Michael James trained originally as a painter and printmaker but converted to quilt making after being inspired by the abstract artistry of Amish quilts. Having mastered the traditional technical skills and patterns of quilting, James explored a new direction to become perhaps the foremost proponent of the art quilt. Dispensing with the grid structure, the uniformity of block patterns, and hand sewing, James created his own cloth from machine-seamed strips of multicolored cotton. From this fabric he cut curved sections and reassembled them into quilt tops. Using a kaleidoscope of colored cottons, he created transitions from light to dark and illusions of three-dimensional space, augmented by positioning the quilt on point. The result is Metamorphosis, described by the artist as “transformation, something endlessly morphing from one state to another. . . evolving, returning, re-forming.”