A Tale of Two Trips

This blogging gig has become quite a challenge. My absence, if anyone has missed me over the past weeks, has been motivated by the apt advice of one Tom Lehrer, a piano-playing polymath if there ever was one. He advised:

”If a (you) can’t communicate, the very least (you) can do is to shut up.” 

In my case it was more that I had nothing about stitching to communicate. This blog, after all, is about role of stitching in the modern world.  Now,  the thoughtfulness of friends has enabled me to break my silence. 

Thanks to the ubiquity of internet, this week two couples in my circle sent photos of embroideries that they happened upon in their travels. Touring Canterbury Cathedral in the UK, ahead of a visit by Queen Elizabeth II, my friends snapped two newly commissioned cushions intended for the royal couple's use. The pillows are, of course, regal, right down to the gold work and crests.

Canterbury Cathedral Cushions .

Try as I might, I found no mention of them online. So, dear reader, your patronage of this blog has been rewarded with an “exclusive!” You saw it here first.

Meanwhile other friends, holidaying halfway around the globe in Vietnam, dispatched pictures from an embroidery enterprise their group was visiting.  They were particularly taken by a forest scene.

XQ Embroidery from Vietnam

Close up  of forest scene

Via the link to the website, I see  the portraits, my particular passion, that Vietnamese masters create too.  I wish I could be transported by email to look at these things in person, but, sadly, technology is not that advanced.  I must be content to study images courtesy of internet and my friends.

What these two electronic postcards have in common the intersection of embroidery, friendship, and a new experience.  Over the years, my boundless enthusiasm for stitchery has, it seems, sensitized these friends to embroidery’s beauty and artistry.  (Yes, I do a little tap dance of joy. Mission accomplished.) Not-embroiderers themselves, my friends now notice this art form and valued it. I suspect many in their group probably just walked by pieces or hardly understood the time, skill, and artistry that must meld to create beautiful objects like these.    

I am chuffed because once my friends noticed the stitchery, they  remembered me. They took the time and effort to send me pictures to enjoy. Now they are educating me about things I don’t know little about or never will see.  How genuinely kind of them.

So, once again, my conviction that the point of a needle (and thread) in the 21^st century is to communicate -- be it beauty, love or friendship -- has been borne out and even reinforced.  Surely, this is something to write home about…or at least blog on.

Ilustrative Embroidery

Yesterday, my walkabout the Web left me cheering “yessss" so loud that a worried voice, from two floors below, called up to my attic studio to inquire "is all was well up there”.  And indeed it was. Not just with me, but with embroidery too.  Hence the unrepressed joy.   

I had stumbled across two new – at least to me—embroiderers whose works show that embroidery is finding a place and voice in our techno centric world even as renown painters like David Hockney abandon pencil and pad to sketch with an iPad.

Embroidery by Teresa Lim

Teresa Lim, a Singapore-based illustrator, embroiders as she travels around the globe, not to while away time in flight, but to document her journey. Hooped calico becomes her sketch book, needle and thread her pencil. As her fellow travelers photograph sights, she stitches them, and then photographs her embroidery with its inspiration in the background. Understandably Teresa’s work, a sketch after all, is quick and imprecisely executed. So what, I say to the classical embroiderer in me. That Teresa can stitch so quickly and convincingly is impressive. That she wants to is heart-warming.

Even more heartening than Teresa's verve is her age and background. Just 24, an honours graduate of LaSalle School of Art, she endeavors to meld  interests in embroidery, fashion, and textile design. She is well on her way, I would say. So here is a trained illustrator who approaches embroidery as a form of illustration rather than “handwork” or “craft”.  That gives embroidery a twist, a new lease on life. What’s more, Teresa offers to create portraits for clients. Wow!  That validates my own conception of needle and thread being full-fledged artistic media. So along with needle-painting, we now have needle- illustration!

This week Teresa has put embroidery in the spotlight big time. Her “Sew Wanderlust” series has been picked up internationally by Yahoo (USA) , Daily Mail (UK), La Repubblica (Italy) and Globe.com (Brazil). How’s that for bringing embroidery to the attention of a non-stitching international audience! That in itself is quite an accomplishment.

Meanwhile, around the globe in Oxford, UK, yet another university-trained illustrator under 30,  is  translating her pencil and pastel sketches into thread drawings.  Chloe Giordano  maintains she has learned to embroider by trial and error. You would never guess that from her charming animals and flower embroideries or her striking book covers. She prefers to work with spooled sewing threads rather than embroidery floss.  Chloe supports herself primarily with her embroidery, selling her creations on Etsy. Now that is an accomplishment.

What makes these two stories so exciting to me, a sedate seasoned stitcher? Here we have two more young people beginning to rediscover the ancient possibilities of needle and thread as 1)  a means of artistic expression and 2) a way of earning a living. They are not pursuing a hobby. They are serious. These are young people with professional training and an ambition to succeed.  They clearly have caught the scent of something in the wind and are following it. Good for them. Good for embroidery. Are we about to witness a renaissance in stitching?  Will these creative spirits go on to produce the designs that will keep the embroidery fresh and engaging for their generation? There is reason to be optimistic when computer-literate  graduates in design take to embroidery! Let’s hope their enthusiasm --  and mine--bears fruit.  Our needles and floss depend on them. 

Needlepainter Jerome Speekman

The email landed in my inbox shortly after I launched my thread painting website. It carried an  address from someone in Australia calling herself “needlepainter.” I dithered. Was this skulduggery, spam or fan mail from a kindred spirit?  Protection software pronounced it safe to open.

I was right about Australia and kindred spirit. But this missive wasn't spam or fan mail either. Nor was it  from a woman.

Jerome Speekman, an Ozzie embroiderer, was announcing a  trip to the Netherlands and offering to teach needlepainting to “my students”.  He enclosed photos of his work. It was astoundingly colorful, vibrant and big!

Jerome Speekman with "No Sunshine"

Sadly, I had no students for Jerome, but intrigued by his embroideries. I suggested we meet for a coffee when he was in Amsterdam. And so we did, in a café near the Stedelijk Museum six months later.

I brought along my latest portrait project, still on its hoop. Jerome brought his Dutch sister and his Australian wife and daughter, as well as his latest piece scrunched up in a calico bag. While the women talked among themselves over cappuccinos, Jerome and I put our heads together to discuss materials, techniques, subject matter, and life.  The conversation flowed as with female embroiderers I have met.

Jerome does not do “pretty” or “dainty” work. He creates bold pieces, often over a metre long. Sometimes he stitches free hand and then tacks a finished work onto painter’s stretcher bars. Other times he embroiders directly onto pre-stretched material. His work is meant to hang on walls, unframed. They can hold their own against paintings or photographs.

Lizard Island

Early Morning

Middle of the day

The lush countryside near his New South Wales home is Jerome’s inspirations. He stitches its native birds, animals and flowers. He depicts majestic the forests that make humans insignificant. He stitches people. Alternatively, he can reach into his fantasy to create blue-skinned woodland spirits playing among gnarled branches of giant trees. Then there are two canvases of suicide bombers. This is a shocking subject to be sure, but there no blood or gore. It is just Jerome’s way of pushing the boundaries of artistic perspective and embroidery convention!  

Explosion

Jerome is an auto-didact with a life story as colorful as his work. Born in Amsterdam in 1950, he tried several schools before becoming a cadet at the Lagere Zeevaartschool, the merchant marine high school.  At 15, he sailed on the Pollux, the school’s triple-mast training ship, to Australia, only to fall out of love with the sea and in love with the country. By 19, he emigrated Down Under on his own.

 “I have had a range of jobs in a variety of fields,” he explained, “from fruit picking to a senior project officer with an unemployment schemes.” For the past 15 years, Jerome has been a partner in a computer shop. He also experiments with recordings, videos and animation. He had done wood carvings too. However, embroidery remains a constant in his life.

“Embroidery is a clean form of art with very little mess that pollutes. I can carry whatever I need in a bag. Some cotton and a needle is all I need.”   And that was so. To my amazement, the needle painting that Jerome pulled from his bag to show me was worked free hand and on aida-cloth in multiple strands of cotton thread. His long-short stitching was not “refined.” Did that matter? The interplay of color, movement, and theme were captivating. Van Gogh did not paint neatly either! And Jerome’s work had Van Gogh rawness about it. Here was an embroiderer that I could learn something from: “Just go for it. It’s the image’s effect not the stitches that matter.”

How did Jerome come to embroidery? “I started in 1980. My [first] wife embroidered now and then. The colors that spilled out of her basked were so beautiful. I had to use the blue—lapis lazuli. My first work was a comet’s tail inspired by Immanuel Velikovsky’s book, which correlated myths and legends with catastrophic celestial events.” 

Jerome stitched his comet onto a jacket, which he often wore. “So many ladies would stop in the street whenever I wore it, exclaiming that my work was amazing and that I was a “master.” It encouraged me so to go from clothing onto wall hangings.” Jerome has had a number of private commissions since.

“Yes, I’ve had some funny reactions to being a male embroiderer,” says Jerome when I asked him if his passion for thread art generates comment. The most memorable involved the police back in the days when his now short white hair was brown and shoulder length. “I was hitch-hiking. Two detectives stopped their patrol car with screech. They wanted to search my bag. They asked, ‘What have you got in the bag, darling.’

‘ Embroidery,’  I said. They both took a step backwards. So I showed them my embroidery from a distance. They liked it and left, never bothering to look further.”  I don’t ask what else they might have found.

999 Pelicans

Since that first meeting, Jerome and I have trade emails discussing projects and techniques. He sends photos of the great Australian outdoors with its forests, beaches at sunset, and big skies. And there are updates on his wife and his two-year-old granddaughter.

Jerome’s latest piece “999 Pelicans” is fascinating. The flock covers the whole canvas becoming an abstraction as the individuals’ bodies merge into patches of orange and white. This piece Jerome has stitched on linen, a material I suggested he might find easier to work on.

 Recently he announced a show of his oeuvre in an Australian gallery in his home town. 

What next? Depends on what takes his fancy. A love of stitching coupled with a vivid imagination propels him into the future. Stitching is his obsession. That and his granddaughter.

Needle in a Haystack

A simple sewing needle made big news in Europe this week. Besides hitting the papers, this needle featured in prime time, international TV broadcasts too. What made an ordinary stitching implement so special?  Location, location, location, my friend.   The needle was on show, so to speak, at the Palais de Tokyo , Paris’ Museum of Contemporary Art. It was hidden in a not-so-proverbial haystack.  Italian performance artists Sven Sachsalber had just 48 hours to find it. 

 

Irish Haystacks by Johnathan Wilkins (c) Creative Commons

What’s the point of this needle? The Museum’s director Jean de Loisy explained the exhibit this way: ''It is a symbol of the search we are all doing for something.''   Honest, he really said that.

I’m gob smacked.  Here is a museum director who understands a needle’s role the process of discovering ourselves. He sees the artist’s search and experience very important.   Hooray for that. But the embroiderer in me is incensed. The director breezes over embroidery. It’s the process of discovery that is so important to him. 

 A needle is indispensable to those of us who explore the creative process – and discover ourselves--through the needle arts.   But hang on; needles shouldn’t have any thread in them.  That would leave a trace of the effort that many of us have expended during our quest of discovery. The quest and product would be embroidery and definitely not comme il faut. 

 I am delighted that the museum director gets that needles are associated with doing something time consuming (thus life consuming), but hay—oops hey-- this is ridiculous.  

A search for something concrete, like a needle in a haystack, is art when it is performed by a young handsome man devoting two days of his life to it in front of on lookers.  (Let’s hope that his time is paid for.)  The private process of embroidery, or even its concrete product, is not worth the time of the art establishment despite the thought and technical skill that embroiderers put into them.  Why?  You tell me.

Palais de Tokyo in Paris by Strobilomyces

  And the questions keep coming. Why haven’t hundreds of thousands of embroiderers worldwide produced artistic superstars worth shows in the galleries of the art establishment? Statistically there must be fantastic contemporary embroiderers out there. Surely finding them must be worth the effort of finding a needle in a haystack.  And much more interesting, I would say.

One adjudicator of modern taste the MOMA, Museum of Modern Art in New York, has an ongoing workshop exploring modern gas masks and embroidery. It’s performance based, vanishing at the end of the day. A search of the Palais de Tokyo website –not the haystack--unearthed a previous exhibition featuring embroidery as fashion embellishment.  Embroidery is clearly not the main event. And New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art did a show on textile history. That’s about as good as it gets fans. The Museum of Craft and Design has a collection of modern embroideries but you can’t search their site! 

After years of pondering these questions as I stitch away trying to understand  the world, the answer appearing out of the mist seems to be that much embroidery—not all—is made by women.  And that’s the rub, impediment, explanation, whatever you want to call it.  Amanda Vickery explored the lot of female painters through the centuries in a brilliant BBC series.  The programs got a wonderful review in the Guardian.  A quick look at the comments from enthusiastic female readers shows there is a broader understanding of sexism and feminism a foot.  So if you see embroidery as that subset of art primarily practiced by women, often older women, how can the lack societal interest be anything else than it is:  Benign neglect. 

Because embroiderers understand this condition doesn’t imply we accept it. There are many more urgent existential problems facing women that deserve society’s attention and resources. We don’t make a fuss. Still that doesn’t mean that embroiderers shouldn’t call attention to sexism and ageism. Nor should we shrink from the opportunity to needle the art establishment or to prick their consciences. It just might set someone of them searching the haystacks of their souls.