The Art is the Cloth: How to Look at and Understand Tapestries

The Art is the Cloth: How to Look at and Understand Tapestries

This is the year of new tapestry books! Today’s example is Micala Sidore’s new book, The Art is the Cloth: How to Look at and Understand Tapestries from Schiffer Publishing.

This book is not quite what I expected it to be. I thought it would be a book with a fair amount of text that gave us some guidelines for how to understand what we’re seeing when we look at tapestries. I think I can be forgiven for that considering the book’s subtitle. Instead, it is a book with hundreds of images of tapestries and almost no text. It turns out this is a fantastic advantage for my education. You see, I’m really good at words. I like to string them together, often use way too many of them, and though I love pictures, if I can read about something, I’ll use my brain to mull the words instead of studying photos.

This book is ALL about the photos.

Renditions: a fascinating show of small format tapestries all visible online

Renditions: a fascinating show of small format tapestries all visible online

I love viewing tapestries in person. I can get a close look at how they were constructed and if I’m lucky enough to be at an opening where the artist is present, I can ask them to show me the back along with peppering them with questions about their work. The small format unjuried tapestry show that the American Tapestry Alliance (ATA) holds every two years is one of my favorite shows because it is full of surprises. There are usually hundreds of tapestries and if I can see them in person, I can have a grand time seeing other people’s ideas and techniques not to mention imagery and color use.

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Weaving in the wilderness (nearby)

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Weaving in the wilderness (nearby)

With the possibility of travel largely gone for the foreseeable future, exploring the places where we live seems like something to settle into. I’ve become more interested in details. In watching and understanding what is happening in my back yard. And in spending the time to watch what happens overnight on the trails I have loved for decades. I’ll keep weaving and spinning while outside and that will prompt me to weave more while I’m in my own studio.

Anatomy of a Tapestry: Techniques, Materials, Care

Anatomy of a Tapestry: Techniques, Materials, Care

Jean Pierre Larochette and Yadin Larochette along with Yael Lurie (illustrations) have produced a wonderful new book about tapestry. I read the whole thing this weekend and I highly recommend it. In fact, if you are a practicing tapestry weaver interested in French tapestry techniques, this book is an important one and absolutely should have a place on your shelf.

It contains information from a fairly wide swath of tapestry practice. Jean Pierre Larochette is an Aubusson-trained tapestry weaver with 60 or more years of experience who brings his practice to light quite poetically in this beautiful book. His daughter, Yadin Larochette, is not only a skilled tapestry weaver herself, having learned in her family’s workshop, but is also a textile conservator and provides a wealth of information in the last half of the book to help tapestry weavers create long-lasting textiles.

Getting unstuck when designing for tapestry

Getting unstuck when designing for tapestry

Last week Kathy^ asked a question in the Design Solutions class that has gotten me thinking more about the evolution of a tapestry design. After a week of thinking about it, I was still unable to answer Kathy’s question and I believe that is because the answer is different for every artist. She wanted to know where people get stuck in the design process and how do they manage to get unstuck.

Silvia Heyden is a wonderful example of someone who created her own system of weaving and managed to stay unstuck and prolific throughout her career.* Silvia took her inspiration largely from nature and her tapestry weaving style was informed by the structure of tapestry. Her work is abstract, colorful, and exciting.

Seeing the little things. One day at a time.

Seeing the little things. One day at a time.

June has come and mostly gone and the shifting sands of the global “new normal” continues to make time feel like it has tilted off its axis. Sometimes it flows fast, sometimes moments seem to last forever.

Seeing. Being there for the experience. That is my goal this summer. There are long stretches where I have let the running of a business and my propensity for a jumbled, rambling mind to propel me through my days at breakneck speed, scarcely experiencing the moments passing me by. I have taken the opportunity this month to take a breath and it feels great. My focus for the summer is to see what is right in front of me.

I have three avenues in this goal of taking the time to see. You won’t be surprised to hear that the first two are weaving and hiking. The third is drawing.

I had planned to hike the Colorado Trail again this year. I was going to weave as I went—my favorite sort of documentation of my surroundings in my little tapestry diary. The pandemic has squelched that plan. But it has given me the gift of exploration. Instead of walking a trail that will force me into small towns and into contact with many different people over our fragile mountain towns already overrun with tourists, I'll stay closer to home and hike all the trails I can get to easily from my house. The 500 mile plan has become a series of 20-50 mile ideas and that opens up the opportunity for growth. Because I know the Colorado Trail so well I can watch thru-hiker’s videos and tell you where the images were taken. Visiting new places as a solo backpacker is scarier but it also opens me to new experiences and vistas and that seems like something that could remind me to take the time to really see what is around me.

Walking. Weaving. Drawing.

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My sometimes annoying process of iteration. Some call it sampling.

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My sometimes annoying process of iteration. Some call it sampling.

I worked on several different making projects this week. I was struck by how much I approached two completely different sorts of projects in the same way. The first was the dye project I talked about last week. The red-orange yarn turned out quite well. I did 22 samples over four days of a color that I had dyed before. In the end, the dye formula I used was the first one—my old tried and true with only two dyes and a toner.*

The final answer was NOT one of those last skeins as I’d hoped in last week’s post, but it was a simple matter of changing the depth of shade slightly before I had it. Matching a color in yarn, including the feeling and depth of that color, isn’t a one-shot deal. Maybe if this had been the yarn I usually dye it could have been, but it was not my yarn. I started by dyeing 8 colors in jars from several different formulas. Some were sort of close, some were not remotely close. In one I inverted the proportion of colors when writing out the formula and ended up with hot pink.