En route to Gragg, an unincorporated town nestled up in Avery County, Hendersonville resident Robert Sears spotted an engine-oil-stained barn commanding the skyline, its eaves fringed with a bright quilt design. He remembers he paused and a kind of epiphany ensued — though he can’t quite remember the year it happened.
“It gets blurry when you’re my age,” jests Sears, who has roots in WNC but lingered a long while on the West Coast before returning home. His preferred medium — decorative wood blocks pinned to exterior facades — goes even further afield, across the Atlantic and back to Rhineland.
Barn quilts, explains Sears, date back to German/Dutch immigrants, who brought the seeds of the art with them when they settled in Pennsylvania, circa 1700. Vying for religious freedom, families established self-sufficient homesteads. Though barns became the nucleus of the farming culture, they remained largely unornamented until the 1830s, when the cost of paint got cheaper. Then, the practice — decking barns in heirloom patterns, first iconic “hex signs” to ward off evil, then geometric quilts — became routine.
Sears’ method — tracing complex shapes on treated signboard — isn’t quite as age-old. Though he’s a lifelong self-taught artist, his career reflects pragmatism – construction jobs, the Navy, and 20 years working in the chemistry field. He trifled with crafting pottery, even effigies — but nothing this expansive.
“My aunt bought me a pastel kit for Christmas one year,” he recalls. And, at an untried 5 years old, he found a certain fondness in geometrical planes and vivid pigments.
Today, his labyrinthine delivery of “hearts and gizzards” and other classic quilt designs woo spectators at Southern Appalachian fetes, the most recent being the Grandfather Mountain Highland Games in July and the opening of Fletcher’s Blue Ghost Brewery in June. At Garden Jubilee, Hendersonville’s Memorial Day festival, Sears displayed an observant palette of colonial stars and stripes.
But he often breaks from established patterns, as well. He might create an avant-garde motif in pastel shades; in another design, rectilinear figures stack themselves in an unprecedented scheme, somewhere between folksy and Cubist. He’ll paint a conventional eight-point star, then another kind of celestial scheme in cobalt and rose that looks almost tribal.
“Some are more abstract,” allows Sears, who’s brief without being curt. In his studio, a shadowy garage, a two-by-two-foot square sits sectioned off in strings of blue painter’s tape, undergoing the first of three generous coats. “But most recognize the traditional patterns above all,” he says. “The Primitive, The Pinwheel, The Drunkard’s Path.”
To contact Robert Sears about custom barn quilts, call 828-289-8920.