Brian Dykhuizen and his wife, Susan, unfolded a massive quilt in their Kalispell basement, both stretching their arms full wingspan to drape it across a worktable. With a quilt so deeply intricate and colorful, it’s hard to know where to look first, or where the eye should settle — the design is composed of 10,000 half-inch squares cut from 100 different fabrics.
“This is the Monk quilt,” Dykhuizen said, smoothing out a wrinkle in the blanket.
Years ago, when Brian and Susan were binge-watching the comedy-drama TV show “Monk,” Dykhuizen was struck by a scene in which the main character, Monk, who has a long list of obsessive-compulsive behaviors including a counting compulsion with the number 10, can’t bring himself to buy a dozen eggs at the grocery store.
“It was just so hilarious,” Dykhuizen said. “So I got this idea that I’d make a quilt and base it on 10s: 10 blocks by 10 blocks, each block 10 inches by 10 inches … I figure there’s 150 hours [spent just on the top layer]. I started in January — it was a good winter thing to do.”
“Then it turned into a summer thing to do!” Susan said. “Seems like he’s been in the basement forever.”
Almost too old and ubiquitous to accurately date, quilting goes back several millennia as one of humankind’s original functional crafts. It has deep stylistic traditions, but a modern movement has taken root in the past decade. Content will always be inspired by the daily life of quilters, which, these days, includes television, though there’s also been a recent revolution in form. The new aesthetic features high contrast black-and-white, plain colors rather than patterned fabric, positive and negative space, alternate grid work, and minimalism. Often, modern quilters also use white space to reimagine the quilt as a painter’s canvas.
Perhaps due to the long-standing tradition of quilting, or to their function, which is as utilitarian as it is artistic, Dykhuizen says it’s unlikely that quilters will ever completely discard classic designs. Contemporary artists still find grandmother’s quilts elegant in their complexity, and both styles of quilting have design elements to offer the other. This happy medium between convention and trend, called “modern traditionalism,” will be on display at the upcoming Flathead Quilters Guild 34th Annual Show, on Sept. 23–24 at the Flathead County Fairgrounds in Kalispell, which is themed, “Oh, the Possibilities! Tradition Reimagined!”
“I think my work fits in well with the theme,” Dykhuizen, the show’s featured quilter and a member of the guild since 2001, said. “My hand-dyed fabric is very contemporary and abstract, and the quilts of my own design are sort of traditional. So it’s got a contemporary feel but it’s an old technique.”
The Modern Quilt Guild, the locus of the contemporary quilt movement, points to a defining moment in quilting, in 1998, when a quilter’s “chic, modernist aesthetic” was featured in the pages of Martha Stewart Magazine. In 2002, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston curated a show of modernist quilts, and three years later, the publication of two modern quilt books spurred the creation of online quilt-alongs and blogs. The Modern Quilt Guild was established in 2009 to create local communities for modern quilters who had been connecting online, and today there are over 100 Modern Quilt Guild groups worldwide. The trend has reached Montana — there’s one group in Bozeman — but Dykhuizen has embraced it with more enthusiasm than others in the Northwest.
“I’m trying to work my way to [minimalism],” he said. “In my work, there’s a lot of pieces and it’s tight and controlled, and I want to be able to loosen up … Someday, I want to be able to do a minimalist piece — and have a reason for it. People will see minimalist art and think, ‘Oh, I can do that,’ but they don’t know what the artist was thinking. Yeah, you could do it, but why are you doing it?”
Dykhuizen says he is reluctant to subscribe to any one style of quilting, because he wants to explore the ever-evolving art form and learn something new with every quilt he makes. His work tends to be structured, neat, and geometrical in form, and he finds free-form artistic expression through Batik style-fabric, an expressive, dynamic Indonesian technique of wax-resist dyeing.
“Brian has a very interesting style that’s a little different than some of the traditional folks — it’s more of an art style,” Donna Caffee, the show chairperson, said. “He’s very good in his quality, beautiful in his color choices. I thought it would be nice to feature him as an example of what’s possible.”
At the Flathead Quilters Guild Show, Dykhuizen will display in a special booth five quilts that express the balance of modern traditionalism, and plans to enter the Monk quilt for peer judging. The guild’s 100 members have submitted over 165 entries to some 20 different categories, and popular vote will determine the winner of each. Admission is $5.