Last month I attended a workshop given by Louise Martin in Pacifica, CA through Tapestry Weavers West. This workshop was all about questioning our assumptions about what tapestry weaving is. There were various exercises to help us push against the things we believed shouldn’t be done in tapestry.

Assumptions can be hard to challenge because we most often don’t know we have them!

One of the things I enjoyed most about the workshop was eavesdropping on conversations of other students with each other and with Louise.* I find the human ability to stick hard to our convictions interesting. Sometimes it makes us strong people in a world where we need to believe in ourselves. Sometimes it makes us blind to other options. And how do you know which is which?

I love weaving gradations in tapestry. There is nothing more thrilling than making colors move from one color to another. Sometimes it is the value of a color that changes (light to dark for example) and sometimes it is a change in hue (green to blue for example). And sometimes it is both a value and a hue change.

Tapestry is well-suited to this sort of color change. I’ve used it a lot in my own work and I teach it in a couple classes online (see the notes at the end of this post if you want to learn).

I’ll show you a few of my older tapestries and then one of the newer ones. In reviewing my work, it is a rare tapestry that doesn’t include some form of gradation.

I have lived a lot of my life near the four corners in the USA.* I grew up in Gallup, New Mexico and three years ago I felt like I moved home again when I landed in southwestern Colorado, just a couple hours north of Gallup. The landscapes in this part of the world are horizon and mountains and sand and rock. And these things influence the way I make art. How could they not since they have so heavily influenced who I am?