Ahhhhh fresh air.

It was so nice to go to North Carolina and take a little break from the usual. Its funny how my perspective has changed of the place I’ve been going to since I was very young. Since getting into the program in college, I see everything through design goggles. Driving through the mountains makes me wonder where the art of the hand-painted sign has gone? I wonder why we’ve lost the creativity that is required of living a country lifestyle. With all of the flashy neon and sell out advertising, it is nice to go to a place where there is no flash required and loyalty is a priority. It is less about having the newest, fanciest product and more about the relationship and experience of actually getting a product that will do the job just fine. Could I get a good greasy breakfast sandwich in Orlando? Yes. Could I go to a local breakfast joint and watch customers interact with such intimacy? No. Not in these here parts. The difference between here and there is the service, the history, the community, and the people. The simplicity I used to know of the country has now become a complex mecca of design and psychology.

One thing that really stood out to me were these large square paintings on the side of barns and buildings. I first noticed them driving through a town called Old Fort, NC. I made David slow down while I snapped these pics (above and below) out the window. How incredible are these? They stood out like a sore thumb among the architecture there. I started to notice that they were all over the parts of NC I drove through. Jefferson, Valle Crucis, Banner Elk. Each square has a unique quilted pattern painted on it, so I started to think maybe there was some sort of secret underground society putting these up, or they were a clan or tribe of people I wasn’t aware of, or something really romantic like that. After doing a bit of research, I discovered they are part of a campaign called the Quilt Trails Project, funded by Blue Ridge National Heritage Area, an amazing non-profit dedicated to preserving the culture of craft and heritage of Western North Carolina.

The project was born out of an initiative started in 2001, when a woman from Ohio painted a wooden block with a quilt pattern to honor her mother. Now they are sprinkled along the highways and roads in 6 counties in NC (Ashe, Avery, Mitchell, Madison, Yancey, and Watauga). In the article I read about this project from the publication Carolina Country, the Ashe County Arts Council director Jane Lonon says “We’ve got some up hootin’ hollers.” …that makes for “some mighty pretty drives.” Love it.

The Ashe County Arts Council has some more pics from the project. From a purely design standpoint, they are incredible. From a culture and heritage perspective, they are even more incredible. I love that something that was so important and held so much meaning in the past (both within the patterns and the act of quilting) is preserved on the side of barns in the heart of the Carolina country. Heres to our mothers, grandmothers, aunts and cousins who kept us warm with this form of art.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 9th, 2010 at 10:48 am and is filed under Art, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.