Shelter (2010)

Commercial fabrics (cotton, silk, synthetics) with some hand-painted and hand-dyed fabrics,

hand-appliqué and machine pieced, machine quilted

61 x 58 inches

As I worked on the quilt about Loss, I wondered if I would have any ideas for further quilts. A year or two into the work, I found myself thinking, "Without Jeremy, the future is unremitting blackness, but I don't want to think of Jeremy's future—his existence, of whatever possible nature it might be—as this same blackness."  If someone had asked me "Do you believe in life after death?" and asked for a yes or no answer, the closest answer would be "no." And yet, when David and I had to find words for the marker on Jeremy's grave, we chose this epitaph, whose words are drawn from the Jewish funeral service:

            May he find refuge forever

            In the shelter of Your wings

            And may his soul be bound up

            In the bond of eternal life.

I couldn't say that I "believed" in these words, but I needed their comfort.

I began to design a quilt about the metaphor "in the shelter of your wings." When I first thought about this, a Durer watercolor came to my mind--the wing of a roller bird.  I thought that Durer's colors might be a starting point also.  The range of blues from royal to aqua struck a chord, and the orange and black also seemed good.  In contrast to the straight lines used in "Loss," this image demanded curves. For months I sketched different combinations of curved lines and made many small maquettes, using the four colors (and sometimes others) in various combinations.  While the color black as used in the "Loss" quilt signals emptiness and bleakness, here it carries a different meaning, that of protection and warmth.  It also calls up another image of divine protection used in the Psalms: "in the shadow of Your wings."

Although I didn't notice it at the time, I later saw that the color palette for "Shelter" resembles that of "Loss." The inclusion of the strong complementary colors of orange and blue contributes a kind of vibration that refers to the vibrancy of life--life lost, and life hoped for.