Blocks

China Pettway's blocky strip quilt, made up of the most eccentric palette—brown, black, mustard, peach, faded yellow, orange-red—combines a reductive composition and utterly unique color sense to achieve a majestic quilt. Significantly, in this quilt, even within the largest, simplest section—a section of nearly rectangular brown corduroy—variegation is wrought by using several strips, with their seams subtly apparent. Such "inconsequential" techniques as this, while they may seem arbitrary or functional rather than deliberately artful, could not be more consciously deployed. It is in such details as this, as is true in most serious composition, that the difference between craft and art is forged.