Dominie Nash

Dominie Nash

MD-001

Dominie Nash

Le Rowell

8/6/01

Gwen Westerman

Washington, D.C.

Le Rowell

Le Rowell (LR): My name is Le Rowell and today's date is August 6, 2001, and I'm conducting an interview with Dominie Nash for the Q.S.O.S, Quilters' Save Our Stories project. Also joining us is Bernie Herman from the University of Delaware for this interview. We are in Dominie's studio in Takoma Park which borders Maryland and D.C. It is August 6, 2001, and it is 9:59 a.m. in the morning. Dominie, we asked you to bring a touchstone piece and you have selected this. Can you tell me something about it?

Dominie Nash (DN): Sure, the quilt is called "Red Landscape Number One" as it became a series and in terms of technique it's very related to a lot of work, I've done over the past maybe eight years where I worked in a collage like way sort of layering fabrics, overlapping them, and stitching everything onto a background. It's a kind of very simple appliqué, and the design came, as a lot of my designs do, from a collage I had done, a paper collage, just fooling around which is something I do just to get design ideas and when I saw this one, I decided that it would translate into a quilt. I think I had done it with magazine pictures so obviously I wasn't going to exactly duplicate it, but when I blew it up the form looked good, and I started pulling out my fabric that I had dyed and printed to find fabrics that would work in this quilt.

LR: Tell me more about the fabrics and the dyeing.

DN: Well, I pretty much dye or print everything I use in my quilts. Over the years I've weeded out my commercial printed fabric and started using all my own. So, there are many processes I do, just simple immersion dyeing where I just take a piece of fabric and dye it in a dye bath and it doesn't always come out even and smooth, but I like that because I could buy smooth fabric. I do discharge dyeing which there is quite a bit of in this piece which means taking a dark fabric, either one I've dyed myself, or commercial black or brown, dark green fabric and using various things to remove color. So, I'll paint on a paste of one of these chemicals and then apply heat and the color is removed and it gives a very surprising mysterious kinds of effects and it reminds me of things in nature, reflections in water, patterns in rock, that sort of thing. And I do screen printing and mono printing which means making a plate with ink on it and then putting designs in the plate which essentially removes some of the ink so there is a pattern and then putting a piece of fabric down on top of this and transferring the ink with its pattern to the fabric. Then maybe a little shabori or tie dye. In this one some is just painting. So any way I can get pigment or dye on fabric I've experimented with, and I now have a palette in fabrics both solid and printed that I can use.

LR: And the printing?

DN: Well, the printing is screen printing.

LR: Screen printing

DN: And mono printing I guess is technically a printing technique. Sometimes a simple block print, I don't think there's any examples of that in this quilt, but I do use that. Some other more esoteric techniques which [laugh.] I don't know if you want me to go into all the details, but there are combinations of these things using different kinds of dyes together.

LR: Why did you choose this particular piece out of all your work?

DN: Well, I wanted something fairly recent but that related to the work that I have been doing and I think it set me off in a slightly different direction and that is to kind of make larger more simplified shapes. For a while I had been obsessively filling up areas of my quilt with little, tiny pieces of fabric and I decided I wanted to simplify, so that at least for me worked here because as you can see the shapes are not as complex as some of my earlier work. And it led to a series which I've been very pleased with I've done five altogether.

LR: What is that series?

DN: It's called the Red Landscape series.

LR: Do you want to talk about that?

DN: Sure. I guess the second, third and fourth one were based on details of this first one. So, I took a section of the quilt and blew it up essentially. I may have in most cases did change the colors. But they all had red in them. Most of them have black and white. I know one is just red, reds and purples and browns. And the last one in the series is not a detail but it was another collage I had done, and it looked very related, so I put that in the series. And there probably will be more as I have enjoyed working on them.

LR: And some of your other series?

DN: The series that I worked on before this and I don't think I've finished with it is called "Peculiar Poetry" and it's done in very much the same style although as I've said the use of fabric is a little more complex. Each of the big shapes was filled with many more smaller pieces of fabric and from the same color range to kind of create an overall color for each shape. And then I've done, I'm working on a series that I call "Deconstruction/Reconstruction" where I take old quilts that I've done that I haven't been happy with and cut them up and recombine them to make new quilts, so I've done maybe five or so sets of those. I have more candidates waiting in the wings. And then is a series called "Chimera" which involves taking pieces from one quilt and using them as a starting point for the next and those are based on drop cloths that I accumulate when I'm dyeing and printing the fabric. So with most of them I've taken a whole piece of cloth that has a lot of paint and dye splashed on it and I add some to it and use that as the ground for the quilt and then add, pieces on top of that from the previous quilt, do stitching and printing on top of the whole newly assembled piece.

LR: How do you go about planning all this?

DN: Some of them are very planned and others are not planned at all. The "Red Landscape" and "Peculiar Poetry" I really do. I plan the composition and the general color, and I actually cut out large pattern pieces and then put them up on my working wall and fill them in with fabric and I keep putting up pieces of fabric and taking it down until I have the right one. So, I don't--I don't plan the very specific color elements, but I'll know that this particular section is going to be say, red. So, I guess you can say those are the most planned pieces I do, and the others are somewhat more spontaneous.

Bernie Herman (BH): About the idea of a series, do you always imagine these as series and how far do you project them?

DN: Well, I don't usually know when I do the first one or even two whether it's gonna go on and I have some that have just sort of dead ended. But I like to work in series because it's a way to develop my ideas and have what everybody seems to want is a body of work that kind of hangs together. I never say, you know I'm going to do ten or four or whatever, it just happens and at some point, with some of them I might say this is finished and with others I know that I may come back to them. But I usually have two or three different series that I'm working on at the same time which may not look anything like each other. So I have to be careful when I'm presenting my work not to confuse people. I usually pick one series or another to show someone who is interested in my work. I think consistency is important to people.

BH: One thing I would like to ask sort of the other side of the series idea where it suggests sort of a level of planning out and projecting a project into the future. But also, with your work it also has a great deal of spontaneity about it and almost a quality of randomness in terms of how you appropriate things into your compositions. Could you talk about that part of the process a little bit more?

DN: Well, I guess it all stems from the fact that I get very uncomfortable when I have a blank piece of paper in front of me and somebody says, "Plan something, design something." And so, I have found over the years that I was just frustrating myself by trying to draw a quilt that I wanted to do. So, either starting with a collage which I find much more freeing than drawing, just playing around with pieces of paper, cutting shapes then all of a sudden, I see something is happening then I can go on and add to it and complete the composition; or just playing around with fabric. Sometimes I'll just pin some big hunks of fabric that I like up on the wall and starting putting other things on top and I guess I'm a random sort of person in terms of my designing. That's just the way I've evolved. I used to think I had to be able to plan ahead and I did pieced quilts for a while at the very beginning and that was always a problem. You really do have to sort of plan what's going to happen and when I decided to start doing this sort of appliqué method rather than piecing; it was so much more freeing because the things didn't really have to fit together so that I could make a lot of changes. I overlap things and I leave the edges raw, so that I can change anything as I go along, and I really like that.

LR: And you use various techniques? I saw some of the reverse appliqué you have.

DN: I don't really do too much of that. But every once in a while, it's just called for. I mean I guess the way I work with color and shape is just sort of intuitive and I don't where it comes from or what it really means; but I'll just look at something and say well this needs a triangle or this needs to be cut out, there's no rationale behind it, it's just a feeling that I have in looking at it.

LR: And even the spontaneity in the final stitching that you do?

DN: That's probably the most spontaneous thing even in the planned quilts; I just sit down at the sewing machine and start quilting, and the thread just sort of meanders, and I never know exactly what it's going to look like. I do a lot of ripping [laugh]. and ripping out machine quilting is not fun but sometimes it just doesn't work. And on some of the pieces I do some big hand stitching, I wouldn't call it hand quilting at all because they all have machine stuff also to hold them together. But on certain pieces, especially the more spontaneous pieces that kind of remind me of ethnic textiles of various kinds which I'm very inspired by; often those will have big crude hand stitches with the folk textiles, so I have used those; and I do enjoy hand sewing to that extent. But my hand quilting attempts from years ago were not encouraged, so I-- [laughs.]

LR: And hand drawing? I saw hand drawing on--

DN: Right. I also do on some pieces some drawing with fabric pastels, and I've discovered recently some charcoal type pastels that can be heat set. So those are suitable to work with on fabric and some fabric markers and those sometimes continue the stitching lines or echo the stitching lines; and sometimes I just feel like scribbling on a quilt knowing that I can always cover it up if I don't like it. [laugh.] It's a good thing about quilts, especially the way I work, that things can be covered.

LR: So, when did quilting enter your life?

DN: Well, my background is totally unrelated. It's in social sciences and I have a master's degree in social work and even went to graduate school for a while in sociology after I discovered that social work is not for me. But I'd always sewn my own clothes and did knitting and when I was just so frustrated with school and not liking the field I had chosen, I decided I would try to pursue some of those interests; I'd met a few people who were doing fiber art of various kinds which was a revelation to me, this was in the mid 60's and I got very intrigued with weaving. So, I had a friend who encouraged me and found me a teacher and I got a loom, and I did weaving for many years. But while I was weaving, I came across some books on contemporary quilts and I thought that sounded interesting and I saw that show that inspired so many people that started at the Whitney and came to the Renwick that was something that started the whole field. But I was doing it in a very tentative way and made some quilts, functional quilts for the family, and I also started doing some batik and had a pile of batiks that didn't really work. I was just doing pillows and wall hangings and things so at some point I decided I would try just cutting them up and using them in quilts and that kind of got me started; and I overlapped quilting and weaving for a while and finally gave up the weaving about fifteen years are for lots of reasons; but one of them being that I just like quilting better and so I've been doing that exclusively ever since.

LR: How have you balanced your profession as an art quilter with your family?

DN: It hasn't really been a problem. I have a very supportive family who always encouraged what I did and I'm not much of a housekeeper anyway so I don't think they'd notice the difference, [laugh.] when my children were small I had a little bit of child care so I would have a couple of days when I could work through lunchtime when they came home from preschool and as they got older I made sure that I used all the time that the kids were in school to work. I didn't socialize or do errands or housework or anything. I just worked on my artwork, and it just seemed to work out.

BH: Let me ask you, some of your artist biography statements that I've come across you describe yourself as self-taught. And could you elaborate a bit on that please?

DN: Yes, I kind of learned this stuff--aside from the weaving where I had a teacher of ten little classes in somebody's house--and I took workshops and things. I really didn't know what I was doing, especially with the quilting and I just got some books and just started doing things and I learned later that I was doing or not doing things that kind of scandalized people. I never put a binding on a quilt I guess until I made baby quilts for my grandchildren because I didn't even know what it was and there's really no need to put a binding on a wall quilt any how; but everyone does it and people would ask me about that and I'd say, 'I didn't even know it existed and I didn't know how to do it.' So, I just gradually picked up information and I had taken a few workshops particularly in the surface design techniques, but I never had any formal art training although I would have loved to, I think at some point if there had been an M.F.A. program in fibers available in this area, I probably would have done it, but not anymore. I don't think I would want to now. I certainly got a lot of help along the way informally but never had formal training.

BH: I have sort of a two point follow up to this. One is how do you track the history of the reception of your quilts, in other words you begin as largely self-taught coming out of other fiber arts practices and your quilts make their debut. Can you sort of talk about how that view has evolved over time?

DN: Well, the beginning was inauspicious, but I guess most people's beginnings are. I mean, I entered a lot of shows and tried to get my work out there and it was very frustrating for a while. But I just wanted to persevere, and I did and I'm trying to remember when I finally felt that I had been accepted. It was probably some local shows--I guess I was getting the work out there before it was ready. That's what I think about in retrospect. And it's just been very gradual, I can't quite pinpoint--

BH: Have there been any high points in this gradual history?

DN: Well, I guess the first time I was in a juried show that had a catalogue--I mean it was like a book. It was a show in Long Island and I just entered it because I entered anything that came along that was appropriate and there weren't quite as many shows then, and I was accepted, and my picture was in this book and the jurors were people whose work I really admired and there were people in the show whose work that I really admired and that was really an exciting break through. I'd pick up this book and show people and say, 'My quilt is in this book.' And then I got into some other publications which were very satisfying, and I guess the most meaningful thing, well, two actually fairly recent, one is having a quilt in the Renwick Collection [in Washington, D.C.] which came up as a complete surprise. I had never sent them slides and I always had intended to, but the director came to a show and contacted me about that. And getting a grant from the state Arts Council just this past year after applying at least fourteen times.

I'm sure [laugh.] an individual artist grant so that was--it's the kind of thing that makes you say, 'Well, if I don't get this next thing at least I got that.' So, it's okay, I can relax.

BH: About when was the Long Island show? Do you remember that?

DN: I don't remember, maybe around 1984 or 5.

BH: It's about fifteen or sixteen years ago?

DN: Right and it was also about the time that I really switched over. I guess a few things like that were enough to encourage me to switch over to full time quilt making.

BH: The other question I wanted to ask you is that you mentioned the impact that the Whitney show had on you in terms of beginning to look at the world of quilts and quilting as a form of esthetic expression, and what I'm curious about here is in the fact that some many of those quilts, like all those quilts that were shown in the Whitney show were in fact what folks would term as traditional quilts and your work is not like that at all.

DN: No.

BH: Could you talk a little bit about the leap from one to the other?

DN: Well, as I said, I started doing pieced quilts. I was just blown away by the color and just the whole visual impact of them but didn't really think about the structure because I'd never really done it before; but when I started doing it, I, first of all I realized that it was very difficult technically to make a really perfect quilt, so I kind of gave up that idea and pretty quickly decided that I had to just make it my own and not worry about that. And so, I just started breaking some rules, started just making my designs a little off kilter and I was encouraged by seeing work in books mostly, occasionally in real life, by people who were doing that. And it just gradually evolved. There were other ways of doing it and they were much more satisfying and much more in keeping with the way I worked and my particular skills. So, it was a gradual thing, but I still look back on that as an inspiration, but I have no desire to do that sort of thing anymore.

BH: I have one more question in this vein and then I'll turn it back to you.

LR: Okay.

BH: You've mentioned several times there are other artists working in fiber arts or quilts who've.

had an impact on you. Who are some of these folks?

DN: Well, they're mostly people who work in a very painterly fashion. I hate to say that because [laugh.] it's putting people in categories again, but nontraditional in a pretty free and spontaneous way. One of them is Elizabeth Busch. I think she may have been one of the jurors of that first show in Long Island that I was so happy about. I have met Elizabeth over the years and she's a really interesting person. And another woman who's become a friend named Linda Levin, and I remember seeing her work when I was still weaving and we both had work in a show at the Delaware Museum, the craft show. And I was very excited and went up there to see the show and there was Linda's work, and I said, 'Oh, that's what I want to do,' because I had already started doing a little bit of quilting then. And I'd say both of their work continued to inspire me. And there are others, such as Joan Schulze and Ardyth Davis and I think they all had painting backgrounds actually and probably came to quilting or the same way I did just picking up a little technique here and there and not really knowing what they were doing as opposed to people who started by making traditional quilts which they learned in the family or whatever and going from there.

LR: You mentioned you have a piece at the Renwick. What makes a quilt appropriate for a museum collection? What makes a great quilt?

DN: What I think may not be what museum people think, but [laugh.] I think it has to be something that is in a tradition but that breaks from it in the sense of breaking new ground in some way. And I know that not everything in museums is like that, but in my museum that's what it would be. And I think it has to have a certain edginess and technique that hasn't been done much. I think it should be beautiful although beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder. I don't know. That's a tough question.

BH: Share a little bit more about edginess.

DN: Well, something that's a little off. I had to talk about my quilt one day at the Renwick, they make these little informal talks and I was trying to figure out what in the world to say, and so I pointed out places in the quilt where I thought that I wasn't really following the rules in terms of composition and color and how I liked what happened when those rules were broken although I didn't sit down and break them deliberately. It's the piece that's up on the poster [Dominie points to a poster on the wall in her studio.] there if you haven't seen it. Using a lot of yellow when I'd always been told you should not use a lot of yellow. Yellow is so strong that it dominates everything else and so I always try in both weaving and quilting to use a lot of yellow. That one was deliberate [laugh.] and having sort of an off-balance composition. And also, I guess it kind of relates to having enough depth that people want to come back and look again. So, it's just not a one-line song. In my own work I like people to be able to come back and say, 'Oh, I didn't see that before,' or 'Oh, look at this going on,' rather than being a perfect example of something that's just on the surface.

LR: So, is quilting art?

DN: My personal preferences in the old quilts are these old funky quilts where people use all sorts of weird fabrics and that aren't necessarily really well made but there's something about them graphically and color wise that just really attracts me, very folky looking. I have a couple of old tops that I bought for practically nothing because everybody else scorned them [laughs.] that I just adore, and they really inspire me including one with a whole lot of yellow.

LR: So, is quilting an art or a craft?

DN: I think it's both. I probably focus more on the art than the craft, but I certainly think it has to be crafted well enough that it will hold up and not look as if it's going to fall apart any minute, but--I guess I don't consider craft as the most important part of it. And I think some quilts probably are pure craft.

BH: Could you give an example?

DN: Um--

BH: The genre or an area of quilting where you'd perceive it, this idea of craft is prominent?

DN: Well, I think a lot of the pieced quilts that people are doing today, and I'm not going to name names, but--

BH: I was thinking more in terms of style.

DN: Right, they're perfect and lovely but there isn't anything much beyond that. People are just doing very symmetrical, very perfect quilts, it looks very planned, but it's very static. And I don't think there's much beyond that. I think a lot of the things that we see in Quilter's Newsletter Magazine, the ones that they pick out as the cover girls are not ever the ones that really appeal to me.

LR: So why is quilting important in your life?

DN: I don't know what else I would do if I didn't do quilting, I mean it is something that I just do and that just draws me, and I can't really tell you why. I love fabric. I love manipulating it. All of the surprises because a lot of my work surprises me, either in a good way or a bad way; but 'Oh my goodness, is that what it turned out to be?' It just holds my interest as nothing else does. As I come here every day, almost every day, and I never considered not doing it once I got into it. Oh, I've had bad times when I say, 'Why am I doing this?' I get a string of rejections and I have to talk myself into that's really not what's important. Just get back and do it.

LR: Have you done any teaching?

DN: A very little and not really quilting. I've taught some dyeing and I used to teach some when I was weaving, but I'm not really a good teacher. I'm not a natural teacher, and I do a conscientious job, but I don't really like it and I used to think I should but I kind of decided I didn't need to; there were plenty of people who do it very well.

LR: So, no guilds?

DN: No, I belong to the groups and sometimes I'm asked to do a lecture and I do. I try not to turn people down, but--

LR: What groups? Are they quilt related?

DN: Yes, I just did something this spring for a big quilt guild in Virginia.

LR: The one in northern--

DN: Quilters Unlimited. [Northern Virginia.]

LR: Unlimited?

DN: I'm not quite sure what they made of it but I did go and talk about my deconstructed quilts.

and I'm going to do the same program for Potomac Craftsman [in Washington, D.C.] next year. Yes, they're all fiber related. And I'm not somebody who loves to give lectures, but I will do it. I guess it's good for my character to do it but I wouldn't want to do it regularly. [laugh.]

LR: In what ways do think quilts have special meaning for women in America?

DN: I can't really answer that because they had no particular meaning for me until I started doing them. I don't have the, I mean there's a history of very functional needlework in my family. My grandmother did beautiful crochet work, but it was off of patterns, and so personally I don't have that kind of connection with it. I know a lot of people do. It's something that's carried on in their families aside from the fact that women are the ones who mostly work with fabric in this country [background cough.] that's not something that I really think about when doing my work.

LR: Do you think about how can we encourage young people?

DN: I do and I'm very distressed about the fact that we're all sort of middle-aged white women and where are the young, where are the minority quilters? I know where some of them are. I have some concerns about that actually and the young ones particularly, and when I do meet someone who's younger who's doing nice work, I do everything I can to encourage them.

LR: What are some of your concerns that you mentioned?

DN: The whole segregated nature of this and we heard some of that at the program at the Renwick that you and I attended. Some of the work is wonderful. I'm particularly thinking of the black quilters because I think that's the only group that's really done a lot.

LR: Yes.

DN: It's almost a kind of defensive thing. We're going do this work that shows that we're black and use these images and these styles. I don't think they're thinking about the art of it as much as making a political statement. And that's fine if that's what you want to do but I don't think it's contributing to quilting as an art.

LR: So, haven't--

BH: Part of what you're addressing, I think, is tension between ideology that's political on one hand and ideology that's esthetic on the other. Is that sort of what you're trying to get at?

DN: I guess, yeah--It concerns me because I think some of the people whose work, I've seen, you know, have a lot of ability and are kind of following the party line in terms of making a certain kind of work even if it doesn't make it as art. So, I think--I just wish that everybody could kind of intermingle and not worry about those things. But that's not going to happen soon I'm afraid for lots of reasons.

LR: So, do you have any ideas of how to encourage these young people into quilting?

DN: I think just a one-on-one effort is really important and as I said if I happen to meet someone by chance to get to know them, I really like to try to make friends and encourage them and buy their work if I can. Our New Image group which is a local art quilt group and we've had a lot of exhibits, and it's a small group twelve or thirteen people we were all so excited because we had a new member who unfortunately has moved out of the area who was thirty years old. We're all in our fifties and sixties and we, she just became our sort of pet project to encourage Lisa and get her to keep going in quilting and I know she felt very encouraged by being part of the group. I have met other people in other situations where I've had a way to connect with them and encourage them. I think that's probably the best way, but I know it's just different because so many people will have to work at other things. Our generation is fortunate that we were more financially stable at an earlier age and had a lot of support to do this, and people nowadays think that times are harder. So, I think people maybe aren't quite as free and also, they're closing down fiber departments in a lot of universities, so I was very happy that Michael James got that appointment in Nebraska to teach art quilting basically. I think that's a very good sign.

LR: What trends do you see in quilting, have you seen?

DN: Well--

LR: And does it go into the future?

DN: I hope not with some of them. [laughs.] I mean there certainly is a trend to use more surface design. I mean when I first started quilting, I was the only person I knew--except for these few people that I mentioned when you were asking about my inspirations--who were using dye and paint in making their own fabric, and now lots of people are. And, you know, that's fine, I mean some of it is done well, some of it isn't but it's great and the people are--I think it makes the pieces are more yours if you're not buying the same fabric that everybody else is going out and buying. I see a lot of copying of certain famous quilt artists which distresses me greatly. I just, it really bothers me, and I know it has a lot to do with the fact that some of these people teach a lot and maybe don't teach in a way that encourages people to break away from that, it's kind of a hero worship sort of thing. I think there certainly has been a lot of growth in the field, but I think it has a long way to go if you're going to break out of the mold. I was just down at Arrowmont taking a--

LR: At where?

DN: At Arrowmont School in Tennessee taking a class in screen printing and there was a young woman who was a resident artist there who did really interesting work and it had just, it was really mixed media work but it was fabric and she painted and drew and stitched and gessoed and did all this stuff and some of her work was a quilt in construction and she said that she never could get her work into quilt shows. So, she does find them in the art world, but the quilt judges just look at this and don't know what to make of it. It's extraordinary work and if they look closely at the stitching, you know it would be the envy of most any quilter. It's just wonderful things, machine stitching and--So I think there is a kind of a closed attitude on the part of a lot of people who are in power in this field and keep the status quo.

BH: I just want to ask you about this, in my limited experience with the world of quilts, is that it's extraordinarily diverse, that there are traditional quilters, transitional quilters, common quilters, narrative quilters, specialists in different styles, where would you situate yourself and why?

DN: Well, I don't know. I don't know exactly what to call what I do. It's certainly not narrative. It's almost always abstract. I don't know. I don't know if you have a name for--

BH: You actually used the word earlier, painterly.

DN: Yes, as I said I used that with some trepidation, but I guess, you know, it would fit that category more than any of the others that you mentioned.

LR: Well, I think we're coming to the end of our time, but is there anything else that you would like to add or, before we finish?

DN: Well, I think one thing that I've noticed over the years, and a lot of it comes from talking with other artists in other media is that I think that we're very fortunate in quilting to have the kind of community that we do. And the groups of course are good and the fact that we sort of get together to put on our own shows for a while when nobody else was doing it and the kind of support and sharing that goes on is really quite amazing. I talk about the things that I do with various groups and painters and photographers and other people will say, 'Oh, well the people I know in my field would never tell me this or that. Everybody keeps big secrets. They don't share their sources.' And I think that's, something that certainly stems from the quilting tradition, but it doesn't matter now whether you're traditional or what. It's just there and I really do appreciate that a lot. In fact, I do some volunteer work now that I have a little more time with some of the larger quilt organizations because I feel that that kind of support really should be encouraged.

LR: Thank you, Dominie, for sharing your story with us today.

DN: Thank you.

LR: For the Quilters' Save Our Stories project, the Q.S.O.S. as we call it. And our interview was concluded at 10:44 a.m. and it is still August 6, 2001. Thank you.