Influences & Links

Straight and Narrow Challenge: Pathways

How does one describe influences on your own work? I grew up in Washington state and did a lot of hiking and photography. Does my sense of color come from those formative years? Does my love for the simple come from the year I spent in Japan where I taught English and practiced shuji? Does my current sense of patterning come from more than 8 years of working in the computer industry? How does one take the experiences of a lifetime and pick the parts that are "important"? Where and how does my faith influence my work? I don't journal enough to answer all these questions. I'd rather spend my time DOING my artistic work.

More recently, I am continually learning from the job of parenting and the wonder of having a young son. I have no idea how that will influence my art, except that I have been working smaller over the past two years. I can make the art in a timeframe that generally works better in my life.

There are a number of other quilt artists who have different ways of working in curved piecing. I have learned from many of them, either through books or in classes. So, certainly my work has been influenced by people like Mia Rozmyn, Judy Dales, Melanie Normann and Carol Bryer Fallert.

As far as my Asian bent, certainly I've been influenced by Kumiko Sudo. But, here I've also been influenced by other arts and crafts. I love the wood blocks of Hiroshige. I found the work of Itchiku Kubota to be overwhelmingly beautiful.

My sense of patterning and layout has been influenced by Judy Hooworth, Margaret Miller, Judy Hopkins and David Walker.  I've also been influenced here by the early work of Ruth McDowell and by artists such as M.C. Escher and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Then too, I appreciate the community of artists that I find. I appreciate the way that Quilt Art and SAQA can represent this community. I also enjoyed the Quilt Surface Design Symposium, both as a forum for learning from an instructor and from each other.

If you hoped that I'd list other resources here, sorry.  If you want a long list of quilt related links, this isn't the place, you can do that by going to Quilt.net, a source of quilt related items or to Yahoo. If you wanted a lot of information on quilting in general, you might want to try About.com's resources.

Then, I also have a computer bent, so I am grateful for the community of computer developers and designers who share their information and expertise too. Most of this website design is based on materials Stu Nicholls makes available.