textiles | Tien Chiu's Blog

October 6, 2018 by Tien Chiu 7 Comments

More than my weight in weasels

101 days ago, I was a couch potato. Today?

That’s me squatting 780 weasels (195 pounds) – more than my body weight!

And here’s me at 99 days, deadlifting 700 weasels (175 pounds):

That kind of improvement exceeds my wildest expectations – in fact, it sounds like something you hear about in an ad on late-night TV. You know, “I was a 48-year old couch potato…but after 101 days of Weasel-Power! Boot Camp, I was squatting over 780 weasels!” That would totally have me going out and buying their Weasel-Power video series and their “Weasel-Flex” exercise widget! (For the more gently minded, of course, there would also be “Weasel Yoga – Make yourself supple as a weasel!”. Or – for you digital folks – the electronic game with social media leaderboards, “Wea-Fit”.)

But the amazing part (to me) is that I’ve made this massive improvement without a single injury. I’ve had plenty of muscle soreness, and I’ve tweaked my wrist, shoulder, etc. a few times, but no major injuries and no soreness lasting more than a few days. This kind of improvement isn’t my expertise and certainly isn’t luck: it’s having an excellent trainer. Touissant has done a fantastic job of encouraging me to push as hard as I can without going beyond my physical limits (general or from minor injuries), and helping me improve my form so I can lift more efficiently while staying safer.

Just as importantly, working with Touissant has gradually enabled me to trust that I’m not going to hurt myself lifting, which has enabled me to put everything I’ve got into the workout, rather than worrying about whether I’m going to hurt myself this time. I have a long history of overdoing it exercising and then losing months to injuries – now that I can trust him to watch out for me, I don’t have to unconsciously limit myself and can put everything I’ve got into the task at hand.

Another thing that’s made rapid progress possible is that Mike and I are working out together. We get fewer exercises done total, but it’s more fun to be able to work out with a friend and partner, so I’m more comfortable working out and more motivated to show up.

All of which has made me realize how important having a mentor and a peer group is to learning/doing anything new. People have asked me how I learn each new medium with lightning speed. I’ve always said, “Because I focus obsessively on things and I read a lot,” but I’ve also realized it’s because I reflexively seek out mentors and social groups that can answer my questions, encourage me, and keep me from getting frustrated when I tackle my super-over-ambitious projects.

I think this is true for others as well. So the online course I’m developing will offer both direct mentoring (from me, of course) plus a forum where students can interact, encourage each other, discuss the exercises and their current work, etc. Because, especially for people who are nervous about a new topic, having someone to guide, encourage, and support you makes learning much easier (sometimes it’s what makes learning possible at all!), and having a peer group to work with helps you put that learning into practice once class is over.

Speaking of the class…I’ve been pretty quiet about my teaching business for the last few months, mostly because I’ve been hard at work on it! But I’m getting closer to releasing my class. Close enough that I’m comfortable divulging a few details.

The class is going to cover the essentials of color in handweaving. The first part will cover basic color theory: the fundamental properties of color (hue, value, and saturation), how colors interact when interlaced in cloth, and a brief discussion of color mixing.

The second part talks about design: How to set the mood of a handwoven project by controlling drama, energy, and ambiance with color.

And the third part walks you through the design process: Choosing and using a warp color, weft color, and draft to achieve the mood you want.

The class will be offered in two formats. One will be a 1-2 hour streaming video plus handouts. That will (cross fingers) be released in November.

The other class option will be a full online course, with a discussion forum, exercises, feedback from the instructor (me!), etc. I’m planning to open registration in mid to late November, with the first session starting in January.

Here are two slides from the section on the design process:

Designing with Color - design process slide #2 — Designing with Color – design process slide #2

Designing with Color - design process slide #3 — Designing with Color – design process slide #3

I hope that, once my course is released, my students will be making weaselly fast progress with color!

By Keven Law (originally posted to Flickr as On the lookout...) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons — By Keven Law, via Wikimedia Commons

July 16, 2018 by Tien Chiu

Wow, was THAT a party!!

I left for Convergence on Thursday, July 5, and returned the following Thursday, totally exhausted of seven days of nonstop partying with 1,500 fellow weavers.

I started with the Sheep to Shawl on Saturday, as part of the Black Sheep Handweavers Guild (one of my two weaving guilds). Five spinners, a carder, and me (the weaver) – plus an educator to talk to passersby so the team didn’t get distracted. We had a lot of fun, and finished our shawl well within the 4-hour time limit:

sheep to shawl contest - Black Sheep Handweavers Guild — sheep to shawl contest – Black Sheep Handweavers Guild

For the unfamiliar, sheep to shawl contests originated when a medieval English lord bet one of his friends that the workers on his estate could shear a sheep at dawn, then wash the fleece, card, spin, dye, weave, and sew it into a jacket for him to wear to dinner. The workers succeeded (which still flabbergasts me!). But remember, these were trained professionals, kids – do not try this at home!

Ah, who am I kidding?? Bring on the sheep to shawl contests!

Modern day sheep to shawl contests aren’t nearly as strenuous. Typically each team starts with a washed fleece, then cards, spins, and plies it into yarn. The team gets to warp the loom before the contest, either with handspun or commercial yarn – so all that needs to be done during the contest is weave the shawl and finish the ends. There are variations on the rules, but the basic idea is to get from a fleece to a shawl within a time limit.

I had some funny conversations about the contest, like this one:

“I thought they were going to start with a sheep!”

“Nah, the conference venue wouldn’t let them have sheep.”

“Couldn’t we have told them they were comfort sheep?”

The day after the Sheep to Shawl, I taught my 90 minute seminar about critique. I’m pretty sure most of the students were expecting me to say something totally different – mostly because we have such terrible misconceptions about critique. The three-bullet summary of my 90-minute seminar:

Critique is about evaluating your work in order to make it stronger.
You get WAY more improvement out of taking good ideas and making them spectacular than you do from fixing flaws.
So in critique, you want to focus on finding the things you like, the things that are working, so you can figure out how to make them amazing. NEVER focus on finding flaws.

There was a lot more to the seminar, of course – I’m thinking of recording it and putting it on YouTube, actually, because I got a LOT of positive feedback on it afterwards. In my copious free time, of course.

(As soon as I find out where I stashed all that free time…let’s see…could I have left it in the studio? Hey, what’s this black hole doing here…?)

Monday I took two classes from Mickey Stam – one about “Weaving Your Passion” and the other about “Opening Your Weaving to New Possibilities”. She had a really interesting approach to brainstorming new areas for exploration and some very practical advice on how to move forward with making, exhibiting, and selling textile art.

And Tuesday night started Barbara Setsu Pickett’s class on velvet weaving! I had been looking forward to this class for months – after Wendy Landry’s lectures at Complex Weavers Seminars 2016, I really wanted to try velvet weaving.

Velvet weaving is not for the timid. You weave velvet with two warps: the ground cloth warp, which weaves the backing, and the pile warp, which produces all those lovely fluffy cut ends.

Here’s how it works:

Weave a header of ground cloth. Then lift whatever pile warps you want to show, and insert a grooved rod. Weave a few more picks of ground cloth (to hold the pile), then insert another rod. After placing three rods, run a razor-sharp blade through the groove in the rearmost rod to cut the pile, remove the rod, and insert it in the next pile-warp shed. The five or six picks of ground-cloth/binder weft will (at least in theory) be tight enough to hold the pile warp in place.

It looks like this:

And here’s a short video of me cutting the pile (with a scalpel taped to a depth where it will cut the pile but – in theory – not your cloth):

Swiping razor blades down a thin groove right next to cloth! Relying on just eight picks of weft to hold your entire pile warp in place! What could go wrong??

But wait! There’s more!

If you want to weave figured velvet – and let’s face it, haven’t we all desperately wanted to weave figured velvet at least once in our lives? – every single one of those pile warp ends needs to be tensioned separately. That’s because figured velvet requires having pile in some places but not others, like this sample Barbara showed us:

Looping a strand of pile warp over a rod takes a lot more thread than just weaving it into the ground cloth. So if you are weaving pile in some areas but not others, your pile warp threads will take up at vastly different rates. So the only way to get even tension is to tension every pile thread all by itself.

At the Lisio Foundation, and other velvet weaving studios, they have huge racks that sit behind the looms. Each rack is full of individually weighted spools. Each spool contains (more or less) one pile warp. Multiply by a couple hundred pile warps, and what do you get?

…a ton of spaghetti (and an entire week of rethreading) if you accidentally cut the cloth, or if you haven’t beaten tightly enough to hold in the pile warp ends when you start cutting the pile.

Whee! Velvet is easy!! No problem!! What could go wrong??

Since we didn’t have giant racks, and some of us (including Barbara) flew in, we used an ingenious device (called a cantra) that Barbara designed for her classes. Here’s what my setup looked like:

In the top of the cantra is a piece of egg crate (you can get it in your local hardware store; it’s used as a diffuser for fluorescent lighting). The pile thread warps go up from their weighted bobbins through the egg crate dividers, up and over, through a little cross at the top, and then down to a stick held over the back beam. And from there to the rest of the loom.

The cantra is about three feet tall – which means you can weave three feet of pile warp before having to stop and unwind all the bobbins. And there are a LOT of bobbins. I wove a finer velvet than the rest of my classmates, so I had 15 pile warps per inch. So all the bobbins you see dangling there were required for weaving a two-inch-wide strip of velvet! For a wider warp that would mean unwinding bobbins for approximately all eternity, every time you need to advance. Better make that cantra tall.

You may have noticed that there appears to be quite a bit of stuff in that photo. I actually had a LOT more stuff than that, since I had to come prepared for the Sheep to Shawl and my own lecture, too. Plus, in a burst of generosity, I volunteered to bring an entire suitcase worth of rayon machine embroidery thread for my classmates to use, since I was driving anyway.

This led to a new linguistic discovery when I arrived. I now know that the sweetest words a bellhop can say, in any language, are “Don’t worry, we’ll deliver everything to your room. Have a nice stay.”

(I was AMAZED that he fit all that stuff on the cart. I later discovered that they take classes on how to load these!)

The bellhop who delivered the loom to my room, however, was apparently traumatized by the experience. He kept saying, “I’ve never had to move anything this big and this delicate before!” I didn’t have the heart to tell him what the rest of his week was going to be like. 🙂 (Though I did tip him $5 to help him get over the trauma.)

And here’s my finished strip of velvet – three days’ work!

I played with short pile, tall pile, cut pile, uncut pile, and all possible combinations of the above. It was a TON of fun, and I want to work more with this on the jacquard loom. I’m already plotting ways to set up a rack of spools behind the loom. Stay tuned!

Sadly, it looks like more travel is not in my immediate future. A good friend is going to Rwanda next week, and I was going to help him with his excess baggage allowance by stowing away in his luggage. Alas, this is not going to happen: The cats have grounded me.

“You have One Job! One Job! And that is staying right here and catering to our whims, not running off to Reno and spending a week partying with your no-good human friends!”

“But you had another perfectly good cat-slave to cater to your whims! And I made sure he understood that he was supposed to give Fritz belly rubs, play with you, and do whatever you told him to do while I was gone!”

“That’s not the point. You had One Job, and you weren’t doing it.”

“Aw, but Tigress…”

“No buts! You’re grounded until further notice. Now go clean your room.”

My cats never let me have any fun…

Fritz and Tigress, Rulers of the Universe

June 11, 2018 by Tien Chiu

Pictures of 1000 dye samples are now online!

A quick note to let y’all know: I’ve posted 1000 of my 1500 dye samples on my website, along with an extensive write-up about my dye process. The other 500 samples are still being photographed, but they should be up later this week.

Here’s the link to the master page:

Dye Sample Project

Please spread the word! It was a LOT of work photographing everything, color-correcting the images, and writing/posting the documentation for the samples. I did it because I thought others might find them useful – so please let others know they’re there!

May 22, 2018 by Tien Chiu

Breakthrough

The last two years have been a bit of a puzzle for me. I’ve done virtually no weaving – which is pretty darn odd, considering I quit my job so I could focus on developing my career as a textile artist. At first I thought it was because I was busy doing other things – mostly, working on my business and fulfilling my duties as Board President at the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles. Both of those took (and are still taking) a ton of time and emotional energy. But two years? I was starting to wonder if I’d made a mistake buying a jacquard loom, because I seemed to have very little interest in weaving. But I couldn’t seem to come up with anything that triggered my enthusiasm.

Then two things happened. The first was getting a close look at Itchiku Kubota’s kimono, which are both beautiful and masterful. Conceiving and executing these kimono requires not only vision, but impressive technical skills and deep understanding of the design possibilities of each technique. Years of technical mastery are needed to make them.

This is very different from how most textile artists currently work. Current textile art emphasizes message; it’s about what you’re saying with your art, not about the skill and precision with which the art is made. In fact, too-good construction can even make your work suspect, because good craftsmanship is associated with craft, not art. (Insert the usual arguments about craft vs. art here.)

As a result, most of the textile art I’ve seen recently, while powerful, has been pretty simple, technically speaking. Most of it could be composed by someone with just a few years of experience, and made within a matter of weeks or months. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that style; it’s a perfectly valid approach to art, and it results in some remarkable pieces. It works for a lot of artists.

But it doesn’t work for me. My natural preference is for work that is intricate; that combines multiple media; that requires technical mastery; and that takes many months or years to complete. But I’ve seen relatively little modern work that fits that description. (Except for the American Tapestry Alliance shows, which I love!)

So when I asked a lot of established artists how to study and develop a career as a textile artist, much of their advice on who and what to study came from a body and philosophy of art totally different from what I loved. And I didn’t see my style of work reflected in any of the textile art I’d seen. Technical virtuosity seemed stuck in a past that emphasized skill over creativity; modern art emphasized creativity and downplayed skill. Who was doing the kind of complex, technical art that I wanted to do? Where was my tribe?

Alice Walker, in her essay “Saving the Life that is Your Own: The Importance of Models in the Artist’s Life,” says:

In that story I gathered up the historical and psychological threads of the life my ancestors lived, and in the writing of it I felt joy and strength and my own continuity. I had that wonderful feeling writers get sometimes, not very often, of being with a great many people, ancient spirits, all very happy to see me consulting and acknowledging them, and eager to let me know, through the joy of their presence, that, indeed, I am not alone.

Kubota made my kind of art. Seeing his kimono sent a shock of recognition through me. This is the kind of work I want to do…that intricacy, that breadth of vision, that fusion of multiple disciplines. Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! And – having finally found my tribe – I suddenly felt less alone, and a lot more hopeful.

Another thing that has really encouraged me was a discussion I had recently with a museum curator. We were talking about another jacquard artist’s work, and the person I was talking to said, “You know, I think she did herself a disservice when she decided to limit herself to what could be done on a jacquard loom, as opposed to using whatever technique would help her say what she wanted to say.”

I stopped for a moment, thunderstruck. Oh! Duh!

Because, of course, I had fallen into the same trap. It’s a natural mistake: when you buy a very expensive hammer, it’s hard not to feel that you need to pound a LOT of nails to justify your purchase. So, having bought a jacquard loom, I had naturally been envisioning myself as a jacquard weaver – weaving exquisite pieces that exploited the powerful capabilities of the loom. And focusing on weaving to the exclusion of other disciplines.

But I’ve never been terribly excited about handwoven cloth. (Yes, I know that’s a strange confession for a well-known weaver.) To me, cloth is mainly interesting as a raw material for other processes – dyeing and sewing, maybe origami. And flat cloth? It leaves me, well, flat. Since I had been envisioning jacquard-woven flat wall hangings, is it any surprise that I lost my enthusiasm for starting new work?

The last revelation I’ve had has to do with the question of art vs. artistic career. My style of art is quite different from most of what is currently being exhibited and sold. And because I want to put hundreds or thousands of hours into each piece, building a body of work will be really slow. As a result, taking my approach may seriously impact my career as an artist. I have been noodling unhappily over this for the last two years. Kubota’s kimono have knocked me clean off the fence I was sitting on, because if I can make work like those kimono – or even get close – I do not give a flying fuck about whether I ever have an artistic career.

Which, I think, finally qualifies me to call myself an artist. 🙂

There’s a wonderful passage in Richard Bach’s Illusions that describes how I feel. The protagonist (Richard) has been barnstorming around the Midwest, offering people short airplane rides for a small fee. In the process, he meets the Messiah, whose name is Donald Shimoda. Richard decides he wants to be a Messiah too, so he studies with Donald. In this section, Richard has just given his “Sermon on the Mount” teaching to Donald for the umpteenth time:

I looked at him. “Too wordy?”

“As always. Richard, you are going to lose ninety percent of your audience unless you learn to keep it short!”

“Well, what’s wrong with losing ninety percent of my audience?” I shot back at him. “What’s wrong with losing ALL my audience? I know what I know and I talk what I talk! And if that’s wrong then that’s just too bad. The airplane rides are three dollars, cash!”

“You know what?” Shimoda stood up, brushing the hay off his blue jeans.

“What?” I said petulantly.

“You just graduated. How does it feel to be a Master?”

“Frustrating as hell.”

He looked at me with an infinitesimal smile. “You get used to it,” he said.

Having thought through all that, I have some very exciting ideas for combining jacquard designs with dyeing. In particular, I want to cross-dye jacquard-woven cloth woven from cotton and polyester threads. Cotton and polyester are ideal for this purpose because dyes for cotton (fiber-reactive dyes) do not dye polyester, and dyes for polyester (disperse dyes) do not dye cotton. So you can weave a pattern in white on white, print on the fabric using fiber-reactive dyes, and then dye it in a different design using disperse dyes. The finished piece will show the cotton in the fiber-reactive pattern and the polyester in the disperse-dye pattern.

This is a bit hard to envision, so here is a sample I made a few years ago while playing with this idea. The warp is Tencel (or maybe cotton), the weft is alpaca, and it’s dyed with both acid and fiber-reactive dyes. The pale blue fiber-reactive dye is applied first (it dyes both cotton and protein fiber), then the thickened red-purple acid dye is stenciled on. The acid dye dyes the alpaca but not the silk, giving an interesting pebbled texture. (You can read more about the process in this blog post.)

This is pretty interesting in itself, but throw in a jacquard loom and some really interesting stuff becomes possible. For example: suppose you weave an image of a tree, where the tree is woven in polyester and the background in cotton or mostly-cotton. You can weave the trunk of the tree in a “bark” pattern that is mostly polyester with some textured cotton ridges going through it, and then paint different colors/designs on the polyester and the cotton parts of the bark. You could weave birds in cotton half-hidden against a canopy of polyester leaves. Then you could stencil a pattern of light and dark green on the polyester leaves without touching the birds, and come back and paint the cotton birds later.

Or you could go abstract and do shibori or tied-resist dyeing (twice!). Or you could try to do woven shibori! Depending on thickness, polyester thread may be strong enough to use as tie threads…and polyester has memory, so there is also the option of permanently-set crimp cloth. The possibilities are truly endless, and well worth exploring. This could be a LOT of fun!

May 4, 2018 by Tien Chiu

Pilgrimage

Most artists find their way into art gradually. Their interest develops over several years, often early in their lives.

I didn’t arrive at art quite so gradually. In fact, I regarded fiber arts as a not-terribly-important hobby until December 1995. Then a friend handed me a copy of Smithsonian Magazine, saying, “I saw this article and thought you’d find it interesting.” I opened it, and was floored by a photo of the most amazing art I’d ever seen. It was a kimono, Burning Sun, by Japanese artist Itchiku Kubota.

At that moment, I knew that what I wanted to do with my life, more than anything else, was to make something as beautiful, powerful, and technically masterful as that kimono. It had never occurred to me that fiber art could be art before – I’d been spinning yarn for sweaters and designing interesting quilt tops, which people thought were artistic. But in my mind, they weren’t art. Kubota’s kimono could stand against the most masterful painters and sculptors. They opened my mind to a whole new world of what could be done with textiles.

Alas, Kubota’s work normally resides in Japan, at the Itchiku Kubota Museum. A trip to Japan was on my bucket list, but it didn’t appear likely to happen anytime soon.

So when I found out the kimono were on exhibit at the Textile Museum of Canada, well…

Tien with Itchiku Kubota's Burning Sun, at the Textile Museum of Canada — Tien with Itchiku Kubota’s Burning Sun, at the Textile Museum of Canada

…that’s me, standing next to the artwork that inspired my calling.

It was amazing to see Burning Sun in person. Many artworks don’t live up to their photos when viewed in real life. But Burning Sun’s photos didn’t do it justice – not even close! – because an image of the full piece can’t capture the intricate detail.

For example, here’s an closeup near the bottom of the left sleeve:

Closeup of the left sleeve of Itchiku Kubota's Burning Sun — Closeup of the left sleeve of Itchiku Kubota’s Burning Sun

At this distance, you can see some details – stitched-resist (shibori) dyeing, delicate brush painting, and embroidery.

Getting closer, though, you can make out more:

Even closer view of the left sleeve of Itchiku Kubota's Burning Sun — Even closer view of the left sleeve of Itchiku Kubota’s Burning Sun

Now you can see that there are two kinds of embroidery thread – rough silver thread at the middle right, and a smooth, glossy thread at top right. You also get a glimpse of the wonderful textures created by the shibori stitching.

And if you stick your nose right up against the fabric (don’t worry, I didn’t touch it!):

Super close view of the left sleeve of Itchiku Kubota's Burning Sun — Super close view of the left sleeve of Itchiku Kubota’s Burning Sun

Now you can see that the base cloth isn’t plain weave – it’s woven in horizontal ridges punctuated by irregularly placed floats, creating a textured fabric with floating flecks of light.

I spent two days in the exhibit, from opening until closing (though I did take a break for lunch on both days). I took 1,297 photos of the 40 kimono – though I wish I’d taken a few more, since I’ve found some gaps already. The first day I ran madly about documenting/photographing EVERYTHING, because I wanted detailed shots I could study later. Near the end of the second day, I had a few hours left, so I spent some time just looking at, and absorbing, the artistry in the kimono.

I would really have liked a third day (or another three weeks, months, years…), but two was enough to get most of what I needed. Kubota’s work is inspirational to me in so many ways – the sweeping vision, the incredible technical mastery (across multiple disciplines!), the integration of conceptually different design elements (physical texture, flat areas of ink drawing, shibori dyeing), and the ability to design at multiple scales, from the sweeping vista to tiny stitches. It is ambitious, masterful, and complex. I have never seen anything like it.

Here are some hopefully illustrative photos.

This first photo is of five kimono from the “Symphony of Light” – envisioned as a set of 80+ kimono depicting the seasons of Mt. Fuji and then expanding into the universe. (Kubota only finished about half of the Symphony before he died.)

6 kimono from Itchiku Kubota's "Symphony of Light" — 6 kimono from Itchiku Kubota’s “Symphony of Light”

As you can see, when lined up next to each other, the kimono form a single sweeping image.

In fact, this set of six kimono is actually part of a much larger set, that all merge into a single image. Here is a panorama with 13 kimono (you’ll have to click in to see the larger version; it’s hard to make out details if you don’t). You can see how the seasons merge into one another, late summer to fall to early winter.

13 kimono in Itchiku Kubota's "Symphony of Light" — 13 kimono in Itchiku Kubota’s “Symphony of Light”

I believe that all the kimono of the Symphony of Light can be lined up in this way. What a breathtaking vision!

But wait! That’s not all! Each kimono also stands alone. Let’s look at just one kimono – Hin (Nostalgia). It’s the fifth one from the right:

Itchiku Kubota's kimono "Hin (Nostalgia)" — Itchiku Kubota’s kimono “Hin (Nostalgia)”

While it was designed as part of a larger set, it also forms a complete composition when viewed by itself.

But look a little closer. See that boring-looking dark brown section in the bottom right corner of the left sleeve, just above the “cloud” at the bottom? This is what it looks like from a foot away:

closeup, left sleeve, Itchiku Kubota's "Hin (Nostalgia)" — closeup, left sleeve, Itchiku Kubota’s “Hin (Nostalgia)”

Wow! That boring brown spot is really interesting! The variety of textures is amazing – the smoothness of the “fog” drifting through the bottom, and the longer, sharper creases traveling in different directions on the right side, to give motion to the misty tendrils. The trees are composed of delicate ink painting in the center of each brown area, outlining the trunk, and horizontal ridges suggesting branches. (And if you look to the left, in the medium brown area, you’ll see some very light brush painting suggesting more trees hidden in mist.)

Further up the sleeve, there’s another great set of textures:

top left sleeve of Itchiku Kubota's "Hin (Nostalgia)" — top left sleeve of Itchiku Kubota’s “Hin (Nostalgia)”

I love this particular section because it’s almost all texture – but texture used in a deliberate and astoundingly precise manner to create movement, depth, and patterning. There are four textures just in this small section! And the textures are coordinated with subtle dyework to create the impression of layers of mist shifting over the mountain.

What blows my mind isn’t just the technical excellence of the work but the multidimensional expertise needed to envision it. Each of the design components Kubota is using – texture, color, line – is created using a different kind of surface design technique. Each of those methods “thinks” differently. It’s hard enough to design using even one of those three methods, which is why most textile artists work inside a single branch of surface design. But here Kubota is integrating three very different methods in a single piece, combining them into something far more powerful.

Here’s a shot from near the bottom of the kimono that shows a similar combination of techniques:

bottom of Itchiku Kubota's "Hin (Nostalgia)" — bottom of Itchiku Kubota’s “Hin (Nostalgia)”

Here the shibori ridges create earth and tree branches. To get crisp definition in the tree trunks – not achievable with shibori – Kubota uses ink pen. And, because neither of those techniques produces luster or luminescence, Kubota’s decided to embroider the tops of the trees with scattered stitches in smooth, lustrous gold thread. This gives the effect of sunlight glinting off the treetops.

Kubota’s work has had a profound impact on me because he worked the way I want to work, and his work shatters a lot of the constraints that were suggested to me as a budding artist. For example, I was advised to pick three or four techniques to work with, in a single medium. The idea is to achieve greater mastery by exploring one area deeply rather than trying to integrate a lot of unrelated methods. Kubota works with just a few techniques, but drawn from vastly different areas of surface design. It’s inspiring to me to see that this can work – because my natural inclination is to work across multiple disciplines. Trying to focus in a single area felt terribly limiting.

I’m still processing all my thoughts and feelings about the exhibit. Seeing Kubota’s work has helped me recognize some of the limitations I’d imposed on myself, and reassured me that there is enormous potential in my multidisciplinary approach. The design philosophy embodied in his kimono is making me think deeply about what it means to me to be an artist, what I want to strive for in my work, and what I want to learn. And, of course, I’m also learning a ton about design by examining the work of a master.

Kubota’s work is also making me feel enthusiastic about weaving again, which is great after a nearly two-year hiatus. I was seriously wondering whether I had made a mistake buying a jacquard loom, because I felt like I might be done with weaving. But seeing his work has made me think of some really cool stuff I could weave (and dye) – and I can’t wait to get started on it!

Over the next couple weeks, I’m planning to write a series of blog posts about some of the thoughts the kimono have inspired – both philosophy and design. Stay tuned!

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