from Meet the Quilters...Anita Kaplan... Stitching in Sea Ranch, Carla B. Mills, Quilt Magazine, Fall 2002

The spirit for adventure is strong in Anita. She often pilots a small plane low over the countryside, watching the landscape drifting along below her. Many of her quilts represent some of the landscape she has seen while flying. The undulations of the land as Anita flies along, curving , rising and falling with the terrain below her, inspire her quilt designs.

Another source of inspiration is right in Anita's sewing studio. Fabric piles will sometimes come together seemingly of their own volition and suggest an idea to Anita. (She loves to rearrange her colorful piles of fabric.)...Most of all, Anita wants her quilts "to reflect the beauty of this amazing world" in which we live.

...Anita suggests that quilters not be afraid to try new things. She urges them to experiment and not be alarmed if they make mistakes. Asking for help and advice from another is a traditional part of quilting. Challenge yourself; your work will be all the better for it!

from Fun With Little Quilts: for Quilters Who Just Want to Play, Annie Beckett, Miniature Quilt Ideas, a supplement to Quilt Magazine, Fall 2002

Sometimes quiltmaking is serious business, and sometimes it's pure play. Anita Kaplan's Economic Growth and Yellow Triptych are the creations of an artist at play.

Economic Growth emerged from the 1999 challenge by her local guild: create a quilt about mathematics. "I'm terrible at math," Anita laughs. "I do quilts that don't require me to count!" She struggled with how a math-challenged quilter was going to do a Math Challenge. Then, browsing an area quilt store, she happened on the Monopoly fabric and it all came together...Anita sketched her idea, but worked as always, without a pattern, building the quilt freely as she went.

...Yellow Triptych is an outgrowth of a project with the Art Quilt Study Group. The given parameters of the original challenge were the size and inclusion of the color yellow. Anita went to her stash and pulled the same jazzy yellow solid she'd used in Economic Growth. She added the other fabrics to put together "the wildest combo I could find that I liked and thought would be really dynamic."

Anita prefers to work in the abstract and with true colors. In her opinion, realism in quilts is limiting to the maker and the beholder if not done very carefully and well: "I love the freedom and movement in abstract art. I want there to be room for what the viewer can bring to my work."

..."It's great fun to do little projects," Anita says. "Sometimes you just pick something like a color or shape or fabric and see where you can go with it, and in a short time you have something wonderful! Sometimes you just want to play."

from Appliqué Influences: New Ways to See and Stitch, Annie Beckett, Appliqué Quilts, June 2003

On the way to becoming an accomplished and award-winning quilt artist, Anita Kaplan has studied with many of the best teachers, but no one has influenced her more than David Walker.

...Anita likes to discover her quilts. When not knowing exactly where she's going threatens her confidence she recalls David's admonitions against trying to control and engineer the tells us to 'let art happen, don't struggle, don't think.' That redirects and reassures me when I start obsessing."