BETTY VERA
Taking my time with a slow art form

I always wanted to be an artist.  As a child, I loved to draw and paint. Later,  I earned my BFA in Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and then headed to New York, where my painting practice languished but I began learning to weave. I bought my first loom for $14—a rigid-heddle loom that caught my eye in a toy store window—and wove simple scarves and pillow tops on it.

One day, a friend showed me some shawls she had woven. All were made on the same warp of randomly mixed jewel tones, but each had a different weft hue that changed the overall color feeling. I was entranced by the color magic and mystified by the weave structure that helped it happen. I just had to learn how to do this!

My first teacher, Juliette, was  4’11”.  I am tall. On her tiny folding floor loom, I grazed my shins, kicked foot treadles loose, and made every weaving mistake possible, but Juliette was patient and amused. In spite of my clumsiness I wove a beautiful table runner with overshot patterning. Juliette opened my eyes to contemporary fiber art and urged me to join the New York Guild of Handweavers. That was 1978, and I am still a member. And Juliette felt gratified that I wanted to go further by studying woven textile design at the Fashion Institute of Technology.

The first floor loom I bought was a kit loom from Harrisville Designs. I assembled it all by myself, and I still love to weave on it. At first I wove functional items, but it wasn’t long before the artist in me took over and I began weaving tapestries. I have never looked back. By now I have acquired three more floor looms, and for the past decade, I have been working with fabricators to produce my Jacquard tapestries on their industrial machinery.

It’s no surprise that I bring a painterly approach to my fiber art. When I weave by hand, I dye-paint the warp yarns and use a color-blending method traditional to tapestry weaving which  I learned in the mid-1980s, when I had an opportunity to work as a weaver in Michelle Lester’s New York studio. When I went to work for Michelle, she had been commissioned to weave four large tapestries—each 30 feet high and 10 feet wide—and she hired every weaver she knew in order to complete the project on time.  I got to know some of the other weavers, and several of us formed a group, New York Tapestry Artists, and exhibited our work together extensively for several years. More than 30 years later, we are still friends and occasionally exhibit together, despite having scattered geographically.

Color is my primary weaving impetus. I depart from tapestry tradition—in which the warp is completely covered by the wefts, which create the design—by incorporating painted warps as a design element in rendering an image.

Warp and weft hues interlace to create new colors, and these color interactions create an image made of tiny dots of color, like a Pointillist painting. There is both vibrancy and mystery in the woven image.

Color interactions work differently in my two bodies of work—hand-woven warp-painted tapestries and Jacquard weaving—due to the differences in weaving technology between weaver-operated and industrial looms, and the type of control I have over the equipment and yarns.  My hand weaving is more painterly, as I can use a wide range of colors and yarns to achieve the image. My Jacquards, on the other hand, are more limited in color, but because the Jacquard loom can raise each thread individually, I have complete control over every pixel in a digital image file, yielding precise,  photographic detail.

I love the exceptional detail possible with Jacquard weaving, but lately I’ve been giving in to the desire to get my hands on the work. I sometimes hand-color or embroider the finished weaving to bring out the image in a richer way.

I choose my subject matter spontaneously—or, rather, it chooses me. When I stumble upon something interesting, I capture it with cell phone snapshots: a parked delivery bicycle casting complex shadows, a rusty manhole cover, or graffiti behind a chain-link fence.  In urban environments I discover strange objects, unusual perspectives, complex shadows, structures, grunge and clutter, graffiti, gritty surfaces, shadows, lines, texture. Interior spaces can be filled with meditative quietude, a haunting sense of presence, shadows or a halo of light, from a window, or visible traces of human activity. At times my weaving materials themselves serve as my subject.

Art making is essential to my wellbeing, and I thrive on seeing new artwork and being in the company of kindred spirits. I joined the Textile Study Group of New York during the mid-1980s, and I am still a member even though I now live in Massachusetts. My live/work loft is one of 40 in a restored former 19th-century cotton mill that is home to an assortment of visual artists, poets, musicians, novelists. My looms rest happily on wooden floors that bear traces of scuff marks and graffiti from earlier generations of workers and equipment. And I am within walking distance of MASS MoCA, a huge museum complex that was once a textile mill.

Patience, attention to detail, the pleasure of working with my hands, a meditative focus, and willingness to embrace the process wholeheartedly—all come into play when I create my tapestries.

www.bettyvera.com