wallowed in self-pity – don’t we all? Those moments were usually compounded by financial stresses, though in looking back over the stretch of my making career, the work sold pretty well, if not on a predictable enough schedule. It found collectors. I don't know any makers who are ever ungrateful for those who willingly give their work homes. Any angst reflecting back at me from the pages of a journal was something I laid there in handwritten script as a way of giving it up, a way to shelve it so that I could continue to do the work in a less encumbered frame of mind. That strategy usually worked. It didn’t necessarily erase the insecurity; rather, it put it in a place where it wouldn’t get in the way.

Damning with faint praise

Back in the 1980s a design workshop student looked me in the eye and remarked "You're very good at damning with faint praise." Guilty as charged. I'm rarely inclined to feign interest in something that doesn't trigger genuine enthusiasm, and if I do, I'm not convincing. I know this. I know too that no praise is probably better than faint praise, though either can sting, be disappointing, hurtful even.

I do know how it feels. Some years ago I toured a very successful and highly regarded visiting artist around a solo show of my work that happened to be hanging while the artist was in town. It embarrasses me now to picture myself smilingly making talking points about the work as we walked from piece to piece, the guest artist's inscrutable half smile betraying nothing that could be interpreted as a reaction. [The museum curator who'd escorted the artist to the gallery at the appointed time didn't even make the effort to circulate around the show with us. He grunted a hello, parked himself on a bench near the entrance, and read from a notebook for the duration.]

Four Stages in Picturing Imagination, 2008. Digitally-developed & digitally-printed cotton; reactive dyes; machine-pieced & machine-quilted. Private collection.

I didn’t know then, nor do I know to this day, what the artist thought. No doubt he’s found himself in that situation many, many times, so I console myself that I’m likely just one among numerous artists whose chutzpah outweighed the appeal of his work.

On a long solo road trip a year ago I tuned into a podcast interview of a national public radio program featuring the artist in question. Over the course of an hour he provided enlightened and sometimes profound answers to his host’s thoughtful and well-prepared questions. My admiration only enlarged. My intrusion on his forbearance years earlier seemed in hindsight more misguided than I thought at the time. I realized that we occupy two entirely different spheres of interest and intellect, and if each of us were held within a thin membrane, those membranes might touch but wouldn’t mesh.

The only logical response was, and remains, humility and self-acceptance.

L. A System of Classification, 2009 and (r.) After Nature 2, 2009. Digitally-developed and digitally-printed cotton; reactive dyes; machine-pieced & machine-quilted. Photos by Larry Gawel.

The paradoxical indivisibility of the personal and the professional...

You’re welcome to think this self-congratulatory. In that case, I own it. I’m writing about my work, my life, and this is my forum. Your reading this is an indulgence that I appreciate, but I know full well that I may be writing in a fog of self-delusion. Well, it’s a kind of valedictory; be kind.

If I died tomorrow, I’d want to be on record as having said that Ambiguity & Enigma, the show of my then-new quilts that the International Quilt Museum mounted in 2015, was for me at the time, and remains still, the most fulfilling solo exhibition of my entire career. This work was as true as any of my work ever was; honesty and integrity were the two things that meant the most to me in both my work and my life, and this exhibition embodied those. [And now, re-read the paragraph preceding this one. Allow me some slack.]

Installation view, Ambiguity & Enigma, June 2015 - February 2016, International Quilt Museum, University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Photo by Larry Gawel.

If David Herbert Lawrence was correct, then the tale represented in that body of work gives it its authority. I told that tale in all its complicated and melancholic detail in my 2023 memoir Dear Judy–A Love Story Rewritten by Alzheimer’s.* At that moment of post-Pandemic publication, my perspective was entirely hindsight. When I was making the work though, I was in the thick of things. In 2013, 2014 and 2015, I was trying to parse out what to that point was the worst experience of my life, of Judy’s and my life together. There was little objective remove. It was all emotion – love, grief, fear, regret, guilt, sadness – and it sits there in these surfaces, in the marks and colorings and compositional pastiches that contain them. My entire adulthood had been inextricably tied to that other person, forty-three years two as one, and this was the tale that played out as commitment reached fulfillment.

Installation view, Ambiguity & Enigma, June 2015 - February 2016, International Quilt Museum, University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Photo by Larry Gawel.



L. For now we see through a glass, darkly, 2013. 70.25” h x 63” w. Digitally-developed & digitally-printed cotton, reactive dyes; machine-pieced & machine-quilted. R. Elegy (flatland), 2015. 73” h x 76” w; digitally-developed & digitally-printed cotton, reactive dyes; hand-painted cotton; machine-pieced & machine-quilted. Photos by Larry Gawel

In the catalogue that the museum published to accompany the show, a long essay in the first person articulated my thinking at the time. “Now, in returning to the domestic role of caregiver, the compatibility of my creative practice with my home life and routines is again, as it was forty some years ago, fortuitous. Doubly so, because these parallel practices now inform one another: the subjective and objective experiences of dementia (from the patient’s as well as the caregiver’s perspectives) driving its graphic representation in my work, and the studio practice seeding patience, temperance, and empathy, and itself being fertilized by these.” **

Installation view, Ambiguity & Enigma, June 2015 - February 2016, International Quilt Museum, University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Photo by Larry Gawel.

A few beautiful things that brought me to tears...

Our English friend Michele Walker and her husband James Kingston-Stewart advised us just ahead of our leaving the UK for France in late May 1985, to pack a picnic for our planned visit to Giverny, the home and gardens of painter Claude Monet. They had visited some time before and when they did, had enjoyed a déjeuner sur l’herbe in the midst of Monet’s visionary surroundings. They said we must.

The rules had changed in the interim. We’d packed the picnic lunch, but signs around Giverny’s car park and on the property made it clear that picnicking was definitely verboten. Oh well. We began our self-guided tour, dismayed by the multitude of foreign tourists disgorged from the coach-choked lot. It seemed not very different from the crowded galleries of the Louvre we’d witnessed a few days earlier.

Back at the car park a little after noon, frustrated by a couple hours dodging the willy-nilly meanderings of so many road weary travelers, we grudgingly set out our fixings on the hood of our rental car and proceeded with our déjeuner sur le macadam. In the half hour or so it took us to take our standing victuals, the car park emptied out. Nearly completely. Not a single coach remained. Ah, we thought, now’s the time to be in the gardens.

And so we found ourselves with Giverny almost exclusively to ourselves. The combination of relief, the blissful quiet, the good fortune of simply being there, of seeing it in all its verdant lushness, of experiencing viscerally what no art history tome could ever have fully described – it was almost too much. Our son was entirely nonplussed when he looked up to find his parents walking along in tears. What’s wrong, he asked. That’s just it, my boy, it’s entirely the opposite.

My 13-year-old son Trevor and I contemplating Monet’s handiwork at Giverny, Spring 1985.

___________________

I’ve carried from art school into adulthood and professional practice hero worship of a handful of artists. Pierre Bonnard is one of those. When the Museum of Modern Art in NYC mounted its 1998 exhibition Bonnard, I planned a long weekend there with the show as the primary objective.

While the galleries were crowded when I visited, the tone was hushed and respectful. The intimacy of Bonnard’s work, whether a tabletop still life, a garden scene, or a submerged nude dozing in her bath, elicits that thoughtful consideration. You enter Bonnard’s world; it’s you and the painting.

By the time I reached the final gallery wherein a generous collection of his self-portraits were gathered, I understood that the vital back-and-forth I’d been engaged in with the artist in the preceding dozen or so gallery spaces now culminated in a face-to-face meeting. It overwhelmed me. I wept in the presence of his humble intellect, his humanness and vulnerability, his naturalness and self-acceptance, and of course the tender sensitivity of each spot of color and each painterly stroke. I wasn’t expecting that, and can no longer account for whatever else was going on in my life at that moment, that might have conspired with the self-portraits to disinhibit me. In a crowded gallery. In a temple of high art. A rare occurrence.

___________________

In late May 2001 I flew with my wife to France to lead a couple of design workshops over about a ten-day period that included several days of free time. Those were assigned to checking off a couple of bucket list items: the great Gothic monastery crowning Mont St. Michel in Normandy, and the nearby Bayeux Embroidery. For me, Mont St. Michel was an enormous disappointment. The disagreeable tourist trap that greeted us as we made the ascent wasn’t bad enough once – we had to walk that gauntlet both up and down. Once arrived, the cold, gray hardness of the abbey’s structures, the spare, silent and unwelcoming spaces we found ourselves in, and the absence of any positive emotional reaction on our parts gutted any excitement we’d started the day with. No connection at all. We were out of there.

The Bayeux Embroidery, housed in a small museum in its namesake town an hour and a half or so from the abbey, redeemed our morning and early afternoon. It’s fascinating on many levels, and though decidedly not a tapestry, it is one of the world’s great textile art achievements. I was happy to have had the opportunity to walk its length and be inches from its intricate and shattering and comic detail. The seafood lunch in the town square that followed allowed us to de-brief the first part of the day and consider what remained of the afternoon. There was that sign we passed, I suggested, to the American Cemetery. It can’t be far.

And so on the eve of Memorial Day 2001 we found ourselves at Omaha Beach and the cemetery that lies just above it.

One of my photos of the American Cemetery at Omaha Beach, looking northwesterly toward the English Channel.

The burial ground’s stark and precise geometry, its fateful and terrible purpose, and the glory and tragedy of what took place beyond its perimeter bushwhacked me so unexpectedly it stopped me in my tracks. Faithless, non-theist pacifist that I am, it kneecapped me. To this day I’m unable to talk about those couple of hours on that plot of land without breaking down. Not much more to say. It was the inverse of that particular morning’s mélange of dashed expectations. It was one of the most powerful and redeeming experiences of my life. Stone markers standing to attention in long, honorable rows. A perfect and devastating symmetry.

___________________

There are tunes in opera that always get me, whether in the theater or listening to a recording. Familiar arias in Puccini and in Verdi, especially when they involve parent and child. Gilda and Rigoletto for example, their touching Act 2 duet. And the reprise of Children Will Listen in the Finale of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods. It’s music and affecting lyrics, and that combination can very easily tug at heartstrings. But it doesn’t usually take me by surprise. It’s what those types of melodramas are intended to do. If I look around me in the theater, I’m not the only one blinking away tears.

I hold on to artful moments that bring me to tears when I’m least expecting it. The through line in some kind of narrative, whether visual or literary, that suddenly erases whatever objective distance I thought I was maintaining as I read. This happened to me a couple years ago on a plane heading homeward from a French island vacation, my friend Isabelle Jarry’s novel In Paradisum open on my tray table, lit by the overhead spot in an otherwise darkened cabin. When I’m reading in French, I think I’m even less likely to drop that critical distance, since it’s not my native language. It’s a different kind of reading for me, part exercise and ongoing maintenance. But nearing the end of her story, I turned from page 341 onto page 342, and this skillful and prolific author hit an emotional chord so precisely that I melted. And I loved the surprise of it, and my receptivity. That may have been in part because it was night, my noise-cancelling headset had quite effectively cut most of the plane’s airborne drone, the narrow beam of light caused all else but the words on the page to dissolve into obscurity. And a few words on a page, laid out with sensitivity and great artfulness, can reduce a man to tears.

___________________

The point here, if it isn’t already obvious, is that art is both transformative and revelatory. I’ve experienced it this way throughout my life. What religion may give to other folks, art and art making give to me. It can open the deepest wellspring of emotion, and it has always fired the kind of intellectual questioning that’s the fuel in my tank. For whatever time I have left, the plan is to let it continue to work its magic...

Jaali 2 (Udaipur), 2019, 28.5” h x 40.5” w; digitally-developed and digitally-printed cotton; reactive dyes; machine-pieced & machine-quilted. Private collection.



I began this retrospective look at the fifty-odd years I’ve spent in the quilt domain a year ago, and it’s run its course. I don’t have much more to say. I covered a lot, and I know there’s a lot I didn’t touch on. To comment on some of the disappointments, large and small, would seem like sour grapes. I likely made mistakes, or at least miscalculations and misalignments along the way, and each of those became part of the journey and affected it, probably in ways that will never seem crystal clear even to me. But as the song goes, Non, je ne regrette rien! Let me leave it at that.

Untitled (No. 5), detail view, 2021; digitally-developed & digitally-printed cottons; reactive dyes; hand-sewn, paper foundation.



* Anne Truitt, in Always Reaching: The Selected Writings of Anne Truitt, edited by Alexandra Truitt. Yale University Press (New Haven and London, ©2023), p. 184

** available from Pine Eden Press at https://pineedenpress.com/ or from your local bookseller or online vendor

*** Ambiguity & Enigma–Recent Quilts by Michael James, catalogue published by the International Quilt Study Center & Museum (Lincoln, NE, ©2015), p. 30.