More about quilts

Photo: my quilt in progress.

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Quilt art resources

Three quilt artists:

• Lynne Heller


• Marilyn Clarke
  
• Lorraine Roy

Quiltart: an internet mailing list.

Studio Art Quilt Associates

York Heritage Quilters Guild

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When I was young I made all kinds of compromises to hide the fact that I was gay. I had many interests that didn't fit the paradigm of a normal boy, especially gardening, playing piano and doing art. I consumed considerable energy hiding these interests from my classmates. Other interesting pursuits I blindly ignored. For one thing, anything involving fabric simply seemed too feminine. For decades I carefully avoided anything involving cloth or thread.

After coming out I started reconciling myself with these things. After all there is nothing inherently masculine or feminine about them. I had bought into stereotypes. In fact our society is replete with male role models who play piano, paint and grow plants.

Ironically, in those early years the first gay men I encountered as a couple were Patrick Lima and John Scanlan, the owners of Larkwhistle, a famous private garden near Tobermory, Ontario. I became aware of them through Harrowsmith Magazine and related publications. Lima's writings frequently referred to Scanlan as his partner. They were the only gay role models I perceived before 1996.

After that I started exploring my broader artistic interests. For the first time I entertained the notion of living as a professional creative person. In particular I began writing poetry and drawing with Prismacolor pencils. As early as my last year of university, 1986, I loved experimenting with colour. I took some fine art courses when I considered studying landscape architecture. (That was another way of diffusing my creative interests into a valid profession, I suppose. After all, an architect is an engineer.) I loved the way complimentary colours vibrated against one another, especially blue and orange, and yellow and purple.

Quilting initially captured my attention because of the colour. But as I collected fabrics for my first quilt, the textures also arose and asserted themselves. I have always appreciated the tactile qualities of materials. that led me to try papermaking, like a gardener learning how to enrich the soil. Paper is like the writer's earth: we lay our imprint upon it. Likewise, cloth is imprinted with all kinds of colours and patterns.

In order to make a quilt, I learned to sew. I began to appreciate the rhythm of needle and thread. So far my quilt has been pieced together entirely by hand. Perhaps I'll borrow a friend's sewing machine to complete it, maybe not.

It is the running stitch, rather than the cloth patchwork, that defines a quilt. A quilt top can be made entirely of one piece of plain fabric, texture sewn into it with needle and thread. This is the technique used in traditional Japanese quilting, called sashiko, and Italian quilting, called trapunto. Traditional North American quilts incorporate a variety of archetypical patchwork patterns, such as log cabin.

My own first project is a watercolour quilt. That means the pattern is formed by colour gradations between the squares, creating an overall pattern like an Impressionist painting.