Thursday, April 29, 2010

not Granny's quilt...


Some of the major insanity of the past week has been a national phenomenon that occurs here... It's the Quilt Show.

To the tyros, that seems like a gentle and bengin sort of event, populated with possibly a half-dozen grey-haired ladies of a certain age, slowly looking at fabric swatches...

Wrongo!

This is more like 35,000 folks of every description descending on MY neighborhood for 5 days- it's not a single rentable bed available within a 30 mile radius of the show- it's every imaginable color, texture and pattern of fabric offered for sale, either by the bolt or "fat quarter"...

It is amazing. One of our dear friends is a nationally acclaimed quilter and this show is why she choose to move to Paducah. The quilts that are on display are not your grandma's quilt- we are talking about paintings done in collaged layers of pigmented fabric and constructed of single continuous threads measuring in miles.

They are inspiring to look at as anything that I've seen in the Smithsonian- I kid you not!

These images are just an appetizer- a tease- of the more than 100 quilts that made it through the jury to get to the show...

When I think that I spend too much time in the studio and have no life, and then I look at the work that goes into one of these quilts... I'm not at all suprised that they can take years to complete and isolate their creators effectively from all human interactions...

1 comment:

Penny from Lopez said...

Beautiful quilts! Someone's been minding his/her P's and Q's. I can partially understand why Paducah seduced V and M.