Success, piece by piece: Idea for an unusual quilt sparks growth in woman's talent

Daily Press (Newport News, Va.) (MCT) - Sandy Curran had been making traditional quilts for several years when she stumbled across an image that knocked her off course.

Day after day in early 2003, the Newport News, Va., woman saw it staring up from the newspapers and magazines that covered her floor _ until one day she could no longer resist the challenge.

Drawing, tracing, cutting and ironing _ then taking up needle and thread _ Curran spent weeks shaping and assembling the small pieces of fabric she needed to recreate one of the early 21st century's most famous and arresting gazes. But not until the very last stitch in tens of thousands of painstakingly hand-pulled stitches could she tell whether all the parts went together as she hoped.

Tearing her paper templates away from the fabric, Curran looked on with excitement as _ one by one _ each appliqued element added up to a stern and unforgettable portrait. Staring back at her through a letterbox surrounded by a dense black border were the menacing eyes of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

It was an odd choice of subject for a traditional quilt maker, Curran says today. And though she encountered rejection after rejection when she entered "Evil Eyes" in quilting competitions, the unconventional piece sparked a landmark shift that has since transformed her into a nationally recognized talent.

"Every time I'd go by that picture, those eyes would just look up at me. I thought _ it's just so powerful. I wonder if I could make it into a quilt," says Curran.

"I had no idea if it would work. I didn't know what I was doing. But when I pulled that paper off, I was shocked and amazed. And I've just grown and grown from there."

Few things in Curran's early personal history could have predicted her mid-life passion for making quilts _ or her efforts to push this often tradition-bound medium in such a distinctive direction.

As a child growing up in Old Town Alexandria, Va., she learned to knit and crochet. But neither became a life-long interest. Her later studies at Radford and George Washington University included little or nothing to do with fine art or art history, much less the world of crafts.

Not until Curran reached her late 40s did she get an unforeseen introduction to a pastime that has since become an obsession. She and her elderly mother-in-law _ who had recently moved from Baltimore to the family's James River, Va., home _ joined their church guild in 1997 in the hopes of replacing the older woman's lost social circle. Not long afterward, Curran made her first quilt block as part of the group's annual fund-raising project.

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"I'm not a sewer. I'm not a home-ec girl," says Curran, who taught exercise classes for years. "But after I did that first block, I loved it. I was hooked."

Virtually all of Curran's instruction came from the local band of quilters at Nancy's Calico Patch and the Peninsula Piecemakers Quilt Guild, of which she is still an active member. Without their guidance she couldn't have gotten started, she says, and she continues to depend upon this tight-knit subculture of quilters for support.

Like most novices, she focused on traditional quilts in the beginning, gradually learning and then mastering an increasingly sophisticated set of techniques as she advanced. But the very first quilt she made was also the last in which she strictly followed someone else's pattern.

"I was moving flowers around where I wanted them. I was doing my own borders _ and that was considered brazen by some people," she confesses. "But I wanted to do my own thing and not someone else's."

Six years later, Curran's habit of taking off in her own direction led to her experimental Saddam portrait as well as related likenesses of Hitler and Osama Bin Laden.

Though the dramatic series met with few admirers in the quilting world, it spurred her imagination in new ways, leading her to produce increasingly ambitious works that combined both traditional craftsmanship and an unconventional taste for artistic expression.

Since then she's won many awards for such eye-catching and provocative pieces as "Fatal Attraction" _ an edgy portrait that shows a menacing house cat peering down into a pool of nervous fish. In "Kabuki's Nine Lives" and "Flynn," Curran reinvented an old but still rewarding Andy Warhol trick, using multiple likenesses made of painted fabric to probe the unexpectedly complex characters of her cat and dog.

"She's very creative in her use of fabrics and techniques _ and she has an artist's eye," says Nancy Gloss, the veteran quilter who owns Nancy's Calico Patch in Newport News, Va. "She sees things in a way that not everybody can see. It's an inner ability that's become an important part of her quilts."

Inside Curran's quilting studio _ which looks out over the James River from a second-floor loft in her home _ visitors soon discover that her painterly feel for fabric and tireless appetite for hand work and problem-solving play equally critical roles in her creations.

Hundreds of different colored spools of thread wait on racks and inside storage bins, ready for whatever direction her imagination and a pair of sewing machines will take her. Cabinet after cabinet swells with folded swatches of cloth, filling an entire wall from floor to ceiling with thousands of color-coded hues and patterns.

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Two large fabric-covered work tables stand nearby, as does an oversize ironing board, three different irons and bucket after bucket filled with such necessities as scissors, paint brushes and sewing pins.

"This is my stash," Curran says, throwing the doors to her cabinets open. "It's an obsession _ and all of us quilters have it. We're always looking for something better."

Despite being best known for her colorful, multi-patterned quilts, Curran has shown that she knows when to work simply and directly, too, in such conceptual pieces as "Terror."

Inspired by the same feelings that sparked her chilling Saddam portrait, this stark, black-and-white essay on the contemporary culture of fear shows a trio of over-sized eyes looking down upon a person wracked with apprehension. Though executed in blacks, white and grays, it has such a disturbing impact that _ nearly three years after it was selected for Virginia's Peninsula Fine Arts Center's 2006 Juried Biennial Exhibition _ Hampton artist James Warwick Jones still recalls stopping to take a closer look.

"I remember it mostly because of the unexpected substance it had," says Jones, who runs Hampton's Charles H. Taylor Arts Center. "It was beautifully designed and beautifully crafted. But it wasn't just decorative. It was thoughtful and provocative."

Not all of Curran's quilts have attracted such attention. Some have fallen so short of her technical and artistic expectations that they never made it out of her studio.

"Those can be real boo-hoo moments," she confesses, "because it's usually involved a lot of time and work."

More times than not, however, even her more audience-friendly pieces have a way of grabbing the eye with their pattern and color, then provoking the mind with their content.

The combination has earned many national awards _ and attracted the notice of knowledgeable admirers for years.

"When you look at Sandy's work, you see the quilt as art. She has this wonderful way of putting her own spin on things," said Mary Claire Moyer, coordinator of the Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival, which wrapped Saturday.

"Her quilts are the ones that really draw your eyes when you walk down the aisle."

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© 2009, Daily Press (Newport News, Va.).