45: Michael Rohde (transcript)
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Hello and welcome to WeaveCast, episode 45. This episode Anna Zinsmeister brings us another wonderful interview. This time she talks with Michael Rohde who is a talented rug weaver and tapesty artist.
He talks about his work as well as how he got his start on a simple and humble rigid heddle loom.
I’ve added a new feature to the WeaveZine site. It is an events calendar. Now this calendar is a bit special because it is filterable by geographical region. Which means that you can enter and find weaving events for any place on the planet. How cool is that?
There is even colour coding that’s roughly by continent.
The alpha testers and I have been working hard and polishing this up. It is good enough for beta so please take it for a test drive, enter your weaving events, or your guild meetings, or whatever you want. It’s kind of an experiment.
I don’t know yet how people are going use it but I can’t wait to find out.
You can find that up on the site at http://weavezine.com/calendar
And just a note, you do have to be logged in in order to post.
Without further ado here’s Michael Rohde.
Musical interlude
AZ My name is Anna Zinsmeister and I’m interviewing Michael Rohde who is a friend of mine and also a very experienced and knowledgeable rug weaver and tapestry weaver now and been doing it a long time. Welcome Michael.
MR Thank you Anna. I’m surprised and honoured.
I guess I should say that I’ve been a weaver now for more than 35 years or so, I guess. I didn’t really have any family exposure to weaving.
I got started weaving because of curiousity about cloth was made and I had seen somewhere in the early ‘70’s someone wearing a hand woven blouse that caught my eye. I’ve often said it was probably badly made or otherwise I wouldn’t have noticed it.
It got my curiosity going and for a few years I thought about it off and on and then at some point after that I was living in Houston. Had seen I think it was the needlepoint shop. They actually had a rigid heddle loom in a box about the size of a Monopoly set, so I bought that.
I was still a student so I couldn’t afford the yarns that they had. I went to K-Mart and bought kite string and Orlon knitting yarn because that was inexpensive.
I think that the other thing that sort of influenced me into using those yarns originally was that a friend of mine had some rugs on the floor that another friend of hers in another city somewhere had woven.
Apparently out of the same yarn.
So I think that also got me thinking about rugs at the same time.
So I bought the rigid heddle loom in a box and the knitting yarn. Also got a copy of the Sunset magazine book on weaving.
For about the first year and a half, kind of followed that. Taught myself a bit from the book and explored different things. Patterns you could get from two dimensional, on a two harness loom.
AZ So were they were warp and weft faced or were they just more like the rugs, or…
MR The very first warp I put on was weft faced because I thought it would be fun to do tapestry. So I put on about a yard and a half warp or something like that. And after I’d woven about 3 inches I decided that it was very slow and tedious and I didn’t want to do that and I cut it off.
So here was this two or three inch weaving with a yard of fringe hanging off.
(laughter)
A good friend of my father is president for ?
AZ So you started out doing tapestry really?
MR Yes.
AZ Sort of come full circle.
MR Yes. So then a couple times I tried to make a shirt or blouse from that little rigid heddle loom, which wasn’t much more than about 18” wide. So not knowing enough about shrinkage during weaving…
AZ Right!
MR So a lot of people do this, so I wove it with a slit for the neck and you know, so it could be folded over and put together and then of course by the time it came off the loom and, I don’t even know if I had washed it. I realized it was too small to wear.
(laughter)
AZ Oh well. It was a start. I think all of us get into that experimental time learning a lot.
MR Yes.
AZ It’s really exciting.
MR Well, it is exciting because it’s something entirely new to you unless you’ve had experience before and you’re willing to try things that you wouldn’t have otherwise.
Somewhere along that point I must have found a weaving supply shop because I wound up making the first successful piece of clothing I made was for another friend. It was a ruana and I think I was using some Harrisville yarns because I remember the yarns were really lovely in terms of colour and sheen and everything.
And so that was easy enough to do because you could make it with a couple of strips and then piece them together and then it wound up being a much bigger garment that would actually cover a real person.
AZ So this was still on the rigid heddle loom?
MR Yes. I’m fairly certain it was.
I’m trying to remember if it was because it was for a friend in Houston and I don’t think it was after I’d moved to North Carolina.
But by the time I’d moved to North Carolina then, I found looms and loom parts for sale at flea markets and found a floor loom made out of 2 x 4’s and spare parts from the mills for $200 or something like that.
AZ Wow.
MR Two harness, counter-balanced loom. I bought the thing from a guy at the flea market and he, I said but I’m going to need some help getting it from Raleigh to Durham, where I lived, about 30 miles on the freeway. So he said “Oh that’s no problem.”
So he had a station wagon and he strapped it to the tailgate of the station wagon. Well the first turn onto the freeway the loom fell off, but did not damage to it whatsoever.
(laughter)
It was so strong! And then I got it to the apartment I lived in and I had to take it apart to get it through the door and then put it back together again.
So I wove on that for a long time, didn’t know the idea of a warping board, so I wound the first warp around the door and then struggled to get it on in an even fashion.
Wove a few more rug type things with Orlon knitting yarn and then finally I wound up finding a place to take some lessons. One of them, I think, was an extension class at Duke University where they actually started more basic technique than I’d been doing, which was how to make your own rigid heddle with heavy cardboard.
It was, I think the idea was to teach us how to make a backstrap loom out of cardboard and popsicle sticks that had holes drilled in them.
And so you glued all this together and you wound up with a loom.
But I think it was the same person also taught a class on natural dyes, which was my first exposure to dyeing things.
It was dyestuffs that we gathered from the fields around where the workshop was taught in North Carolina.
Then there was a weaving store somewhere like halfway between Durham and Chapel Hill that I took classes on four harness looms, little 22” Harrisville, on krogbrad. I did four of them that were 20 by 30”.
AZ So that’s where you really started getting interested in a different kind of structure than plain weave.
MR Yes.
AZ Did you eventually get a four shaft loom?
MR No. Actually because I could still buy spare parts for that loom I wound up putting two more harnesses on that original loom so that I had four harnesses. I figured out how to do four harness counterbalance, probably a direct tie up rather than – I’m certain it was direct tie up.
First started trying to sell things in a gallery in North Carolina and did a craft show there with some of the things I’d done. Sold some of the first few things there.
I even remember the first large weaving I sold. It was like $55 but it was – the dimensions I’m showing you are probably about 3 feet by 4 feet.
AZ So was it a rug or was it…
MR No.
AZ …a wall piece.
MR No it was when I still had two harnesses on there so it was a wall hanging and it was purple and green pick and pick and stripes, that sort of thing.
But also began to find other sources for yarn. There were some mill outlet stores that had mill outlet yarns. There were ones they’d used for a while.
Then when I moved back to Houston, became friends and familiar with other craftspeople and a group of 6 or 7 of us started a co-op gallery that was near Rice University – the medical centre – and we ran that for about two years, I think.
I was still not completely doing rugs. I was interested in other things just because we were trying to sell things. Slowly I realized that even though I made other things the things that seemed to sell better were the rugs and began to get recognition for making the rugs. Houston design magazines and got commissions from decorators and design people for some rag rugs as well as some wall rugs.
Bought a four harness loom that was made by Thought Products and I had wanted to buy one of their larger looms, but at that time I was interested, this must have been the late 70’s, they weren’t making the really large looms, the Barbara looms.
And so I wound up buying something that they called Cassandra model and it was nice because it had much better harness control than I did over the one made out of the 2 x 4’s.
But it wasn’t heavy enough in terms of the tension you needed for rugs so I realized that was a problem. I still had spare harnesses and gears and things like that, that I’d bought at the flea market. So I then built an upright four harness loom where the harnesses had to be pulled manually at the top and then held open with a stick that I put in it.
But I sort of liked the idea because then I could see the whole weaving as a piece.
The beater was pivoted and had weights on it and had to be held up by a bungee cord or something really ridiculous. I had no idea.
AZ You were really imaginative.
MR Well, I don’t know if you call it imaginative or naïve, or just dumb.
AZ No!
MR Because it took forever to weave on a loom like that where you had to manually open the harness, stick the shed, er, stick in there to keep the shed open, throw the shuttle across, which was, like I said this was where I got used to using stick shuttles because that was the only way you could do something, on a vertical warp.
And then, release the beater so it would slam down, and lift it back up again and hook it under to keep it in place.
So I did a fair number on that and then it must have been about 1980 I got a commission for a whole house full of rugs from a family in Houston who had a summer house in Castin, Maine.
It, at that point I’d been wanting to have a larger loom than the one I’d built out of the spare parts had a 5 foot weaving width but I wanted something larger than that.
With the deposit for that commission I decided it was time to go ahead and buy an 8 foot loom from Cranbrook, and decided that was what I wanted because I was mostly weaving rugs by that time. And I bought the loom.
I’m not sure I was aware that they had 10 foot Cranbrooks at that point. I think they weren’t selling them directly, but somebody later told me that some of the Bob Kidd looms that he had specially made were 10 foot were available and for sale, so I almost should have had the 10 foot loom because the commission involved two 10 foot wide rugs.
So the only way I could do that was to weave them in sections.
AZ Are you sorry you didn’t get the 10 foot loom?
MR No, because I can count on my two hands the number of times that I’ve warped it up the full 8 foot width.
I did a large plain weave wall hanging, 8 by 27 feet for a company I used to work for. That was the last full width. Actually a couple of times I set up two warps side by side that were each 40, 39 inches, like that and wove two rugs.
AZ So that you could get them the same, or?
MR Well, I think the idea was maybe it would go faster if I was weaving two rugs in different colours with the same patterns at the same time. And I think I realized after having woven that warp off that it didn’t make things any faster, so…it was the odd time, that I fortunately took pictures of the crazy things one does on one’s looms.
AZ I guess essentially you really haven’t used the full game.
MR Well, there were three 8 foot rugs that were done 8 foot woven rugs on that loom, for that commission. There was another rag rug that was 8 foot wide that I did, actually for the same client.
But it’s still my main loom because it’s so well constructed and so strong.
I had lately, wished that I had a little bit different loom because I’ve typically, especially on a big loom like that, rather than sitting to weave, I’ll stand to weave. Also because it had locking treadles so I can open the shed and then walk from one side to the other and go back and forth.
But because I’m very tall – I’m 6’6” – that loom was originally designed as a working height of a little less than 30”, I think. So it’s difficult. And I hadn’t realized how difficult it was to be bending over quite a bit, to work at that.
I think maybe 10 years ago I finally figured out that maybe I should just raise it up on blocks so I put it, I currently have it up on blocks that raise it either 6 or 8 inches. I don’t remember what.
Which involved redoing treadle separator bars and all the tie ups and everything.
AZ Oh yes, because you push down more, is that what you mean?
MR If I left the treadle bar where it was it would have been too high. I would have really had to step quite a bit to get to the treadle.
AZ Oh, oh, I see what you’re saying.
MR About 10 years ago I bought from one of the internet lists, somebody was selling a Barbara V Thought Products loom that I’d always wanted and so I said well, I’d like to have a second loom, and I bought that.
It is, does have a higher working height and I realized that by golly, this is a little less stress on the body having to bend over.
AZ Sometimes I’ve read people on, like the WeaveTech list, where they would talk about how they’re short and some looms are just way too big, so you don’t think about that, that not every loom fits every body. You know.
MR Well, I didn’t meet the woman that I bought the loom from. I corresponded with her. Evidently she was short and so she had had blocks attached to the treadles so that her feet would reach them.
AZ Which is just the opposite from you.
I guess what I was going to ask you too, is, we talked a lot about the weaving but not so much about the dyeing. At some point you started doing the dyeing.
MR I’d been exposed to the dyeing, as I said, in somewhere around 1975 in North Carolina.
Didn’t really take to the natural dyeing at that time, but was exposed to all the different chemical dyes that are available and began doing a little bit with that.
Initially with silk, because I think I was still doing some garments or I think it was a caftan that somebody wanted. So I worked a little bit with that with this, probably Cushing Dyes at that point, on the silk.
It wasn’t until after I moved back to Houston and was beginning to work with making rugs that I noticed a really big difference in a rug that I had woven using off the shelf dyed yarns and a rug that I had done where I had dyed a similar colour range for that rug. To me there was just a lot more visual interest with the ones with the hand dyed yarns because there were some variations in the colours that weren’t there, but the other one was just flat and dull to me with the commercially dyed yarns.
Because everything was even and predictable, visually predictable.
And then I did another rug where I thought about, well, what would happen if I were to start a dye pot and put in a few skeins and then take them out and then add a little more dye to start shifting the colour from one end to the other.
And so I really liked what happened when getting that kind of gradient. It was pretty choppy in terms of colour gradation. Actually I sort of like that.
So I began doing a lot with colour gradients within the rugs.
Sometimes just with the colour gradient and a few little accent lines but then later started doing a lot with pattern weaves where you would have, let’s say, a large scale grid, you know, the little squares within the grid of about an inch or ¾’s of an inch per square, or so.
So you would have a colour for the grid and a colour for the background and then work on having a change in the colour of the background and a change in the colour of the grid. So you could really start to have ways to play with the interaction of the colour from two elements of the pattern.
And did a tremendous amount with that sort of way of getting patterns and colour and did a lot with the grid pattern for, by this time I’m sure I was using the broken twill instead of the krokbraagd.
Using Peter Collingwood’s book of course as a primary guide for all different rug structures that he’s written about.
I began saying, well what other patterns could I do with the broken twill because I didn’t want to be doing only grids and so I worked through a number of the more complex two colour patterns he had in there.
And some three shuttle patterns. Also worked a bit with discontinuous weft, clasped weft sort of things, to get some pattern variations in that instead of just having an overall selvedge to selvedge pattern.
Probably then the big change in weaving style came about when I joined a guild in Los Angeles that you and I are both members of, the Designing Weavers. This was a big impetus to change in the way I dealt with my weaving because the purpose of the organization seemed to be to develop their members because we always had projects we were required to do.
The year I joined the project was that we should do something that we’d never done before in a technique we’d never done before and based on a Georgia O’Keefe painting.
Of course people had some idea what I had done and so they were really perplexed that I was excited about a Georgia O’Keefe painting as a subject matter because they knew that I did geometric things.
But what I could remember was that Georgia O’Keefe did some paintings that were skyscrapers in New York, so that gave me my regular geometric pattern.
When I bought the Cranbrook loom it had 8 harnesses but I’d always had four harnesses in the closet because all I ever did was broken twill.
I decided it was time to take those extra four harnesses out and start working with ways to do multiple harness weaving.
So I started doing block weaving which gave me tremendous freedom in terms of pattern. I no longer had to deal with small scale patterns you get from broken twill. I could work with bigger areas of changing the colour from one side to the other.
I’d always been intrigued by blocks on backgrounds and did a series where I used all 8 harnesses for the weaving and it was a summer and winter or taquete’ structure where we had 5 blocks assigned to colours across the loom and then if you did that strictly as a four harness weave you’d have a regular checkerboard pattern. It would be predictable.
But I said what would happen if you assigned each of those five blocks across the surface of the rug to a different harness, then you could move those blocks around at will to make them either part of the contrast block pattern or part of the background.
So I did a series of rugs based on that idea which again was governed a bit by naivety and thinking well, it’s no problem, all I need to do is change the pattern.
AZ Okay, it’s easy to go under the loom.
MR Go under the loom, which was a real big challenge on the Cranbrook countra-marche loom.
AZ Yes, because they have all these chains.
MR Well at some point I changed all those chains to TexSolv cords.
AZ Oh, did you?
MR And arranged it so that I could do the tie up from the bottom instead of from the top of the lower lamms.
But it still meant – it was something for a young person to do – younger than I am now – you could crawl under the loom every four inches of weaving and change that.
So at that point I was would begin thinking about, gee it would be nice if I had a computer controlled loom, but there wasn’t really a commercially available computer controlled loom that was suitable for rug weaving. At that point I had a prejudice towards counter-balance, contra-marche looms and didn’t think that a jack loom would be satisfactory for the really high tension that you wanted for rugs.
And so I didn’t pay much attention to options that were available that were jack looms that some people thought could be used for rugs.
I then began – it was at a weaver’s – what do they call it – workshops in Coupeville – fibre…
AZ Oh, the Fiber Forum.
MR Fiber Forum.
AZ Yes.
MR I was at one of those workshops and I was talking with Jan Paul, I believe it was, thinking about ways of doing in-lay on that machine. And she said “Well, I’ve got hand outs from a workshop I took a few years ago, I’ll mail them to you.”
Well, sure enough she did mail them to me, and I opened it and I says “Wait a minute, I have these handouts.” It was from a workshop or actually a seminar, that Barbara Hand had given in 1984 at the Dallas Convergence. It was a way to transfer Theo Moorman’s in-lay ideas to a rug technique.
And so I looked at it and I said “Well, this is a good idea, actually, I think I’ll go ahead and try it.”
She had done it for what is referred to as 3 end block, and I wanted to do it in Summer and Winter, so I adapted the procedures for Summer and Winter.
Began weaving that. At the same time I was thinking about ways to do shaft switching on the Cranbrook. And so I constructed these things after one of Collingwood’s. Saw the directions on how to do that and then put it on the loom.
And did one rug with it. But partly because of the way I’d designed it it was an idea that was really slow and tedious, and I said “You know, I could probably do the same thing with the inlay that I’m doing with shaft-switching.”
So I took that off and that’s now sitting in the closet somewhere. It hasn’t been thought about since.
I’ve done most of the rugs with in-lay, that are, the set of rugs that I’ve done over the years that have a big central field and then a solid border around it, and so there’s colour gradient moving in both the central field and the solid border. But then there are smaller squares that are blocks of colour that move around in that border area, and each of those blocks is a different colour as it moves from one end of the rug.
That was the basis of an article that I wrote for Madelyn van der Hoogt for Handwoven and um, 2002, I think it was Block Weave
AZ Right,it was the cover article.
MR Well, the one that was the cover article was a 2000 article and that was the one on that Summer and Winter where I did all the changes in the tie up.
AZ Oh.
MR That was a cover article.
AZ Okay. So this was a different article.
MR Different one, yes. Two I wrote for Handwoven.
AZ So when you do the Theo Moorman technique and you’re doing it with 8 shafts…
MR Uh-huh.
AZ Okay so I know the Theo Moorman technique, which is the one where you have two separate warps that are doing two separate things. One is doing the ground and the other one is doing a tie down for the overlay.
MR Right.
AZ So when you’re doing it with 8 I guess I’m not quite understanding what’s happening.
MR With the rug I was talking about earlier which has a big central rectangle and then a solid border around the outside so in order to do that, in the Summer and Winter all you really need are four harnesses. The four harnesses would be because you’ve got your ground weave tie downs on two harnesses and then each block is controlled by one of the other two harnesses.
So that’s, you could do that sort of weave just a central field and a solid border around the outside on a four harness loom.
When you want to add the inlay, then you need two more harnesses…
AZ And that would be for other, the pink and red blocks.
MR Yes. And so then that means that rug is actually can be done on 6 harnesses. And what happens with the in-lay then, is that they work with the ground weave tie down together until the point where you want to add a block of in-lay. And then the tie down harnesses are raised and your in-lay yarn goes back and forth in the area under that.
AZ Hmm – okay, I think I see now. Okay. That’s interesting. So it’s a one-sided piece.
MR Yes.
AZ The back doesn’t show the blocks it just on the one side.
MR Interestingly, I had the opportunity – I went to a northern California conference one year when Jack Lenor Larsen was the key note speaker and they had also arranged that he would agree to do a critique of a limited number of people in a very public forum – of work they wanted to. People had to sign up ahead of time so I said “Well, let’s go ahead and do that just for curiosity.”
And so he in general liked the rug that I showed him, but what he liked the most was, because the in-lay is on one side then the other side of the rug is entirely different.
And so he looked at it and he says “Oh I like this.” He says “You get two rugs for the price of one.”
(laughter)
AZ What fun.
It’s interesting how you’ve got three different gradations, actually, or maybe even more than that, going on in the rug.
MR Yes. There’s about 3 in there.
I’ve always looked at other textiles as sources of ideas and inspirations, so I think some, actually some of the first in-lay I did was from looking at oriental rugs or middle eastern rugs, whatever.
And the first one I did actually had this format I talked about earlier, with the central field. But then I also did one where I had in-lays in the middle of the field which were little hexagon shapes. I don’t remember what type of rug that was.
At another point I said, well if this central field with the little in-lay areas only takes 6 harnesses, then if I wanted to do a 3 colour, 3 block, 3 shuttle Summer and Winter weaves, then I could do that by only adding one more harness. So I could do that on 7 harnesses.
So that got me to thinking about kimonos and the traditional presentation of kimonos as a body of one long strip and then two short strips as the sleeves.
I said, well, if I wanted to weave a rug, I guess I was still thinking they were rugs, as a kimono shape where there was a colour gradient in the body, which is longer than the arms, then a different colour gradient in the arms, how would I go about doing that?
And so I began thinking about, well, then that would be 3 blocks where the background would be the first block or the A block, then the body, the long body would be the B block or the second block and then the arms would be the third block or the C block.
I did that series, I actually started that series with the idea of it being four seasons. So I would do four of them in that series from the four seasons.
The first one I think I did was reds and greens, summer, so each of these four kimono wound up being tied to a season of the year, of course, a place that I visited in Japan, I’ve been to Japan in the early 90’s, and had visited four places that impressed me a fair amount.
So we had the seasons, the place I visited and then some traditional technique or image or colour combination from Japanese tradition.
So the first one was summer with colours of summer flowers. The red and the greens were somewhat similar to the contrasting colours you get in glazes of pottery where you get an ox-blood red from oxidation reduction condition, and then pale green in the other.
So that one was Summer Kyoto related to pottery glaze colours.
The second one was the winter one in blues and light greys so that’s winter like ??? ????? is an area that has a light that’s in the shape of a ???? which is a loop form. But at any rate it was very blue in my recollection. It may not have been.
So that was winter.
Then spring was thinking about irises, on gold leaf folding screens. That was kind of a yellowish green against the gold background and some purple accent areas.
And then the last one was fall and that was based on a visit to Nara Deer Park in an area between Kyoto and Tokyo.
So after I did that I decided that this was really awfully outrageous for a rug so I fell back on another set of traditional rugs and did those for a while, but they actually got some pretty good response and the New York Gallery, the Gilmar gallery was able to sell one of them to the Art Institute of Chicago.
And so I said, well, why don’t I do some more in this area. I’d done the accent squares and the shoulder line at the end lines, wool in-lay, and often wanted to think about the idea of silk and something more reflective to contrast that.
So I did slightly smaller kimonos. The original ones were four feet by 5 feet. The new ones were 4 feet by 3 feet.
So I did a set of 6 of those with wool and silk.
That was probably the end of the set of kimonos. The second set of 6 kimonos was the end of doing the rugs because at that point Gail was saying you know, you really ought to think about making them lighter because they were, I had sent her some very large rugs. I did some 5 foot by 8 foot rugs that I sent to her that she had for a while.
One of them was exhibited at the American Craft Museum in an exhibit that Paul Smith put together.
But these things were heavy. They were, you know, 15 pounds of wool in each rug. So she said “You ought to think about doing tapestry.”
So I actually did another kimono that was at this point I was working with natural dyes, and this one was done in tapestry technique in the traditional 12” strip fashion. So I wove four 12” strips that were then pieced together to make the kimono shape.
I thought it was a beautiful arrangement of colours and the doner that made the money available for the Art Institute of Chicago to purchase that piece sometime later decided that she wanted a piece of mine for her collection.
She looked at that one but it didn’t fit the space that she wanted so she wound up taking a prayer rug based that I’d done. But I did wind up selling that silk, natural dyed kimono, to a woman and a friend in Pasedena. She absolutely loved it. Had to have it. So…
AZ Well that always feels good, I’m sure.
MR No, it always makes me feel good when somebody likes it well enough to decide they want to live with it.
AZ Yes. Yes, I guess it’s opposed to a gallery…
MR No I’m not sure that the Chicago Art Institute has that piece. I’m not sure they’ve had an opportunity to put it on public display yet because they quite often will collect items for, especially in the textile area, for study purposes and documentation of the artist’s careers and uh, don’t always have an opportunity to display everything that’s in their collection.
Especially the textiles because they want to rotate them for light exposure.
AZ So, at that point, you’re starting to head towards tapestry.
MR um-hm.
AZ And making things that were more ends per inch, closer together…
MR Right.
AZ …so they would be lighter. Were you sticking with the kimono shape at that point or?
MR No I, it wasn’t until just very recently that I did the kimono shape in a tapestry format.
In 2003 I believe it was, I was invited to be one of the American artists for the Polish Triannale of Tapestry in Luge, Poland.
I’d been trying to decide what to do for that because the woman that invited me had seen an exhibit that I had in Vancouver that she thought was a nice installation.
It included the kimonos and some other rugs, but, so I began trying to think how I could do an installation that would be up to the standards that were expected for an international tapestry exhibition like that.
We were allotted a 3 metre by 3 metre square space for wall pieces, so I could do up to a 9 foot by 9 foot rug or tapestry.
As it turned out, at the same time I was trying to think about what designs I wanted to incorporate I had taken the dog for a walk and tripped and broke my ankle, and so I knew that I was going to be challenged to be weaving on the big loom.
Also was thinking about ways to get a large tapestry to Poland because it had to be packed up and sent to them.
But the thing that had the biggest influence on what I wound up doing is this was about the time the US was about to invade Iraq you know. The second Gulf war.
I didn’t personally think it was a good idea and a friend of mine had been to a Buddhist fellowship meeting where someone had read a poem by June Jordan about the bombing on Iraq in the 90’s and the devastation that it caused for turning houses into bits of sand or – I read the poem a number of times. It had a big effect on me.
So I began thinking about, well, what if I were to weave a series of houses that centered out from a distinct house form on a contrasting background, to the point where that house disappeared and became indistinguishable from the background and had small accent areas or windows that eventually one by one disappeared and went away.
I’d really liked that process of starting with the idea first and then doing the design afterwards instead of a lot of the rugs I’ve done, I would do the weaving and maybe the kimonos were the exception to that where I would have the concept of the four seasons somewhat driving at least the colour selections.
So it was tremendous experience of creativity, I think. It gave me a very good feeling to have the idea first and do the weaving after that. Concept first, as it were.
So I did that one. It went to Poland. It was well displayed and well received. It was, I think, later exhibited at Woven Gallery, outside of Philadelphia.
And then the Art in Embassies program had some images of mine and that was one that one of the investors chose to have displayed at an ambassador’s residence in one of the countries in Africa. So that’s where it’s at right now.
AZ When you’re working in tapestry are you working in a traditional way? I know you’re working on the horizontal loom.
MR Yes.
AZ But are you, do you have a cartoon that you’re going by and that you’ve drawn and planned out?
MR I’ve been to art school. Drawing was probably my least favourite class. In fact I think it was the last class I took. But colour and design I always enjoyed.
In fact, when I was in art school taking the colour and design class I’d asked the instructor, I said “You know I’m really interested in weaving and we have a weekly project for school. So can I do my weekly project as a woven project.” And he says “Sure!”
AZ Well, that’s nice.
MR Well, it was nice, but that meant I had to do one weaving a week so…
AZ Oh right! (laughter)
MR So that lasted for one semester and then I went to paint.
So consequently I’ve never been very enamoured with doing a lot of drawing on paper in terms of getting designs done.
But I’ve always been comfortable working with the computer so I typically planned out any weaving I’ve done with a sketch on the computer which has allowed me to rearrange colours and shapes until I get something I like and then print it out and then go ahead and dye yarns that are in harmony with that idea and then weave from there.
So my sketches, or cartoons, come from the computer. They are printed out at a regular notebook size piece of paper so it’s not a full scale cartoon that most tapestry weavers would use.
AZ It gives you an idea to go by.
MR Yes. It gives me an idea to go by and then allows me a chance to re-think the idea as I start weaving and see what’s happening.
And often I’ll have the computer overlay a light grid on that so I can mark my progress.
AZ They are still block patterns within that images.
MR uh-hmm.
AZ So I guess you’re carrying over the blocks that you have done all along.
MR Yes, it is. And the other thing that really happens is that for all the planning of colour and dyeing the yarns and looking at the yarns, skeins, you think you have an idea of what it’s going to look like but once the skeins become something woven, even though they’re entirely weft faced and solid colour within their particular block, the way the yarn that’s woven relates to the colour next to it is different from the way a skein or a ball placed next to each other works.
So there’s always a little bit of adjustment when, once you start weaving.
You say, well, these colours are not quite what I thought they were going to be next to each other, and so let’s maybe think about rearranging them a bit.
There was one three block weaving that I did, again in the rug technique, that I would keep changing the cartoon as I wove because I’d get this and I’d say, well it doesn’t look right. So I wouldn’t undo the weaving, I’d leave it in there. I’d say well, let’s go back to the computer and make a new sketch.
I want to put a stack of maybe a quarter inch of paper that show the changes from time to time.
But the other thing I was going to say about the, having done the tapestry houses, then I really became enamoured of the house shape as something to explore a lot further.
So I did a lot of woven houses for a number of years after that.
Having done that very serious piece based on my reaction to the invasion of Iraq I went on a vacation to northern India and had done a lot of reading and studying of Indian myths, religious ideas and so had all of that idea in the back of my mind. And then all of the exposure to the textiles and the wonderful ways, different ways of using colour was that, what one finds in any other culture than your own – once you take yourself out of your own culture, you have a lot of inspiration for other ideas.
So I came back from that trip and then did a set of 8 houses that were a little bit lighter idea, that were based on different aspects of Indian mythology and colours that might be associated with that.
Things I done a number of times trying to think how to relate colour to something that you wouldn’t naturally relate it to.
So the series of 6 kimonos actually wound up with titles that were related to characteristics you wouldn’t associate with weavings or kimonos, but maybe those characteristics were somehow evoked by looking at the colour combinations.
So had one that was Nobility because there were very rich red colours on a grey background.
Actually the one that was all in different shades of grey then you know, after working with colours so much, I said, what would happen if I were to work only with grey colours.
So this one is very stately and noble sort of colour combinations.
Verity sort of the true blue colours.
AZ Uh-huh.
MR So then the Indian houses were related to characteristics of the gods, so the one that was in shades of red was Agni the fire god and Tara was green and Krishna blue. There was one Mahisha, the buffalo demon, which was in cow colours and buffalo colours.
AZ I was looking at this rug that you brought, and you have also your basketry that you’ve been doing.
Those are sort of related in that they are working with colour but in a different 3 dimensional way. So, those are interesting too.
When did you start doing those?
MR That must have been in 2002. I’d taken a workshop, one day workshop, at the Vancouver Convergence with Kate Anderson who does absolutely incredible knotted linen teapots that look like paintings that are related to traditional painters work.
I was fascinated with the technique. She, because she wanted a lot of detail in her work used some very fine waxed linen to do all the knotting.
Each little spot of colour comes about because you’ve tied one knot with that waxed linen and each one becomes a different thing.
Well, I found it slow and tedious and so I put it away for a long time and didn’t do anything with it.
But I had some white rug warp linen that I had used for some table runners for somebody who wanted some table runners.
I had some longish thrums left over from that and this was a lot fatter yarns and so I got to thinking, well, if I could dye the colours that I wanted instead of being dependent upon the waxed linen that was available and use a little bit larger size thread, this might be something that would be a little bit more in keeping with what I was willing to do in terms of…and I’d always been curious what would happen if I were to work in 3 dimensions
Sort of a natural fit. I worked on that first one for a little bit and made an ovoid shape I still have. But I got to thinking, what about making cylinders and so I would start the knotting at the base and then work my way around the form and then take the support form out of it and have just a free-standing cylinder at the end of it.
Well this really really intrigued me because I had originally worked with some painted warp and so that meant that you wound up getting – because these knots were tied at different places – from where they had been dyed and came up in different sequence. You wound up getting some patterns that were a big surprise from what one might have thought.
And so I’d done a lot of playing with that in terms of what kind of patterns can you get from this technique and how can you manipulate the colours. All of these will start by winding a skein, or several skeins, depending upon the size of it, which I’ll lay out on plastic of some sort and then paint with dye. Different colours in different areas. And then set the dye and rinse it completely. And then cut one end of the skein so now I’ve got long linear segments of the yarn that can then be used to create the vessel form.
AZ And they’re very beautiful, they really are. The ones that I’ve seen are really nice.
MR One of the outcomes of having done that show in Poland was that I had in invitation from a woman living in Chicago that had originally been born in Lithuania, married an American man in the ‘50’s, moved to America and then when the wall went down in the former Soviet Republics gained their independence, she decided she wanted to go back to her home town in Lithuania and establish a museum as her gift back to her homeland.
She is an artist and a tapestry weaver and so she wanted as much as possible to exhibit tapestries in her museum.
And so she asked me if I would consider doing a show at the museum and again after sending the work to Poland had not been terribly easy, nor inexpensive, because of their requirements. So I hesitated for a while and then finally decided to go ahead and do it.
The show was to be in 2007 and in 2006 I had the opportunity to take a trip to the grasslands of eastern Tibet and the nomadic areas and visit monastaries, nomads, shaman festivals and the like and had a tremendous amount of visual stimulus from that trip.
About the same time I needed to start thinking about putting together a large museum exhibition. All of my work. There were three galleries and so I wound up doing one, a set that were based on prayer flags, which we saw a lot of fields of prayer flags.
Just a very moving idea, the idea that you would print a prayer on a piece of cloth and then hang that piece of cloth up in the wind with the wind blowing the prayers onwards gaining merit for you and whatever people that you had put the prayer flag up for.
And then the prayer flags would hang up there in the elements until they just disintegrated to nothing. And the fibres from which they had come.
So I did one full gallery that was of prayer flags. One with a large tapestry that simulated the written text on a prayer flag and then a set of 5 of them in the traditional colours of some prayer flags, that mimic the idea of the disintegration that – so there were 3 large rectangular forms and each one a grey background that started with very intense red, let say, and then that red slowly faded into something else in the other rectangles.
So that was one gallery. And then the other thing that we experienced when we were there was the nomadic Tibetans had traditionally grazed their herds of yaks from lower elevation to higher elevation as the summer progressed. So they lived in tents and they had nomadic lifestyles, but partly because of concerns about over-grazing but also partly as an idea of controlling people, the government was building houses and trying to settle them, fencing the yard and so on.
The idea of the changing of the old ways and having nomads being put into houses, I thought, was sort of a jarring idea and so that actually became the title for the exhibit – Houses for Nomads.
So I did for the second gallery, I did a set of 16 houses that were all based on some of the colour ideas we’d seen and named for the places. Places that were visited on that trip.
And then the third gallery which was really a long hallway that connected the two of them I lined with some photographs from that trip, just to give people an idea and the background from that.
AZ It was a really influential trip for you.
MR I’m lucky to have been able to travel a fair amount. When I was working full time I always said that was a reason to work, so I would be able to travel and do something, see something different.
I’m a very firm believer in finding inspiration from exposing yourself to something other than what you are comfortable with, what you normally see.
I think it was for the American Tapestry Alliance newsletter I’d written an article on creativity and I said it really doesn’t have to be travel, just do anything that is out of your normal comfort zone. Go to a different grocery store than you normally go to, or go to some place that you would normally go to but go with a friend. Go to a museum exhibit. If you’ve already seen it go with someone else they’re going to have a different viewpoint.
And just these little things that jolt you out of your normal way of thinking make you consider things differently and I think can be a real stimulus to creativity.
I’ve always woven, you know, even when I was working full time I would get up early in the morning and weave until I went to work and then come back from work and weave some more in the evenings.
AZ I guess we should mention what you actually did as a ‘real’ job.
MR Yes, I was trained as a chemist and later a bio-chemist so I got my PhD in bio-chemistry and ’74 and was actually about the time that I started weaving. I think I must have been finishing graduate school and was afraid that I was going to run out of things to do. So I took up weaving because that was certainly something that would take a lot of time.
AZ That’s true, it does.
MR So I did that until about 10 years ago. At that point I realized from that job I’d saved enough money that I would be able to do what I wanted to do based on what I had in savings, and occasionally sell something.
AZ So you’re sort of supporting yourself on, still from that job.
MR Yes still from that money I put away and saved and been fortunate enough that it’s held up and I’ve been able to do what I wanted to do.
Still travel a little bit.
AZ Yes. You travel quite a bit.
Thank you for talking with me. I really appreciate it Michael.
MR Well, and thank you for asking me.
AZ It was fun.
Musical interlude
That’s all for this episode. And now it’s time to get warped, because everyone knows, you have to be warped to weave.
Musical interlude
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