RUTH B. McDOWELL: A COLLECTOR’S VISION

by Ruth B. McDowell

January 18 – April 5, 2020

Ruth McDowell is widely recognized as a treasure of the quilting world. A professional quilt artist, a beloved teacher and a prolific author, she has contributed to the art form in significant ways. She has produced more than 600 quilts and ten books over the course of her long career.

Her quilts have a distinctive visual impact due to her innovative use of printed commercial fabrics and her complex construction process. She embraces the traditional method of pieced construction, sewing two fabric pieces, right-sides- together, by machine. “Piecing forces abstraction and a winnowing away. In my opinion, visually, a pieced quilt looks different from an appliqued one, sometimes in a very direct way and sometimes with great subtlety.”

She enjoys the construction process–figuring out the structure of the design, how to piece fabric to make the images, and how to make it sewable. She prepares a detailed line drawing that provides a precise plan for construction. Each line represents a seam line, straight or curved, dividing the image into sections. She uses freezer-paper templates, ironed to the back of fabric, to cut individual pieces from commercial fabrics. Early in her quilting career, she became visually fascinated with fabric patterns. She uses a wide range of fabrics of different styles, values and scale. For Ruth, the selection of fabrics is “an intensely visual process” that is impressionistic, not literal, and is intended to bring life and character to the quilt.

Her quilts reflect a wide variety of subjects—plants, animals, landscapes and people. “I like quilts that you can look at for a long time. The seeds for my quilts spring from things that absolutely amaze me in themselves: a tree or a place, a group of people or a plant, a ship or a stone.” She also insists that each work is intended to be viewed as a quilt, not a painting or a photograph or a realistic representation of a subject. “Artwork exists as the result of a process; that is, the artist working, over a period of time, in whatever medium he or she selects, to express something that did not exist before.”

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