BY Keith Recker | February 7, 2010

Saddling up for a lifetime

My aunt Bonnie drove across Northern Africa in an avocado VW camper in the early 70s and sent this little saddle blanket to me from Tunisia. I've had it for almost 40 years, and the memory of it is always in the back of my mind. My first viewings of the work of Josef Albers and Mark Rothko and Franz Marc and Paul Klee made me think of the blanket's simple abstraction. Are you skeptical?  Just look at the feathery way one color finishes and another begins and tell me you can't think of Rothko. And the gradations from teal to lime are pure Albers.
 
Yes, it's just a scrap of scratchy tourist art. But it opened up a curiosity about the way we humans encode and transmit our experience into art and craft and design, of how we capture movement and emotion in materials that have neither.   Everything around me murmurs in its own voice, telling its own story.  I hear and learn something about being human every time I look or touch -- in silent museums or sweaty bazaars or crusty junk shops or swanky boutiques. Every story is different, and I am always eager to find the next one.
 
And I think, somehow, it all started here.