Melinda Snyder exhibit

Melinda Muhn Snyder, a fiber artist and friend, has a show at the Patio Gallery in Louisville KY, mostly of quilts, plus fabric collage.  Although she rarely enters juried shows and thus hasn't been widely seen outside the Louisville area, her work is good enough for any venue I've ever known and I wish she would bite the bullet and get it out there for the wider world.

The quilts are freehand cut, almost exclusively with strips, with exquisite straight-line quilting, and given a delicious twist by her use of hand-dyed cottons and silks side-by-side.  The silk gives a sparkle and lushness that lifts the cottons to a new level and makes me wonder why I don't do the same thing.

Melinda Snyder, Sunset

Melinda Snyder, Blue Cross (detail below)

Melinda's day job is an elementary school art teacher and she often incorporates printed fabric that the kids have made into her quilts.

Melinda Snyder,  Mark Making 4 (With Purple), detail below of student-made fabric

Melinda Snyder, Green Spheres

Many critics dismiss freehand-cut strip piecing as derivative and boring, too much like Nancy Crow, but they are wrong.  That's kind of like dismissing portrait painting because it's too much like Gainsborough.  Melinda is just one of a host of piecers who continue to give fresh looks to their quilts through inspired use of simple geometry.

The show runs through October 7 and is worth a detour if you're anywhere near Louisville (it's only a half-mile off I-64).