Tradition and the New

I get this daily email called Design Milk. The founder of Design Milk, Jaime Derringer, posts pictures of a wide array of contemporary design in furniture, art, graphic design, architecture, you name it.

Sometimes I'm thrilled by what I find in the post. Sometimes ho hum, but that's the way of design. Nothing is ever going to appeal to everyone.

But yesterday, Jaime posted some contemporary work by a quilter with the remark "this isn't your grandmother's quilt."

Now, I haven't been quilting as long as most of the women in my guild. I'm still very much of a newbie in that regard. But I have been observing and writing about quilting for a while now so I can tell you categorically that we passed the "grandmother's quilt" stage a long time ago.

So I wrote to Jaime and we got into a lively conversation as I turned her onto a strategic handful of contemporary quilt designers. At one point, I mentioned that I'd done and written about art for a long time and come to the conclusion that adhering to tradition is as much of a dead end as ignoring tradition in favor of always being "new, new, new."

She agreed. And then this morning, as I looked for a quote to share with a wonderful art quilter who's working on a book with me, I discovered that Winston Churchill believed the same.

"Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse."
—Winston Churchill

Lord Churchill, by the way, was quite the visual artist and memorized all the major plays of Shakespeare. Amazing man.

This Friendship Star quilt, which I made for my sister Heidi, is more in the traditional mode of quilting.

This wall hanging, made for my brother-in-law Terry, is far from traditional quilting.