Self-Taught Artist Thornton Dial

Eye of the Fabric, 2007
In this tribute to Southern-women quilters, which might have involved a very sentimental treatment, Dial opts instead for near abstraction. He suggests the women through a webwork of braided cloth, a kind of sewing circle that also represents bonds of community (and women's braided hair). But he paints it all over in a leaden gray to suggest how that way of life has already receded into the dusty sediment of the past

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