Rick Vanderpool

Moda has created a vibrant new floral group called Wildflowers, inspired by the deep and rich photography of Rick Vanderpool. Read about how his love of flowers, photography, and quilting came to be!

Greetings, Quilters, Quilt fans and other readers;

My name is Rick Vanderpool, a photographer and writer, living in Killeen and Commerce, Texas. While those places bear my addresses, I am seldom at home in either – choosing instead my ’95 Chevy pick-up, at once primary residence and favorite travel companion.

After completing several Texas-themed travel projects (visible on the www.stateart.net web site – click on TEXAS), I was fortunate to have Northcott Silk take interest in using my montages for the creation of quilt fabric. When my contract was completed with Northcott, MODA/United Notions flattered me with interest in creating fabric from my Looking for Texas and Texas Wildflowers collections…While I may know quite a bit about photography after 35+ years behind a camera, it was MODA’s talented designers who selected several of my more than 1,000 photographs of the state name, and who picked a bouquet from hundreds of its lovely native blooms to become some of the company’s latest offerings as fabric.

Briefly, both MODA collections came to be like so:
Looking for Texas – I awoke one morning to the play on words ablaze in my mind, “There is a place where a thousand pictures are worth one word – TEXAS!” So, I set out on a 20,500-mile odyssey to photograph that word at least once in all 254 counties in The Lone Star State. While I was traveling all those miles, looking for Texas, I simply got tired of not knowing the names for the abundant array of wildflowers I saw blooming all over the state. I soon owned nearly every book on the subject and soon after that I knew roughly 400 Texas wildflowers on a first-name basis.

I have always been a lover of quilts. Both of my grandmothers, a great-grandmother, and even a great-grandmother, whom I knew briefly as a teen, were avid quilters. My father told me he remembers as a boy, quilting with his grandmother. As a photographer and writer, my life is a patchwork quilt of images I’ve captured with my camera or pen. My creative process, as it were, has merely been to record them in one form or another, store them, and later piece them together – in a most quilt-like fashion – as collections for sale, exhibit or gift.

MODA’s Design Director has encouraged me to submit photographs for other collections, and I am working on a few at the present time. Please watch this site for updates on the progress. Feel free to email me from the StateArt site with FATQUARTER in the subject line, please…