Category Archives: creativity

Weaving again!

This has been a pretty tough couple of years for me in terms getting myself to weave, which is, paradoxically, the activity most central to my identity as an artist. Weaving is the calming, centering, intellectual and creative activity that allows me to make things that I feel are profoundly expressive. All other creative activities — design, sewing, crafting little things — are fun, make money, but are peripheral to the core.

A bit like writer’s block, I hit a bad snag in my creative flow a couple of years ago and just stopped working. I questioned the value of making art at all. It seemed to be piling up here, the economy was making it nearly impossible to sell it, I had to turn to more intensive textile design work to get by. And once I broke the continuum, it has been terribly difficult to raise up the faith to get back to work. But I have begun. I finished my studio sale, and the local Christmas fair the week before, sold a lot of pretty little things I had made, (even sold a real tapestry!), and then I sat down, sighed in relief, and decided it is time to lay off the little stuff and make more important things. I began a new piece based on a photo I took earlier in the fall while driving through southern Illinois. I made myself a sign to keep me on task. And I finished hemming the tapestry this afternoon.

Illinois Field, 2013, 24″ x 27″, wool with cotton & metallic Laura Foster Nicholson

meditating, or not

Well, I am still not weaving — nor am I writing very much, despite best intentions and earnest promises to myself. But as I fuss and bother and stay far away from the studio, meditation is creeping back into my life, and that, as we all know, is the path to mindfulness.

I have never been one to sit and chant a mantra, though I have sat and followed my breathing (thanks very much to yoga training) and I know full well the value of this: the clearing out of the pipes, the increased ability to concentrate, the intensification of focus and clarity which will result.

I have always, since I first understood what meditation meant and how it worked in our lives, thought that my weaving was my meditation. At Cranbrook, where I studied in the 80’s, Hamada’s writings about the centering power of craft were much in discussion and a formative and empowering defense of hand weaving in the face of conceptualism.

But I had a significant conversation with a dear friend, who lives and breathes a meditative life, earlier in the week. I told her how much I felt unbalanced because I was disconnected from my artmaking, in particular the meditative weaving process. I asked her if weaving was, as I had frequently claimed, a true form of meditation, and to my chagrin, she replied that it certainly has great meditative qualities, but the attention required from time to time for the motion of the hands or the decisions one makes along the way remove it from the total detachment that is the goal. Aaaaahhh.

No, I have not yet dug out my zafu and begun pure meditation in earnest. But as I was weeding my gravel garden this morning (how Zen!), my mind roamed elegantly around and formed such beautiful, clear associations about art, life, gardening, spring. What to do? Interrupt it, run in and write it all down? Or keep going and savor the experience, knowing that it will slip from my memory by day’s end (now)? I chose the latter, valuing the experience over the recording of it. Kathleen assures me that when I start meditation in earnest I can, in effect, have both: the beautiful experience and the reclaimed memory to write about it later if I choose.

The Half-Life of Words

The internet sometimes spooks me. Your words can literally come back to haunt you! I subscribe to Google Alerts to find out what people say about me (call me vain or paranoid, it is useful!), and today and alert about an article mentioning me came up, so I went to it and found the abstract ot a talk I gave to the Textile Society of America in New York in 1998, when, if I remember rightly, I was asked to speak about making textile things. I should note that I was practically schooled to understand that weaving was plenty old fashioned (or call me paranoid!). Here is the abstract. As for the talk, it was probably ad-libbed, used slides, and if I stored it on the computer at all that was a few crashes ago.

Making It the “Old-Fashioned Way”

“It is tempting to consider the process I am about to describe as the result of a point of view which is subjective and maybe even romantic. Although the adjective “old fashioned” as used in the title carries a certain amount of ironic wit, in fact my method of weaving is ancient and timeless. I chose it because it is the only way I can adequately convey the majority of my ideas about the textile world. I also work this way because I love the process itself I have tailored my ideas, and risked hobbling them, in order to continue to indulge in a way of working that suits me eminently.
I weave objects which I call tapestries, although technically they are compound twill fabrics with images composed of discontinuous inlaid wefts. The structure is a three harness twill; the ground is warp-faced and the inlaid areas are weft-faced. I selected the structure after studying the three-harness twill tapestry of Kashmiri shawls. The structure confers the ability to express acutely refined detail while yielding the drape necessary for a shawl’s function. I adapted the weave to an inlay structure in order to economize on the time spent in weaving. In fact, I weave quite rapidly as a result, often more than 12″ a day. I am also able to exploit both warp and weft as design elements. The sett of my warp is relatively fine, 30 epi, which gives the work good detail and yet is a large enough scale to be able to see easily the interaction of colors between individual threads.”

And here is a detail of something I was weaving around that time.

detail, “Pear Tree”, 1996 hand woven textile

contemplating weaving again

It has been a really long time since I have done any weaving — I cut the last tapestry off in September last year, shipped them all out to Patina Gallery, and heaved a sigh of relief at the close of a cycle of work.

Most times when I do cycles of work, they are focused on something external: a historic garden, perhaps, or the contents of my kitchen. When the sequence makes sense,when the story has been told, it is over. The last body of work was different in that it recorded an internal state of personal transformation. What marks the end? It was not a deliberated logical sequence, so much as an intuitive one. When I finished Beatrice, my muse, the work was complete.

So the remnants of specific warps — with enough left to weave more! — have hung limply from my looms’ reeds, chiding me that it is wasteful not to weave them off, while I have busied myself with projects of an entirely different nature: reading about climate change, working toward bringing local food to our tiny rural town, learning to screen print and using that to make direct statements about these issues in terms of household items. All the while wondering, Will I ever weave again?

Bee Nice hand printed Linen towels, 2012

Weaving to me is a centering process essential to my well being. I don’t make useful things, witty things, toys on my looms (all of which I love to make in other craft media): I reserve it for my alpha state work, when my hands and heart and head are connected in a way that still the chatter of thought and manifests deeper realities. I now that sounds hyperbolic, but that is how I define the art-making state, and it deserves the highest respect in my own chain of work: the weaving studio is uncluttered with any of the other things that crowd my work day: no sewing, no paperwork, no computer, nothing but yarn, space, and my looms. When I set foot in there it is like entering the yoga studio: no shoes, mind stilling.

I haven’t been there much lately so the mind is clamoring.

I have been distilling thoughts, though, about how the art end of my work can begin to confront the same ideas I have been so absorbed with in the rest of my activities. I have the idea, but not the visual yet. Often a body of work begins when I see something out there which might as well have a halo around it: I see it and it marks me and demands I do something with it. The last cycle was without the exterior stimulus, but most other things are clearly about a place. Genius loci, is that the phrase?

“Cold Frames & Fruit Trees” from the English Garden Series, 1989

Now I have been thinking about gardening as not just a metaphor for life, but as central to a new sustainability, and I am re-discovering old thought (such as my English Kitchen Garden series) and combining them with exciting new ideas being tested in the world, such as the zero-waste urban farm I saw in Chicago a few weeks ago. I have the ideas spilling out, but have found no centering visual focus yet. Nearly there! Watch this space.

all images copyright Laura Foster Nicholson

the relevance of the Victorian Kitchen Garden

Over the last six months I have been doing a lot of reading on fairly hair-raising topics concerning the end of oil and climate change. I take these things seriously though I admit to a kind of hyper-excitement about the direness of all of the predictions. I have spent the last several months pondering how my art could make any difference at all in these critical times. How will we survive at all? I wonder. What good can art even serve? Will making more stuff even begin to address the stuff problem that has gotten us here?

The home making part of me has fared better: ah! resourcefulness! self-sufficiency! local food! frugality! victory gardens! I am inspired by the issues to hand.

And life is so lovely: there is always some serendipity that reminds me of what Jung referred to as the collective unconscious, what others think of as karma or our simple interconnectedness. So it happened that a couple of weeks ago my partner in ribbon, Edith Minne of Renaissance Ribbons, mentioned to me that she had been watching an old BBC TV series about the Victorian Kitchen Garden, did I know it? I wrote back that I had used a book, based on an 80’s TV show, The Victorian Kitchen Garden, by Jennifer Davies, as the extensive resource for my series, the English Kitchen Garden, which I wove in the late 80’s. Yes, that was the series.

The English Walled Garden, 1989, hand woven tapestry

She sent me the link, and I have been able to patch it together on youTube. What a wonder it has been for me!

It is such a slow and gentle kind of program, dated even by the time of its making, let alone its subject. A leisurely conversation between two gardeners, lingering shots of beautiful and unusual produce. But the reality here: the goal of the kitchen garden was, of course, to provide food for the house. If it was a big house, it needed a big garden. Little question of anyone of relying upon imported food: one ate what was grown at home. If one were very rich, and had at hand 14 gardeners, glass houses, and acres of land to till, one could have pineapples brought to table, melons, bananas even. So what? a trip to the supermarket will get us all that — brought in from Costa Rica or Mexico, whenever we want (at the cost of oil and our climate) — but this was all grown in chilly, grey, rainy old England. The hunger to impress, to have a variety of stimulating and exotic foods was theirs, as it is ours, but the ingenuity required to perform all of this magic without today’s comforts of ready electricity and plumbing is simply breathtaking.

The Vinery, 1989, hand woven tapestry

This takes me back to my work, then & now, as it were. In 1988 or so, I witnessed what remained of an English walled vegetable garden at Holkham Park, in Norfolk, England, in the dead of winter. It was glorious: patterns of trained fruit trees etched on pink brick walls in the low and golden December sunlight; bluish glassed houses and cold frames with sheltered vines and fruit trees, rectalinear patterns of quiescent gardens awaiting spring. I took photos and flew home inspired. I took up the Victorian Kitchen Garden book for reference.

Cold Frames & Fruit Trees, 1989, hand woven tapestry

I look back at that work now, after watching these sweet programs, and wonder at the relevance. Here it is. I have been reading — and ranting — about year round gardening (per Elliot Coleman’s Four Season Farm, for example). I have been chivvying up our reluctant gardeners here in the mildest southern Indiana climate to try growing vegetables all winter. I have been working hard to convince people that our farmer’s market is worth building and worth shopping at. So I look back at my old tapestries and think,”yes, there is an answer, and I have known it for many years”.


The Root Cellar, 1989, hand woven tapestry

more about writing!

In early January I wrote about my resolution to write more, and draw more, this year, and here it is nearly April, and no posts since! Shame on me. It has been a massive case of writer’s and artist’s block, I am afraid.

Do you ever have those times when your head is aflame with ideas, but you can’t seem to get them on paper before they are gone? The last 3 months have been that for me. So many exciting things going on here! I have been working toward making our local Farmer’s Market more stable and bigger. I have been making “green” household textile items, which I am still not ready to publish but which have given me great pleasure to make. From time to time I pluck up the courage to learn a bit more about Adobe Illustrator — I make all of my designs in Photoshop right now and am sorely feeling the need to be able to do vector-based designs. But all of this learning and experimentation is too raw to show and hence I stammer about even talking about it. I will post one thing now, since I am so happy about our Farmer’s Market development (I don’t mean to take total credit for it as it has been toddling along for years, it just needs to grow).

If you like this towel you can get one for yourself here
(You will need to order it on 54″ wide fabric)

quiet time

There was an editorial in Sunday’s New York Times which is high on the most-emailed list, posted frequently to Facebook as well, on The Joy of Quiet. It clearly resonates with a lot of people: in essence the article discusses the various values of going offline, not taking calls, etc.

In a sense I have been doing that, staying quiet and unconnected, in that I have not been posting on either of my blogs for months. I mounted a (personally) important exhibition of my work this year to show in two venues, in the spring and in the fall. The works I made to send were redolent with meaning, dripping with lush color, totally satisfactory to myself, and to those who cared to comment to me, as a strong new body of work. I got a great writeup in Santa Fe’s Pasatiempo (hard to get, they say!), 2 pages, 2 big color photos of tapestries. Seems like I did everything right, and I sat back for a little while to rest on my laurels.

But here is the hard truth, friends: I sold exactly one piece, a small one, out of the two shows combined. For those of you who have long since opted out of commercial galleries, proudly disdaining commercializing your art, bully for you. I have been proud, delighted, and extraordinarily fortunate to have made a living for close to 30 years by the sale of my tapestries. I am also proud of my work, itself, as a real expression of my thoughts and vision, as something that people clearly love and respond to. So what happened?

Well, the economy, I guess. I have survived a number of recessions over the years totally intact, hardly missing a beat. But life is different now. It is shocking and jarring to realize, at the age of 57, that in a sense I have been laid off. My artwork is an elite and — seemingly unnecessary — luxury few can afford. More on that later.

Join the club, you might say. Of course. A lot of folks who had previously fortunate lives got their pink slips in the last few years! And so — like many others — I have been spending a few months trying to reinvent my way of working.

I feel fortunate to be a creative person, to be an artist. I actually don’t feel unemployed (my mother, when speaking about the difficulties her family endured during the Great Depression, proudly maintained “my father worked every day. He just didn’t get paid for it”). I have been as busy as ever, as optimistic as ever (something about the bottom falling out tends to rally some of us: gets the adrenaline flowing and brings out the survival mode.) I believe that creative people are in the best position to dig themselves out of problems — as long as we can believe in the value of our ideas.

I used to wonder what in the world I might be able to do if I couldn’t make art, and would conclude, nothing. One of my more recent schticks about “the business of being an artist” classes is that I sure wish, back in art school, they had told us what else our extraordinarily creative minds might be good for, in case we needed to make a living! So now, I am looking at what I know, what skills I have, what beliefs I want to share (the role of the artist), to find where I fit now. I plan to re-invent my art making, though I did think about becoming a nurse.

Art has always been essential to culture. To cut it out of budgets as a superfluous, unnecessary expense is a grave mistake. Art-making, and living with art, makes us more human, more articulate in non-verbal modes, more sensitive to the world. So it shouldn’t be so hard to make my work essential. That is – essentially — what I have been musing about for the last 3 months.

I have made 3 new year’s resolutions, and they are all absolutely vital, and absolutely terrifying for me to undertake. They are

READ
WRITE
DRAW

Frightening because now I must take responsibility for my thoughts — again.

I would really welcome your comments!

more as it happens,

Laura