Being an artist is like being the odd kid in an ordinary classroom. It’s not like you aren’t trying or you didn’t have good ideas. It’s that you put a purple gardenia in your hair and are wearing different unmatched socks to boot. It’s more like you’ve scared your teacher and everyone else, just by doing what comes naturally.

It’s the questions artists ask. It’s the things we have to do. It’s the things we are compelled to do while we figure things out.

One of the hardest things for me is to follow other people’s proscriptions and prescriptions. You would like me to make a what? I should be quilting dogs and cats? It needs to be a particular size? Or shape?

That’s how I ended up making this huge ass dragonfly quilt. I was asked, by the Indiana State Museum to make a star quilt of a particular size. I tried. Bless me, I tried. I pieced up samples, played with star imagery. Did not work. Finally I ended up giving them a star. He really is a star, but you could see from their faces that they weren’t expecting anything like that. They weren’t unhappy, but it was clearly the arrival of the Spanish Inquisition. It did end up printed in the newspaper, just for oddness, I believe.

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Lately I haven’t been able to leave alone these elongated shapes. I Need to fill the shapes and make them dance across the surface. I’ve called them visual paths, because it’s a matter of making the eye travel across the surface of the quilt.

So people want these quilts? Historically, they have. They fill a huge space with a little foot print. Which is always useful. And a neat trick.

Can you put them in a show? Probably not. I tried to put two of them in a project for some folk lately only to have them rejected. They were good quilts. But they were an aggressively odd shape.

Can I make myself fit expectations? Sometimes. On a good day. If I wear my looser big girl panties and stick my tongue out when the going gets tough.

The truth is, I simply have to, to some extent, work on my own obsessions. If I walk too far away from what compels me, I have to fight too hard to do what I do. It’s a good exercise to push against it. But it grinds the art out of me. If we only fit in minimally around the edges, perhaps we fill in the spaces only we can fill.