The Art Quilt

Beautiful color plates. If you are an artist or quilter who prefers to emphasize color and design, then this book is invaluable for ideas and inspiration. Highly recommend for your library.

I'm a weekend quilter - and love working with rich color. This is not only a coffee-table beautiful book but it inspires creative ideas far beyond normal quilting. You don't have to be a quilter to enjoy - the art is wonderful. And if you do quilt, this will inspire you to all sorts of radically new ideas.

Robert Shaw draws upon his impressive expertise to celebrate the traditional bed quilt as a needlecraft art form that is a creative, emotional, example of "form following function". His insightful text traces the transformation of the quilt from bed cover to display piece, the quilter from homemaker to academically trained artist, the workshop from kitchen to studio, and the materials from simple to complex. The Art Quilt is superb survey of an art form grounded in tradition and, at the same time, committed to originality and innovation. The works of such superb contemporary quilters as Michael James, Yvonne Porcella, Julia Pfaff, Nancy Crow, and more than two hundred others, serve to illustrate the quilt as art -- and the art of the quilt. The Art Quilt is enhanced with 300 full-color reproductions and numerous insightful sidebars of important technical processes and leaders int he art quilt field. The Art Quilt is highly recommended reading for needlecraft students, quilters, collectors, and popular culture enthusiasts.

From the moment I set eyes on this book I knew I had to have it. The quilts are totally incredible. The skill of these quiltmakers & the detail they obtain is astonishing. They are true artists. It is a great value.The abstract quilts combine color, pattern & shape so beautifully it takes your breath away. Surface techniques such as dyeing, painting, applique & embroidery make these quilts remarkable works of art. Some of my favorite quilts include a nude pregnant woman & two quilts depicting Noah & his ark. I enjoyed a few scenes with vases & another made as a memorial to the artist's parents. I also fell in love with the many landscape quilts. The text is fascinating, discussing the history behind quiltmaking & the techniques used to make these beautiful quilts. The captions are great, explaining the methods used to make the quilt as well as the artist inspiration.

This book is carefully researched, very well catergorized into sections of color, embellishment, pictorial quilts, etc. Photographs of quilts are good and copy is well presented. Robert Hughes has covered the world of the art quilt in depth. Missed a few of the very early art quilters, e.g. Maria McCormick-Snyder but all in all the best I have seen.