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FrontRangeLiving.com -> Home Design -> Patty Hawkins
An interview with Patty Hawkins
 Patty Hawkins’ quilts have been exhibited in the Museum of American Folk
Art in New York City, Quilt National in Athens, Ohio, The Museum at the American
Quilter Society in Paducah, Kentucky and the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C.
She has been interviewed for TV programs such as HGTV. She lives in
Estes Park, Colorado.
FRL: How did you get started in contemporary quilting?
HAWKINS: I was a watercolor painter for 15 years. When the kids were in grade school,
I thought I finally would work at being an artist. I struggled with watercolor.
But life was busy. In 1987, I hit on becoming a quilter. A book came out from
the American Craft Council, "Craft Today." That’s what did it for
me. Nancy Crow, Michael James, Pam Studstill and Rise Nagin—their work was so
profound for me. Those four people’s quilts were hanging at the Denver Art
Museum, hanging up high like stained glass. I couldn’t even talk, I was
overwhelmed.
Quilts really are art and revered. I’d always sewn. I thought everybody
did. I could take my design knowledge and work on a bigger canvas. I started
taking quilt classes. I have one traditional quilt on our bed. Of course, I had
to do it in graded colors.
 FRL:
How did you first work if it was not in the traditional form?
HAWKINS: You have to play with the fundamentals at first. I knew I had to find my own
creativity. I always tried to create depth—that’s important to me. Then I
thought: I can’t keep making quilts in blocks. I draw things out—it was so
labor intensive. I’d learned in Home Economics to make gussets. So I used that
technique at first.
The fabric gets pinned up before it gets sewn. You never pick the right
fabric the first time. It took three to four months to make a quilt. My
challenge then was to create a drawn landscape into quilts. That was the time I
got into Quilts National with that mountain quilt. But I got tired of it. I was
giving a lecture one time and explaining to the students that they should pay
attention to the photos they take because they would find inspiration and
influence in their work. I was showing photos of the Cliff House of Mesa Verde.
Suddenly, I thought: "You foolish woman, pay attention to what you are
saying!" And that was the introduction of those shapes into my work.
 FRL:
You’re using hand dyed fabrics these days. What’s the significance of
that?
HAWKINS: The value of my hand dyed fabrics is that the quilt is painterly. Hand-dyed
fabrics are widely used now for that very reason. One day I noticed the linoleum
floor in the bathroom of my son’s business place. I told him it was in a
quasi-log cabin pattern. That set me off on a tangent. I like a brush stroke
style, again that’s influential from my days as a watercolor painter. Color
for me is like what French painter Paul Cezanne once said: "Color is not a color until it
is neighbored."
In San Francisco, I was visiting my daughter and took photos of markings on a
skyscraper window. I have been so infatuated with those darned skyscrapers—even
though I cannot stand cities. It’s so fascinating to me that there is beauty
in something so dreadful.
FRL: Is there a rivalry between traditional and art quilting?
HAWKINS: There’s a kind of traditional quilter who doesn’t like fusible webbing
(that holds layers of cloth together). You have to assure yourself that it will
stay on. So you use a lot of stitching over it. But stunning work is being done
with this fusible material. It’s a wonderful tool that allows you to have
unusual shapes. People still have to be impeccable in their work. You don’t
want the technique to be the draw. You want your visual impact to hit people in
the face. It’s like a painting.
I know I once said I’d never work in blocks. But now I am. These are
quasi-blocks. A viewer looks for a certain something in quilts. Our eye is more
comfortable with repetition. I want repetition but in an irregular way. I might
use a few colors, but many values. I want people who are not even quilters to
say "Wow!" Jane Matthews is a paper quilt artist who termed this the
"two-second seduction". If you can pull someone in for two seconds,
they’ll look at your work.
 FRL:
What's the quilting world like right now, in terms of growing interest?
HAWKINS: The quilt world right now is so healthy. I gave a two-week symposium to
surface design quilters in Ohio. (surface design refers to printing, painting or
dyeing fabric before quilting it). It’s so much fun to see these young gals
with their babes. I’m getting them to open their eyes. I tell them to work
with one motif for two or three years. That way, the design just gets better,
stronger and more simplified.
I’m taking some design classes: painting canvas and working with more
silkscreen. There’s so much going on, quilting has become such an expression
for so many people. The painting, the copy machine, the silkscreen. There’s
always a tour-de-force type work—but those that are lasting can still have new
techniques not for the sake of newness, but an impact, a message.
FRL: Quilting is so unique and wonderful in our American heritage. Does
it
continue to strongly influence contemporary art quilting?
In the United States we have a sense of legacy. But in Germany, for example,
they don’t have that heritage. Maybe they’re better off. They were quicker
to use silk when we felt duty bound to use cotton. It’s fun to dye silk. So
there is both a pro and a con to the legacy. In 1971, the Whitney Museum in New
York mounted the first show of Amish Quilts. How brave of them! The world was
blown away. The plainest of women were so expressive of color and big shapes.
The lights were low and the walls were painted black when I saw the show in San
Francisco. The quilts were like jewels.
And then Nancy Crow in Ohio turned a dairy barn into Quilt National and that
established contemporary quilts as art. By the mid-80s I entered two big shows
and got in. One was Quilt National and the other was the American Folk Art
Museum. Sometimes that’s all you need…that little bit of encouragement to
continue the course.
The Front Range Quilters is a group of nearly 200 art quilters dedicated to
teaching and showing their work. To learn more about the organization, go to
their website at: www.artquilters.org
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