Mastering Her Craft

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Welcome to beyond you'd why Podcast, where we go beyond just talking about your why and actually helping you discover and then live your why. And so if you're a regular listener, you know that every week we talk about one of the nine whys and then I bring on somebody that has that why. So if you have not yet discovered your why, go to whyinstitute.com and discover your why and then come back because. This will have much more meaning for you when you know your why. Now, today we are going to be talking about a very rare why that probably the most rare why, which is the why of mastery. To seek mastery. Now, people with this WHY seek deep amounts of information over sometimes a broad variety of topics. They will pick a specific subject and begin to learn about it, often for the sheer joy of curiosity in learning something new. They gather and retain substantial knowledge in different areas. Typically viewed as experts in their area, they will insist that they have yet to truly master it. They are fearless about new subjects or ideas. In a discussion with a person with this why, you might hear them say, wait, we need to think about this first. People with this why include artists, experts, masters, teachers, master craftsmen, theorists, programmers and surgeons. Today I've got a very fascinating guest for you. Her name is Elizabeth Buckley. Let me read you her bio. Elizabeth is a second generation tapestry artist and teacher of over 50 years. Her work evolved from using techniques of the Mexican and Rio Grande traditions to those of French tapestry. She further honed her skills in France and I'm going to butcher this, but it's the atelier of Giselle Brevet. She's going to correct that for me. With her degree in art, Elizabeth brings to the classroom her deep grounding in design principles in color theory that specifically apply to tapestry. She draws from multiple tapestry traditions to provide her students the technique vocabulary for finding and expressing their own unique voice. Elizabeth's tapestries have a lengthy exhibition history, including national and Canadian juried and invitational shows as well as in museum exhibitions. Her work is in numerous private collections and was featured in the Fiber Art article on an Artist's Sense of place fall 2017 issue. Her publications include Fiber Arts Design Book, the Tapestry Handbook, Contemporary international tapestry. In 2011, Elizabeth was awarded the American Tapestry Alliance Award for Excellence in tapestry. Now, for Elizabeth, tapestry weaving is a universal, nonverbal language that transcends generations, cultures and and locale. Elizabeth, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you, Gary. It's nice to be here.

Let's start by correcting me.

It's the atelier of Giselle Brevet and I studied in Aubusson, France.

Man, I destroyed that. Well, you know, that is not my language. And thank you for correcting that. Well, let's start with the most obvious. How did you get involved with tapestry?

Well, I first learned to weave from my mother at the age of 10, hence why I'm second generation.

And where was this? Where did you grow up?

I grew up in Kansas, a very small town in Kansas. And my mother had worked on her master's degree in art education. And as she was learning to do things, I was curious and wanting to do them as well. She was going through the more traditional art program where you learn the painting, the drawing, the printmaking and that sort of thing. And then she discovered weaving and textile arts and all of that arena and basically just gravitated to that like a fish to water. That was just her metier of expression. And as she was learning things, I was very young and it looked really interesting to me and I said, can I learn to do that too? And she just showed me things as she was learning them and that's how I got started.

And so did you start originally in tapestry or in different disciplines and then move towards tapestry?

I think I started first with macrame, which is an knotting technique. It was really big in the 1960s. It was really quite the rage. And then from there learning the basics of weaving. And in weaving, then the tapestry is one form of weaving where the warp, which is the threads on the loom and the weft, which are the threads that you weave with. It is what they call a weft faced form of weaving, where the threads you weave with are the only threads you see. They cover up the warp entirely. And I found that to be one of the most fascinating aspects of weaving. Over the years, I kept going back to tapestry. I explored other areas of weaving, but I kept going back to tapestry because that's what I really, really loved the most.

What does the word, or maybe what does the word tapestry mean?

Does it have a meaning.

In the traditional sense? Tapestry is a hand woven technique with discontinuous wefts. In other words, the yarn that you weave with do not go all the way across the war. They stop and they start to make different patterns and designs and what about.

Tapestry is so exciting, interesting that you have dedicated 50 years to it?

Oh, gosh, it's a combination of things. One, it's a very old art form. It goes back several thousands of years. You know, they will excavate at excavated tombs in Egypt that have tapestry in them. In the other part of the world, in the Inca and the pre Inca cultures, the Hawari cultures, that was their way of living. Everybody was expected to participate in weaving and weaving tapestry in some fashion or another. Whether it was spinning the yarn, dyeing it, weaving it, it became their method of currency as well as their way of documenting and creating a language. And the whole idea of how old this is has just always fascinated and intrigued me. And the fact that this exists everywhere in the world and many, many of the indigenous cultures around the world have developed their own system of weaving as one of the primary ways of developing their culture. So it is an old and very universal nonverbal language in that sense. It's a very visual language, but it's also a language of warp and weft and the designs in the warp and the weft.

So why did that become so exciting to you?

I'm intrigued by things that are really, really old. My father, when I was a child, was quite fascinated with paleontology, and he would take our family on fossil hunting excavations in the Flint Hills of Kansas. And I learned, I think, around 9 or 10, how to read the layers in the limestone and the shale and start doing shape identification of the invertebrate fossils, the gastropods, the crinoid stems, the trilobites, you know, those sorts of things. And the whole concept of geologic time being so much larger than the human lifetime, I had a really hard time trying to understand that then. And even now, it still blows my mind to think in terms of millions of people years time being that long and old.

So you just kind of saw tapestry, saw that it was a universal language or a universal way of communicating or connecting. And it just intrigued you?

It really just intrigued me, Grabbed my interest and grabbed my psyche, grabbed everything.

And then what did you do? How did you learn it to the level? What are the steps that you've gone through to learn tapestry?

Well, as I was growing up, through my teen years, my mother basically set me up on a loom and let me show me the essence of over and under and how to make basic shapes. And this let me start exploring on my own. I wove without any kind of pre planning. I just was letting the yarn talk to me and thinking about, okay, One shape leads to another, one row leads to another. Let's try this color next to that color, those kinds of of things. So that was kind of like the beginning point. And then as I went into my 20s, I became a little more formalized in my searching and understanding of the basic techniques with the information that was available in the 60s. And there wasn't a whole lot documented. Some of the Mexican tapestry techniques were documented. Some of the New Mexico Rio Grande traditions were a little bit documented. And so I had those books to begin with.

Documented means this is how you do it?

Yes, like instructions, diagrams and instructions. If you want to get rows that look like this, this is what you do. If you want to create angles, this is what you do. If you want to create curves, this is what you do. So it was a basic study of how to create essential shapes, how to create shades within colors, you know, going from one color to another, gradations, those kinds of things. From there, I continued just weaving on my own, trying to explore what it is I wanted to express in this very interesting language. And the more I dove into it, the more intrigued I got with it. And I got to a certain point where I was at this point still designing and creating as I wove. And I got to a point where I was. My designs got too complex for me to hold it all in my head. Basically, I would spend more time staring at the loom than weaving because I was trying to figure out where I was going to go. And then I knew I needed to find a master to work with that would help me get some ideas down on paper in some fashion so that I would have a sense of being able to know where I was going to go next by creating a roadmap of sorts. So I started looking around, and I saw the work of Jean Pierre La Rochette and Yael Lurdy, who were starting to teach workshops here in the United States, took a series of three workshops with them. This would have been in my 30s, and I took one workshop a year. I go and do an intensive workshop, go home, weave, weave, weave, weave, weave for a year, and then I go back and take another workshop, say, okay, show me more, and they would show me more. And then I go home and weave. So it was an incremental thing over a number of years.

So when you're talking about going home and weave, weave, weave, weave. Give us a sense for how much time are we talking about?

Well, tapestry is very time intensive.

To do areas. The more detail you have in a small area, the more time it Takes to weave it. So you're looking at several hours to weave maybe a half inch across, maybe 12 or 13 inches of warp.

So how much would you put in per day? Or was it like a daily thing that you would do?

I would try to do it daily. I was also juggling a day job because, well, you know, an artist has to earn a living and you have to pay your bills and, you know, usually the art does not pay. So I was also juggling a day job and then weaving. Usually I would weave in the mornings. First thing, get up, crack a dawn, weave for a couple hours, then get ready to go to work and be out in the world. And my best creative times are early in the morning.

So if you. How. What would a weekend be like for you?

Oh, weekends were great. I would. Then I'd have, like two whole days. I wouldn't weave solidly the whole day because after a while you focus on something, you just get really tired. But I would definitely weave the entire morning. If I got up at daylight and wove until about noon, I was a happy camper.

Okay, so for those. And I want to. I want you to continue with your story, but I think it would be great to give the audience, the listeners, a sense of what one of your tapestries is like, because if you know, how could describe, you know.

Your favorite tapestry that you've created.

Well, I have several favorites, but my favorite ones, I'll put it that way, usually have to do with the effects of transparency and creating layers on top of layers. So in other words, you're seeing through a veil, through something behind that, and do something behind that, that's mind boggling. And to be able to weave that, and you're keeping track of basically two or three layers simultaneously as you're weaving. So it requires a lot of focus and a lot of concentration to be able to pull that off and patience and not being in a rush because it's just. It's not something you can rush.

So for those that are listening, how big are we talking? Like the size of a wall or size of a big poster or how big are we talking?

We're talking about one piece, which I call the veils of time is 50 inches by 60 inches. And that took me a total of 23 months to complete. And that is from the design phase. It took a couple months to design it. Getting the loom warped up and ready, getting the cartoon, which is the design you put under the warp so you can see the roadmap as it will, getting the colors selected. And prepared out of the yarns and then all the weaving time and then after it comes off the loom, the, the finishing and getting it ready to hang. So that's 23 months, basically all that entire process.

And so if you were to look at that from a, you know, say 10ft away, it looks like a picture almost, right?

Yeah, it's an imagery. So, yeah, it's like a picture, but it's a woven picture. And it's what we would call a weaverly image versus just copying a photograph.

Yeah. So for those of you that are listening, again, you need to go to her website, Elizabeth Buckley, tapestryartist.com and just take a look. So if you, if you maybe stop this podcast for a second, go look at what we're talking about and then come back and you'll hear more about how the heck she did those. Because I remember looking at them and thinking, there's no way that's tapestry. I mean, it looks like a super detailed picture versus being made with pieces of yarn. That just was mind boggling to me. And initially I go to, what the heck would it take to be able to make something like that? That's not like a weekend warrior that goes out there and creates something like that.

It's not something that happens fast. It's a totally different time in a very different sense. It relates to, you know, geologic time and really old time time that just goes beyond the nanosecond and what we're used to in our high tech days right now, it's a totally different concept of time.

Okay, so back to your story. Now you're 30 years old, you've gone, you've taken the once a year, the three courses.

And then at the end of that time, Jean Pierre suggested that I go to Aubusson. He says, you really, you know, your next step is to go to Aubusson, look at all the old tapestries, because. And Aubusson itself, it's a center of tapestry. It's had all aspects and components of making tapestry for six centuries. And it was recently, I can't remember which year, but within the last 10 years, declared.

World Heritage Site by the UNESCO. And they've created a city de l' Art Tapesterie. And they've created all kinds of things to help visitors come to the town. See the ateliers, see the process of making tapestry, see the process of the dyeing, the plants that were grown, the dyeing, the mills that created the fiber, the ateliers that weave the tapestries, and then the restoration studios. It's all in one area of France. It's really a delightful, delightful place to be.

So tapestry started in France.

It did not begin in France, I think when they were tracing where the knowledge of weaving came from. It probably came from North Africa. And then as people migrated around the Mediterranean Sea, some of the weavers came up to the central part of France in the cruise district, and to Aubusson, where they had the water, they could raise the sheep, they could create the fibers, all the components going into it. So it's been an obasan since around 6, 700 A.D. oh, wow.

So what did you learn there? You went there for how?

I was actually there for only a month. A month felt like a lifetime.

Okay.

Where I was eat, sleep, live, breathe tapestry. For a solid month, I was in the atelier. Giselle Brevet, she herself was a fourth generation master weaver. It was the women in her family. She grew up in Fellowton, which is another area close to Aubusson, where they have another tapestry center. And it was in the women in her family that passed down the knowledge. And her husband, Henri Brevet, was teaching at that time the Aubusson School of Tapestry. He was teaching cartoon and tapestry design. So between the two of them, they would work collaboratively on their pieces. She would do commission work and weave various things designed by painters and other artists. But she and Henri, her husband, would also create tapestries of scenes of Aubusson and things like that. So she was looking at this was in the 1990s, and this is a time in France when tapestry was dying as an art form. This is before UNESCO came along and declared it a heritage site. And in French culture and in this whole weaving tradition, ateliers kept their competitive edge by keeping the knowledge within the family. So it would get passed down generation upon generation within each family. And by the time of 1980s, 1990s, there were families whose kids did not want to learn tapestry. It was like, that was totally passe, you know, why would I want to do this kind of attitude? So as ateliers, the master weavers, if they would die, their knowledge of techniques would also die out. And so this is what Giselle and Henri Brevet were facing. And when I approached and there were two others from the United States taking workshops with Jean Pierre La Rochette and Joel Lurie. And we approached, we wrote letters, we sent pictures of our work saying we would like to learn more. And one of the three of us from the United States, her daughter lived in France, so she went to Aubusson. With our information and knocked on atelier doors to see who would be willing to take us on. Angie Zelle and Henri said yes. So that's how we came to do that.

And you got to spend a month there.

And I got to spend a month there.

So when you left, you had new knowledge, new skills. What did you have?

New knowledge, new skills. A lot to integrate, to digest. When we weren't weaving, we were looking at tapestries, historical tapestries, contemporary tapestries. We were going to different museums, we were going to different ateliers. We were just trying to absorb everything we possibly could about tapestry.

So that what? Why did you go to this level? Why did you go to this depth in tapestry? You were already really good, right?

I was skilled, but I wanted to become even more polished. There were some things I did not know yet how to do. One was how do you weave water? How do you weave forms that are really three dimensional? How do you create illusory space on a two dimensional plane? And that was really the direction I was wanting to get more information on, in addition to more subtle and sophisticated shading techniques.

The nuances.

Nuances? Yes, the nuances.

That's one of the things that we talk about with people with the why of mastery, is they love the nuances. They go so deep. But it's really those little subtle things that make all the difference.

Oh, yes, absolutely.

And they go like you did to the nth degree to get them sometimes to their detriment, right?

Well, yeah, you get really obsessed sometimes and just absorbed in all this stuff. Yes.

You said something really interesting. You said that you got to the point where you almost couldn't weave because you got so focused on maybe the detail.

Well, the idea. I was trying to understand where I was going in the weaving. This is back when I was trying to let the idea evolve and just kind of grow. It's what I call weaving from the gut. You just sit down at the loom and you start weaving. And I still do that periodically just because I enjoy that process. But I needed to find a way to make a roadmap so I'd have a sense of where I was going to go.

Gotcha.

And understand then what kind of weaving I would be doing, what kinds of decisions I would be making. It's like constant decision making and puzzle solving process. How am I going to get this effect using these techniques? Well, I could do this or I could do that. You know, it's those kinds of decisions.

And so once you finished with your month in France, came back and started to try to implement all this.

Yes.

And then take us a little bit farther.

So about a year after I came back from France, I had woven, I think, one major tapestry after coming back from France, incorporating some of the knowledge, you know, working on what I learned from the masters and incorporating just bits of it into designs that were talking about things I felt needed to be expressed in this way. And it came. I had the opportunity to teach, basically. And part of my mission is to help preserve the knowledge that was passed on to me from Giselle Brevet so that it will be continued and not get lost. So part of my mission is to not only keep that knowledge alive in my own work, but to also pass that knowledge on to other tapestry weavers so that they can have a more deeper understanding of how to get different effects. And so this knowledge will live.

Ah, so it's kind of dying a little bit.

Well, I think at this point in time, now we're in, you know, 2019. It's quite a ways from the 1990s, there has been a resurgence in tapestry here in the United States.

Great.

And with the UNESCO declaration of Aubusson being a Heritage site, World Heritage site, there's been renewed interest and vitalization there as well. So there's been new breadth put into this art form, which I'm really happy to see happening.

So you now teach. You also do. So you create the tapestries?

I create the tapestries.

And then you teach courses to other people that want to learn from all the experience that you've had. And what is that like teaching somebody?

Oh, I love it. You know, it's like I have a captive audience. People want to learn what I love to do. It's like a win, win situation. People are really thirsting because they're struggling and they're frustrated because they can't get different effects and they want to know how to get different effects. I give them the tools to help them understand the theory behind why some of these techniques, Techniques work visually and let them understand how the techniques work in a weaverly way and how you can synchronize design and technique to create what you need to create.

So if somebody were to say that they believe that you're a master at this, do you. How does that feel to you? Do you feel like you're a master in tapestry or.

I think on getting in that mode, yes. I mean, there's always more to learn in any field. There's always more to learn. But I feel like I have enough under my belt now to say, yes, I Am a master. But a master who's always expanding and learning more.

Yeah. Continuing your journey.

Continuing it, yes.

What does tapestry represent to you? Is it a language? Is it a art form? Is it a currency? What is it to you?

It's probably primarily a language in an art form, the two merging together. What do you mean? Well, it's a little hard to separate out the woven language from the visual impact of it. And the woven language is the techniques, but it's also the imagery you create. So that's why I say the two go hand in hand.

What has been the most challenging thing for you to have been on this journey because you've invested your life to this.

I've invested my life to this. The challenges living in the day to day world that is totally oblivious to this art form and the constant need to educate people to help them understand that there's a lot more you can do with your hands and your fingers besides text message and type on a keyboard. That there's a lot of skills that you can develop in your hands to create other ways of communicating, create forms of self expression, responding to the world in a very tactile way.

I can almost imagine it as like a therapy.

It can be like a therapy for people. Yeah, it can be.

Because you got to know yourself.

Yeah. You learn about yourself as you're working. I mean, any kind of nonverbal art has that potential of being a therapeutic way of expressing something that can't be expressed any other way.

How do you determine what you're going to create?

Oh, I always kind of joke with my students. I can always tell when an idea is starting to percolate for the next tapestries. I start getting obsessed about certain things. For one tapestry I did, I was getting obsessed by the havelite reflects off of leaves. I live have an ace an irrigation ditch near my studio in the South Valley here in Albuquerque. And there are old hundred year old cottonwood trees that grow along that. And of course I get to see the changing seasons with them. And I just. Whenever the spring green starts happening, when the leaves start coming out, it's that really bright yellow green kind of spring green. Or in the fall when they start turning golden yellow and the sunlight is on them and it's just a glow. I was trying to figure out how do I capture the idea of light on leaves. And that was my very first kind of initial idea for a tapestry that I eventually wove called Dialogues through the Veil, where I was working with transparency and leaves falling and a waterfall of light. And it Was just an interesting process. But ideas kind of start coming to me because I get obsessed about something. I get intrigued by something. Something makes me really, really curious. And then I start just focusing on where that will take me.

Makes me wonder if mastery is.

Just a form of curiosity, Meaning people become a master because they are so stinking curious, like you just said.

Well, it is a form of curiosity.

Yeah.

But it's also a form of wanting to hone that skill to the ultimate finesse as well.

How have you figured out how to get out of your own way? Meaning?

I understand that one really well. Everybody struggles with that. Yes. We have these conversations in my classes. I say, you know, we have this editor that lives in our head that says, you're not an artist. Who do you think you are? No, no, no, no, no. All that stuff. And I said, you know, and we all have it. I have it. And I just basically say, okay, that's your opinion. Now go listen to this music while I can get to work. You know, I play some music in the background to kind of soothe that editor, to distract the editor so that I could kind of just get into the process. Creative process of working.

How do you get yourself out of the creative process and into the doing process?

Well, there's. You know, in the design phase, I am. I am doing and doing in a way that is very intuitive, I guess is the best way to describe it. I will sketch. I will pull out my watercolors. I will try to get the idea that's brewing in my head in some kind of concrete form, and I will take the idea as far as I can for that day for two or three hours, and then I know I need to go off and leave it, because part of the creative process is to let things percolate and gestate. And then you go back to it with a fresh set of eyes the next day, going, okay, in this area. I need to do this next. And you work on that. It's a building process.

And when are you done?

When am I done? That's a really good question. I get a design as far along as I can until I know I'm now ready for the loom. So I've completed the phase of I figured out as much as I can on paper, and now I need to hit the loom and start figuring out the rest of it with yarn.

Mm. So that's a question. The reason I asked that question is because one of the things that I see with people with the why of mastery, they have. I'll give you an example? This one gal who has the YF Mastery. She and her husband got a new dog, a puppy. And when I was talking to her, she said, oh, yeah, we got this new puppy, and we're wanting to train our dog. And I said, well, how's it going? And she says, well, I've read six books, and I've watched three videos on how to train my dog. I said, great. How's the training going? And she said, well, I haven't started yet.

And I'm like, wait a second. That's six books and three videos already. When are you gonna actually start the training? How have you figured out to get beyond? To start? Yeah.

I think it's because I work every day. It's a daily discipline. So that even though I don't think I'm gonna do much, I will walk into the studio and give myself a minimum of half an hour to do something. And often it's just kind of the getting started is the hardest thing. It's kind of like the artist with a blank canvas getting started because they're staring at this blank canvas. How do you make that first mark? Well, for me, it's getting the idea down. Well, I have this idea. I'll start with this piece of the idea and see what I can do with that.

I go in every day and just keep working on this piece of an idea. Not try to do the whole thing all at once, but just keep working on this little bit here, this little bit there that gets me started and keeps me going with the flow. And after a while, the design starts taking over and telling me what it needs next in a really clear way. So once I get to that point, then the momentum is happening, and I'm writing the momentum.

At what point is it good enough?

Oh, gosh, is it ever good enough?

When is it good enough to go from the design to the work to the picking up the loom and going, how do you know when?

I cannot go any further with pencil, paper, whatever. When I've gone as far as I can in paper, it's like, okay. And I don't know how really describe that moment. I've got enough of a roadmap to begin, and then there's going to be areas in that roadmap that I will be figuring out at the loom. And I just learned to trust that process and to know that once I'm at the loom, I will figure something out.

Interesting, because that's a critical thing that I hear from other people with the why of mastery and that's what I meant by getting out of your own way is how do you move from the watching the six videos and three books, or six books and three videos to. To taking your dog outside and starting the training process?

Right. I think for some of my students, because they have a similar kind of question, is they want to know how I know what I'm going to do, which techniques I'm going to use, where they have the idea that somehow you have to show up at the loom knowing exactly what you're going to do. Everywhere, every piece, every inch of it. And I say, I don't know when I sit down at the loom. I think, understanding that you're not going to know everything in advance, but I know enough to get started, and I start in this area here.

So momentum. Get your momentum going.

Just get started in an area you know how to begin with, and you start there, and then the tapestry will start talking to you, the colors will start talking to you, all that sort of thing.

So let's explore that for just a minute. I hear that. I hear that comment or what you just said. Well, the tapestry starts talking to me.

Yes.

What is that like? What do you mean?

What is that like?

What happens?

What happens? Well, again, it's a very nonverbal, intuitive kind of thing. I'll be weaving away on a shape, and I'm thinking about, well, you know, I'm going to need to transition to a color pretty soon. Well, let's see. What do I do here? It's kind of like this internal. Okay, I'm thinking about it. Okay, the next stage, I'm going to need to add a color here. I'm going to. To change the mixture of yarns here. And then I was like, okay, a time. Oh, I need to do it now. Okay. You know, it's. It's like the tapestry tells me it's time to do it now to make a change or do something a little bit different.

It's a conversation.

It's kind of like a dialogue. Yeah, conversation. And it's usually. And also when the weaving gets really, really sluggish and I can't. I can't see my way clear, I know I need to step away from it because something is wrong. So I will step away from it. Go fix a cup of tea, go walk outside, come back and go, oh, I should have started that color half an inch ago. So I need to pull out a little bit or, you know, make an adjustment, but usually it's not too much. I have to redo When I need to make that adjustment. So again, it's like when the pace starts getting sluggish, I know to pay attention. When it's going smoothly and flowing well, then I know that there's. That the idea is flowing like it needs to. It's a little hard to describe, but that's kind of. It's a dialogue.

So is the. Does the tapestry, does it already exist and you're just seeing it as you go along, or is it. For example, one of my mentors once said, everything that's ever been here or going to be here or being invented is already here. It just takes someone to get emotionally involved with it, to be able to see it, for their antenna to go up, for them to be able to see it so they can put it down in a different form so the rest of us can enjoy it. Like a song. Song is already there. Someone just has to be able to be emotionally involved with it to. To be able to hear it and then they can write the notes and then we can all enjoy it. Do you believe that your tapestry that you're creating was already there? You just had to be able to see it? Or is it something that's just being created as you go?

I think it's primarily. All the elements are in the ether, all the components are in the ether, and it's a matter of finding them and seeing them. So there's a visionary piece of it and it's a piece of knowing what needs to flow through me into the yarn and trying to stay out of the way of whatever energy is flowing through my hands.

Great way to say it.

Yeah.

What's the future of tapestry?

Well, I think it's pretty bright, actually.

Is it?

Yeah.

Good.

Yeah. There are increasing numbers of people interested in learning to weave tapestry and there's more and more resources out there and information out there. I'm in the process of working on a book to document what I've learned. Tapestry has been such a non written oral tradition that getting things documented in diagrams and in words and videos and that sort of stuff is really a piece of keeping that knowledge alive.

So would somebody. Do you get like commission to do a piece or how does it work? Somebody's listening to this. They say, I really need to get a hold of Elizabeth. I would love to either buy one of her pieces or have her create something for me. How does that work?

It varies from client to client. I had one client who had a really special conversation with her daughter working, walking in the Sandia foothills. Oh, this must have been like 15 years ago, maybe. It was wintertime, we had a nice amount of snow and the sunset was doing its beautiful watermelon colors on the sandias. And she wanted me to capture that moment in Tapestry. So she gave me a bunch of pictures, mostly in black and white, saying, this is kind of what the scenario looked like. But I want the feel of the sunset, glow of the colors. I really want that warm glow in this tapestry. And so I went from her black and white to working up a couple of different palettes. And I remember once I had some maroon and she said, I hate maroon. Can we do something besides maroon? I said, sure. Becomes a collaboration basically between what my client will want and what I as an artist will produce. So that was that instant.

And other people will say, you know, here's the room and show me the picture of the room. Or if I'm in town, take me into the house. Saying, I want the feel of this, this and this, but otherwise it's all yours to create, you know, and basically, as long as I keep conversing with my clients, keep them engaged in the process. So we're kind of all on the same page.

So it is communication.

It is really communication and a form of collaboration, really. Yeah.

And so do so people can get a hold of you. How do they get. What's the best way to get a hold of you?

Via my website, my email address.

What's your email?

Elizabethlizabethbuckleytapestryartist.com Excellent.

So they can connect with you. They can say, here, this is what I'm thinking. I'd love to, you know, those of you that are listening, if you just go to her website, I think you'll be pretty blown away by what's possible with Tapestry, because I never knew that was possible. And I feel like we have a gem here in Albuquerque that people don't even know. You know, they don't know enough about this. I don't think for you to get the credit that you deserve for all the time and energy you've put into this, I mean, it's pretty mind boggling. 50 years you've been doing this.

50 years, yeah.

That's dedication.

It is dedication.

And so for those again that are listening, take a look at it, get a hold of her. And you know, I just appreciate you being here and coming in and spending some time with me. I love hearing about the why of mastery because you do things that I couldn't even fathom doing.

Well, it's been my pleasure. I always love to talk about what I love to do.

Well, thanks for being here.

Okay.

It.