Judith Larzelere talks about her quilting method on the piece Breaking Rhythms, part of her show at the Newport Art Museum. More information about her works can be found at www.judith larzelere.com.

The Providence Journal / Gretchen Ertl

NEWPORT When a deadly tsunami slammed into the coast of Thailand in December 2004, many Americans rushed to respond. Some donated money to international relief agencies. Others collected food and clothing to send to victims of the disaster. Judith Larzelere, an award-winning Westerly quiltmaker whose work is on display now at the Newport Art Museum, reached for a needle and thread.

“I was just totally shocked by the level of devastation,” Larzelere says during a recent tour of the exhibit, “Judith Larzelere: Art Quilts.” “One minute it was a beautiful day with blue skies and people sunning themselves on the beach. The next minute it was complete chaos.”

With images of the disaster still fresh in her mind, Larzelere began working on a quilt that, she hoped, would capture some of the emotions unleashed by the tsunami: sorrow and concern for victims, hope for the survivors, awe in the face of nature’s power.

Now that quilt, matter-of-factly titled Tsunami, hangs in a corner of the museum’s Ilgenfritz Gallery, alongside a dozen or so other examples of Larzelere’s handiwork. And contrary to what you might expect, it’s neither dreary nor depressing.

Composed of hundreds of thin, tile-like strips of fabric — a Larzelere trademark — Tsunami is dominated by a broad expanse of blue that starts off a deep azure but gradually grows lighter and more luminous. At the bottom of the quilt, the clashing tectonic plates that caused the tsunami appear as a pair of dark, jagged forms separated by a strip of fiery red cotton sateen.

Taken together, the quilt’s dark bottom, deep-blue middle section and shimmering top make for a striking composition. Though made of cloth, Tsunami could easily be mistaken for a piece of stained glass.

“I hate to say this, but it’s actually quite beautiful,” Larzelere says. “I think it’s one of the best things I’ve done.”

If that makes Larzelere sound a bit callous, think again. A softspoken Midwesterner (she grew up in Kalamazoo, Mich.) with a shy smile and a pleasantly self-deprecating manner, Larzelere, 63, hardly fits the popular image of a self-absorbed artist. In fact, just getting her to talk about her work can be a challenge.

“I have to warn you, I’m not much of a talker,” she says.

YET WHEN LARZELERE does talk, it’s clear that she isn’t a quiltmaker in the old-fashioned quilting-bee sense of the word. For one thing, she prefers working alone, often taking as long as two months to complete a single piece. Much of that time is spent carefully cutting, sorting and sewing the small pieces of fabric that give her quilts their distinctive mosaic-like texture. Larzelere, who studied painting at Rutgers University before turning to quiltmaking in the late 1970s, compares the effect to brushstrokes on a painting.

“In a sense, it’s a lot like what the Impressionists were doing,” she says. “You have these smaller areas of color — the brushstrokes — that ultimately add up to something bigger, namely the painting.”

Comments like that also highlight another way in which Larzelere differs from more conventional quiltmakers. Rather than following traditional sewing and quilting patterns, Larzelere is more likely to draw inspiration from contemporary art and design. A pair of fiery red quilts in the Newport show, for example, grew out of Larzelere’s attempts to create an “optical vibration” using contrasting color combinations. To do that, she used a brilliant crimson fabric dotted with smaller strips of blue, turquoise and chartreuse.

The dizzying result recalls the work of Op Art painters such as Bridget Riley.

“Most people think of blue and red as very different colors,” Larzelere explains. “But if you get the values just right, they’re actually very similar. Basically, it’s the same effect — a kind of optical vibration — that you get in some of the old eye tests. When the colors are right, the whole thing just seems to pulse.”

One of the show’s earliest quilts, T-5, was inspired by work of Minimalist artists such as Donald Judd and Sol Lewitt. Completed in 1987, it consists of two asymmetrical blocks of color — one green, one black. Like many of Larzelere’s quilts, it manages to suggest both tension and repose, as though two powerfully opposing forces were momentarily held in balance.

“That’s an important piece for me,” Larzelere says. “On the one hand, I was looking at a lot of Minimalist art and wondering how it would work as a quilt pattern,” she says. “On the other hand, I was going through kind of an emotional period in my own life. So the sense you get of these contending forces at work definitely has a personal dimension.”

Other quilts reflect a similar mix of formal invention and personal expression.

A 2001 work titled Pick Up Sticks, for example, follows the same “trunk-and-branch” pattern that underlies many of Larzelere’s quilts, though with one big difference: here it’s the candy-striped seams or boundaries between the larger blocks of fabric that give the quilt its vibrant, web-like pattern. By contast, a 1997 work called Wraith is nearly monochromatic. Composed of closely matched swatches of gray, lavender and maize, it’s full of quiet harmonies — more like an intimate piece of chamber music than a full symphony.

Though different in style — Pick up Sticks is as bold as Wraith is subtle — both quilts show off Larzelere’s love of color. In fact, almost all the fabric in her quilts is hand-dyed to her exacting specifications.

“Most of it comes from Germany,” she says of the vibrantly colored fabrics (mostly sateens) she imports from Frankfurt-based dyer Heide Stoll-Weber. “It’s expensive, but it’s worth it.”

Though Larzelere’s references to world events and contemporary art may not please quiltmaking purists, her work has garnered some impressive awards and honors.

In 2000, she was part of “Art Quilts: America at the Millenium,” a major exhibit of contemporary quilts in Strasbourg, France. In 2003, she was one of the few American quilters featured in “The 30 Distinguished Quiltmakers of the World,” an exhibition at the International Great Quilt Festival in Tokyo, Japan.

Larzelere’s work is also featured in several museum collections, including that of the American Craft Museum in New York City.

Still, Larzellere says that being labeled a “quiltmaker” can sometimes be a handicap.

“To a lot of people in the art world, quilts are still more handicraft than art,” she says. “Never mind that this so-called ‘craft’ has been around for hundreds of years. And never mind that a lot of ‘traditional’ quilt designs are as interesting as anything in contemporary art. Hopefully, though, that attitude is changing.”

“Judith “Larzelere: Art Quilts” continues through Dec. 31 at the Newport Art Museum, 76 Bellevue Ave. Museum hours: Mon.-Sat. 10-4 and Sun. noon-5. Admission: adults $6, seniors $5, students with I.D. $4 and children 5 and under free. Contact: (401) 848-8200 or www.newportartmuseum.org.

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