Needle to Nature

Everyday I literally thread the needle. With blue, or green or brown, or yellow or coral thread. Everyday I thread the needle to recreate scenes of nature, based usually on places I have been or would love to go. They are not quite needlepoint or embroidery, but they are needlework. When I talk about them, I say I am painting with threads. But that isn't quite right either, as even I picture dipping my thread in paint and pulling it across paper. And that is definitely not what these are... maybe thread landscapes?

Sitting quietly in my room, maybe watching TV, I go to a peaceful place a thread at a time. I recreate a redbud tree in spring. Or maybe its a waterfall from my hike the previous week. Or I am remembering back to a snorkeling trip in the Caribbean, or in the Red Sea. Or the colors of an Indian town.

The first time I did this with thread and needle, I used one color of fabric for sky and one color fabric for ground. But that didn't let the two merge into each other. I then chose muslin or canvas and painted a basic sky and earth color. Sometimes the background led me to where I was going, like building the spring green forest with grey and brown trunks, so that the redbud tree of early spring could stand out. But sometimes it was the foreground; it was the birch tree with the peeling bark that led me to creating the mountain scene behind it.

It doesn't matter which came first. Using needle and thread I was in the quiet majesty of the forest or stream I was creating. An exhausted day, too tired to even read, coud still find me with needle and thread figuretively in the woods.

I have taken many trips in my life and these pictures takes me back. The barren tree on top of a hill in the bush in South Africa not only reminds me of the incredible vegetation I saw but the animals that might have been a hill away, resting after a hunt. I remember stopping to see the line of ants returning from war with the termites, sometimes bringing back prisoners. Looking on the ground a short distance from the ants was a lion paw print. That is where I learned that a good tracker could tell which direction the animal was going to go by looking at the deepest part of the print. I learned the difference between different cats prints, and different dog prints. Of course elephant prints were the easiest to read as they are so big.

I don't like making people or buildings anywhere near as much as I like nature. And yet my image for India, Varanasi to be precise, ended up being the colors and people of that world. Although its obvious there are people in it, its the colors and their movement that I was trying to catch. The bolts of fabric, and beads lining the streets, or worn by everyone. And this image captured the essence of that country. Sure there were the enourmous rain trees in Kochi spreading their branches wide, or the banyan trees with their huge trunks that looked like several trees had grown together into one, but the colors of the country created by the the human inhabitants were what became the image of India for me.

And so I continue. Some people like them and tell me how lovely they are, some say this is wrong or that is. Sometimes it surprises me the comments people make like I am a student or a child and I need to be given a backhanded complement. Sometimes I wish I had created more depth or I had left areas flat instead of building them up, or I had differeent colors to work with. But that is all in the artistic process. And the only thing that is important is that I enjoy making them.

I do it for me, so I can go back, so I can remember that part of that special trip or this one.