Page 40 - Flathead Beacon // 9.21.16

EVENTS 42 MOVIE REVIEWS 43 SIDE DISH 46 FACES & PLACES 47 PAWS & CLAWS 48 Arts&Entertainment
A Patchwork of Style
‘Modern traditionalism’ on display at Flathead Quilters Guild 34th Annual Show
BY CLARE MENZEL OF THE BEACON
RIAN DYKHUIZEN AND HIS WIFE, SUSAN, unfolded a massive quilt in their Kalispell base- ment, 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 rst, or where the eye should settle — the design is com- posed of 10,000 half-inch squares cut from 100 di er- ent fabrics.
“This is the Monk quilt,” Dykhuizen said, smoothing out a wrinkle in the blanket.
Years ago, when Brian and Susan were binge-watch- ing 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 gure 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 human- kind’s original functional crafts. It has deep stylistic tra- ditions, 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 reimag- ine the quilt as a painter’s canvas.
Perhaps due to the long-standing tradition of quilt- ing, 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
Brian Dykhuizen, the featured artist at this year’s annual quilt show hosted by the Flathead Quilters Guild, shows o his work. GREG LINDSTROM | FLATHEAD BEACON
artists still nd grandmother’s quilts elegant in their complexity, and both styles of quilting have design ele- ments to o er 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 ts in well with the theme,” Dykhu- izen, the show’s featured quilter and a member of the guild since 2001, said. “My hand-dyed fabric is very con- temporary 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 contem-
porary quilt movement, points to a de ning moment in quilting, in 1998, when a quilter’s “chic, modernist aesthetic” was featured in the pages of Martha Stew- art Magazine. In 2002, the Museum of Fine Arts Hous- ton 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 Mod- ern Quilt Guild was established in 2009 to create local communities for modern quilters who had been con- necting online, and today there are over 100 Modern Quilt Guild groups worldwide. The trend has reached
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SEPTEMBER 21, 2016 // FLATHEADBEACON.COM