everything is curved

Anne Truitt was in an airplane, flying over the desert.  She looked out the window and suddenly noticed that everything is curved.

"Seen whole from the air, the global horizon confronted one bluntly as a context all its own.  I had the startling impression that I was looking at something intelligent."

"Every delicate pulsation of colour was met, matched, challenged, repulsed, embraced by another, none out of proportion.  Each was at once a unique and a proper part of the whole.  The straight lines with which human beings have marked the land are impositions of a different intelligence, abstract in that arena of the natural."

She began to see her own life as something between natural and abstract.

nature - culture
earth - human
natural organic - abstract geometry
curved - straight
balance - imbalance
woman - man

"As I live, certain aspects of what is happening adhere to me as if magnetized by psychic gravity. I have learned to trust this center."

"It is as if there are external equivalents for truth which I already know.
I have to stay tuned in to catch these equivalents.
Vulnerability is implicit in this process."

"The process of art contains my intensities but also exorcises those that are beyond my endurance.
I do all this with haste akin to panic.
I depend on making objects as a kind of defense."    Anne Truitt

text found in 1995 journal, paraphrased slightly from the original
new quilt top finished before the end of the year.  Glad both year and quilt top are done.