Botanical Quilt, 29" × 47½"

Detail from “With a Woman's Hands” - triangular quilt, measuring 34" per side.

hen visual artist Maria Ellena Cosimano-Kohl looks toward the Blue Ridge she sees colors. It’s been that way ever since the Washington, D.C., native first moved to Madison County 40 years ago and looked out her front door, over the Robinson River, to the mountains.

“The colors flow. They’re free, lyrical, feminine and soft,” says Kohl. “I don’t like sharp edges. I love the round; the flowing atmosphere. For decades, Kohl put that flowing atmosphere into her paintings. Then, she put it into her quilts.

“We knew she could paint,” says Trish Crowe, who hosts The Firnew Farm Artists Circle in Madison County. “I invited her to join our group a few months prior to our Mother’s Day Show earlier this year. We were all amazed at the energy and speed she painted. She would arrive in her van filled to the brim with stuff. In no time she had her easel out and an array of oil paints and brushes. She arrived early, stayed late.

“When she wasn’t happy with any of her paintings for the show, she suggested she had a quilt she was working on of her daughter and granddaughter. It wasn’t quite finished. So she brought three smaller quilts that were,” remembers Crowe.

“Seeing these quilts was one of the extraordinary moments, when you understand the meaning of art. These works for all their colors and textures and intricate patterns were from the heart. They told the story of a mother and a grandmother and of a love of the environment; the mountains, rivers, and streams that nourish. We decided to show all the pieces.” Trish encouraged Maria to go back to her studio and work like mad to finish “Fairy Tales Summer Song.”

“Fairy Tales Summer Song” is a true labor of love, constructed of fabrics Kohl dyed herself, lace she tatted, and appliqués she embroidered. Her granddaughter, explains Kohl, is severely retarded, and her daughter has “given up her life to care for her. The quilt is a celebration of the beauty of their relationship.”

Kohl’s granddaughter is now 19 years old. The quilt was 14 years in the making— not a long time, really, for a woman who is able to put one project aside for another, and then go back to pick up where she left off. It’s as though Kohl was born with the ability to multi-task: she started sewing when she was five; when she was 10, she was putting her paintings on display in public exhibition areas near the Washington Monument.

“I was exhibiting a landscape when Pietro Lazzari approached my mother and asked if he could tutor me,” Kohl recalls. “I worked with him from that time on.” The year was 1945. By that time Lazzari was an established and influential sculptor, painter, illustrator and printmaker.

Born in Italy in 1898, he had spent his early years finding inspiration in the frescoes of Roman churches, catacombs, ruined sculpture, and abandoned, overgrown gardens. He had found it in Naples, where, as an eight-year-old in 1906, he had thought the eruption of Vesuvio a beautiful natural fireworks with lapillus showering to earth “like burning little stars, like tears.” And, he had found it in Florence, where “the water played and smiled around stones” while his mother did the family’s laundry in the Arno. (Pietro Lazzari interview, 1964, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.)

By the time he discovered Kohl near the Washington Monument, he had received his formal education at the Ornamental School of Rome. He had exhibited with such Futurists as Balla and Severini before leaving Italy for New York in 1925. A year later his work had been exhibited along with that of Picasso, Pascin, and Modigliani at the New Gallery. He had exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art and had participated in the World War Two “National Arts for Victory” exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“He taught me how to see, feel, and interpret what I see in sculpture, painting and drawing,” says Kohl. Lazzari nurtured Kohl through the remainder of her years at Catholic Grammar School, then through Notre Dame High School, and Catholic and Georgetown Universities. She studied arts and sciences, philosophy, and theater.

“I didn’t have a social life. My life was my work,” Kohl recalls. At 19, she won a Fulbright Scholarship and went to Europe to study under Lazzari for three years, doing painting, sculpture, jewelry design, architectural renderings, and pottery, “but mostly textile designs.” Alhough Kohl says that it’s in textile design that her best gift lies, she began her career as a painter and sculptor.

When she returned from Europe, she set up a studio in Washington D.C., “on Eighth Street, near the old Hecht Department Store building,” and met Hugo Kohl, the man she would marry. At the time, “We both wanted to be professional students,” explains Kohl. “We did not want to go into the grownup world. He wanted to go to Ecuador to hunt for Inca gold. When he first asked me to marry him, I said, ‘No, I want to be an artist. I don’t have time to get married.’