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LENNIE BENNETTWith men doing the quilting, the craft takes a stitch in a no-holds-barred direction.
DUNEDIN - Never much of a sports fan, I remember decades ago beginning to like football a little when I learned that Rosey Grier was a needlepointer in his spare time. About that same time, I was impressed that the star member of the needlepoint guild at St. Peter's in St. Petersburg was none other than the late Robert Fowler, a successful businessman, family friend and one of the people you can thank for the exquisite petit point kneelers in the church.
But those were rare exceptions in my inventory of accomplished textile crafters. The truth is that women seem to dominate this field and craftsmen seem to gravitate to ceramics and woodworking.
The quilt show at Dunedin Fine Art Center is a cliche-breaking pleasure. Each quilt was worked by a guy, and what a variety of talent and finesse is on display.
The show was organized by the Museum of the American Quilter's Society in Paducah, Ky., as was the fine quilt exhibition at the art center last summer. But that show, if you remember, required quilters to create works that used the same pattern, the feathered star.
The quilters in this show had no constraints, and they let the creativity rip. Some of the quilts are traditional; others use the craft as a vehicle to make an aesthetic point.
Arturo Alonzo Sandoval's round quilt, Millennium Portal No. 6, stretches the definition of the craft to its outer limit. Using fabric with metallic finishes, Sandoval adds unorthodox materials, such as plastic netting, connecting everything with meshlike machine stitching. The border is an uneven conglomeration of more metallic fabric embellished with dyes. The whole thing looks like an eccentric interpretation of the solar system.
Across from it, Allan George's Broken Star, hung in the center of the gallery, brings the viewer back down to earth with its conventional working of the star pattern in orange, green and yellow. It is the second quilt he made, worked on from 1979 to 1984. Incredible in its hand-piecing and sewing, it is done with the stitch-and-stab method rather than the faster, more efficient, running stitch. Displayed so the viewer may appreciate the design on the white backing, the quilt seems to have become, for its owner, a kind of talisman over the years, getting him through major life changes, including a divorce and several moves. He and other men in the show express the power of quilting as an emotional comfort, which is an extension of quilts' enduring utilitarian job as warmth-givers. In George's case, it was probably a lot cheaper than therapy. One wonders if he made another or if this one, serving its purpose, became his magnum opus finale.
Some of the men took up the craft to be companionable. Roger Sandy and George Siciliano watched their wives quilt for years and decided to join them. Siciliano's small quilt is near perfection in its geometric handling of tiny triangles of bright color, juxtaposed with dramatic black, worked into circles on top of squares. Studying it is like figuring out a Rubik's Cube.
Shawn Quinlan and J. Phil Beaver treat a quilt like a canvas, "painting" a narrative scene with applique and intricate machine stitching. Beaver's October and White-Crown Sparrows, had it been worked in acrylic or oils, would read like one of those sentimental works that have made Thomas Kinkade rich and famous. Instead, its window encircled by sunflowers whose seeds have drawn two hungry chickens is a lovely piece of craft. Quinlan's palms rise up into a blue sky from a dramatic ground-level perspective, the fronds made from crudely cut and unfinished material, almost like abstract shapes.
In Wild Wood, J. Bruce Wilcox appropriates the old flying goose pattern but uses thick, cordlike silk thread in wide hand stitches, giving it an Oriental feel. The basis for the pattern, a flock of birds on the wing, dates from the 1800s. The image, distilled to its essence - a series of triangles - reminds us that women sewing bed covers for practical reasons 200 years ago understood the clarity of minimalism long before artist Frank Stella.
Michael James' Island blocks a horizontal quilt into three nonequal sections of hand-dyed fabric appliqued with more squares. It's as subtle as John Flynn's Kings X, a riotous mix of colors, is hallucinogenic.
And that's the beauty of most quilts, the homey, modest methods of execution combined with their possibilities as expressions of abstract design. The most successful are those that either adhere to a rigid symmetry or throw it out the window.
Such as the simply fun Squid Dreams by Steve Stratakos. It's a cartoon. I use that word in the modern way, meaning a form of reductive storytelling, and in the older sense, that of a large-scale study, such as those that Renaissance painters made in preparation for a more serious version. This one's a hoot. A hapless scuba diver at the bottom right of the quilt looks up as a glamorous squid, shimmering in pink brocade, approaches with a glittering jeweled eye. The diver's eyes register his alarm. But a piece of delicate white fabric that represents water filling his face mask best tells the story of his panic.
At the risk of sounding chauvinistic or patronizing, which is not my intention, I salute you men who feel comfortable embracing the art of the quilt. In doing so, you have lost nothing to the golf course.
-- Lennie Bennett can be reached at 727 893-8293 or lennie@sptimes.com
REVIEW"Man Made: Quilts from the Museum of the American Quilter's Society" is at the Dunedin Fine Art Center, 1143 Michigan Blvd., through Aug. 6. Also on view is the annual summer faculty show. Two quilts by the late Rosella Smith will be on display during "Man Made." Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday and 1 to 4 p.m. Sunday. (727) 298-3322.