Book Review: Archie Brennan: Tapestry as Modern Art

Note:  If you are a member of the Handweavers Guild of America (HGA), you may have seen a shorter version of this review in the most recent issue of the magazine for members, Shuttle Spindle Dypepot.  Here I expand on that review with additional thoughts.  I am grateful to HGA for allowing me to review this book and urge you to join if you are not already a member.

I am thrilled to recommend wholeheartedly this book about a figure so influential in modern tapestry that he is known among weavers by just his first name:  Archie.  Though I never had the privilege of meeting or studying with him, I will presume to use his first name here.   This book, by "Archie Brennan as told to Brenda Osborn," compiles many of Archie's writings, his memoirs about his life, travels, and career, and best of all many photographs of his work.  If you are a tapestry weaver you absolutely need this book to understand contemporary tapestry.   And if you're not a weaver, I bet you'll still find the book fascinating for the details of Archie's life and training and for his thoughts about how weaving and fiber art connect to the wider art world, and simply put, how pictures are made.  

Published by Schiffer Publishing 2022; widely available 

Brenda Osborn was a longtime member of the "Wednesday Group" of weavers who gathered with Archie and his partner, weaver Susan Martin Maffei, on a regular basis for years to learn together.  The book is clearly a labor of love and a testament to a weaver and teacher who had a profound impact on all his students, and on the students of those students.  If you are new to the field or like me, want to study "with" Archie, go HERE to learn more.  This website has a link to a series of videos Archie made that are incredibly detailed demonstrations of tapestry tips and techniques.  I know several weavers swear by them.   

It was deeply thought-provoking to study the images of Archie's work and to read his writings.  I find much to agree with.  For example, Archie describes his work as "graphic, pictorial, often narrative" but always "a creative journey of discovery rather than a reproduction of a prepared design."  For me, weaving is definitely a journey of discovery, each and every time, but it's rarely narrative or even pictorial in the usual sense.  While I would love to get to the point of being skilled enough to weave without a cartoon, as Archie did, I'm not (usually) there yet.  And to be clear, Archie always did numerous studies and sketches that informed his pieces.  But his larger point has hugely influenced weavers today:  that the imagery in tapestries should appear as if it could only have been made by weaving, not by painting or photography or any other medium.  Archie championed the individual artist/designer-weaver, even though he apprenticed at the Dovecot Studios in Scotland and helped to found the Australian Tapestry Workshop.  

Archie writes that his work has been "a continuous search for a personal graphic language, the nature of woven drawing that is unique to tapestry."  I think most practicing weavers would agree that their work is an ongoing search for a personal voice and vocabulary in tapestry.  Archie's reference to drawing gets at a key point:  during his seven-year apprenticeship at the Dovecot, Archie was required to attend drawing classes four times a week.  Drawing remained a lifelong practice and the bedrock of his tapestry work.  He participated in life drawing sessions with live models for years.   Archie's genius is fully evident in the Drawing Series of tapestries based on these sketches.  They masterfully simplify line and shape in a way that honors and emphasizes the grid of the loom.  Rather than weaving from the side in order to smooth out steep vertical curves, he wove from the bottom up and exaggerated the "steppiness" of these lines.  Archie's love of the drawn line--and perhaps his color-blindness--explain a great deal about his own artistic style.  He is not a colorist who revels in subtle yarn blends; his work is bold, graphic, and focused on line and pattern above all.  

Archie Brennan, Sketch for Drawing Series LXXXIX:  Seated Female Nude, 2009  
and [tapestry] Drawing Series LXXIX:  Seated Female Nude, 2009.  36.5" x 17.5" 
Both photos by Archie Brennan. 

For me, it was fascinating to read Archie's account of his brief flirtation with what he calls "the new wave" of fiber art that exploded in the 1960s and 1970s.  These weavings eschewed pictorial imagery and exploited unusual and coarse fibers, hairy textures, massive size, and three dimensions, pushing weaving toward sculpture.  This style has been rediscovered by weavers today.  He writes that he realized, "The history of pictorial illusion in weaving was what intrigued me," and he revels in the "intimacy" of a tapestry that whispers rather than shouts, "savoring the delight of accumulating detail."  Weavers today can choose to work in either of these modes, and it is helpful for those of us like me who are still trying to decide whether to weave "Objects or Pictures?" (or both?) to read his thoughts.  

In a 1996 essay, Archie describes how today's weaving artists have sought to gain for tapestry a status equal to painting in the contemporary art world, and he thinks this is a mistake.  He writes that his many woven postcards and parcels are partly intended to poke fun at this ambition.  For him treating tapestry solely as art for the wall ignores a history in which in many places and times it has served other purposes.  Tapestry as Art "neglects a potential role that is unique to tapestry" which includes among other elements, the element of time.  In one of the several excellent essays by those who knew and worked with Archie, Mary Lane writes that "Brennan's pursuit of meeting tapestry on its own terms, his eschewal of descriptive color and his use of the grid allies with artists who favored the means of representation over the subject of representation."  This is something to ponder.  Indeed, I have read the book once, but I plan to reread it, cover to cover, soon, to further absorb Archie's views and clarify my own intentions and practice. 

If you are a tapestry weaver, you may already be reading this landmark book and you will surely see several reviews of it in the coming weeks.  Rebecca Mezoff has written a thoughtful review here.  My post here does not pretend to be encyclopedic and I certainly cannot add any contextual details of having met or studied with Archie.  But I hope this post suggests that if you take the time to read the text as well as savor the photographs, it will inform and challenge your thinking about what you weave, and why. 

Designing for tapestry

A word of warning:  Not much eye candy in today's post until the very bottom.

Weavers know that working at a loom is a meditative practice.  Throw the shuttle--or, in tapestry, carefully place the wefts--and the slow, rhythmic pace of the work slows your heartbeat and calms your mind (at least when the weaving is going well).  You shift into the creative zone where hours pass like minutes.  Weaving is bliss.

But then there are the times when meditative calm may shade over into obsessive brooding.  So lately I've been wondering, as I contemplate how many hours I spend making tapestry, and how to begin my next project, Why do I do this?  How do I do this? 

Regarding the why, There is the bliss.  We weavers are addicted to the feel of fiber between our fingers.  We are drawn to tapestry in particular because we want to make images that are the cloth, not superimposed on it.  But what sort of images?  And how do those images come to be there?  

In the past 24 hours I've come across two articles about historical tapestries that highlight for me the ongoing discussion among tapestry weavers about what sort of art form it actually is, or should be, for the contemporary artist-weaver.   Rebecca Mezoff wrote yesterday about her chance to observe the conservation work being done on a historical tapestry at the Denver Art Museum.  She points out that 500 years ago, tapestries were designed by painters and the weavers' job was to translate the painting--usually a scene from history, myth, or scripture--into woven thread. Rebecca writes:

"All this discussion of medieval tapestries brought me back to the conversation I had recently with Archie Brennan as I was writing my article for the Spring 2015 issue of Fiber Art Now.** Archie talked both to me and in many talks and articles you can find if you dig a little about how tapestry became a reproductive medium in the middle ages. That means that weavers were trained to copy a painting in thread. This brought tapestry weaving away from the lovely improvisational work we see in the Coptic tapestry fragments to something that was stiffer and less creative from the weaver's perspective. Of course those weavers were and are incredibly skilled. But somewhere in that practice of copying paintings, tapestry lost its ability to be an art medium in its own right. It is my opinion that we need to regain the standing of the work of the artist/weaver as an art form before tapestry can even hope to become recognized as more than a 'decorative art' or craft."

 

Historic tapestries done in this "reproductive" mode are the subject of today's New York Times review of a show at the Frick Collection that features Coypel's Don Quixote Tapestries.  The show features three wall-sized narrative works commissioned by the king of France as gifts for other monarchs and two large Flemish tapestries also inspired by Coypel's paintings and engravings of the Spanish novel Don Quixote.  The artist Coypel designed the image, and the mostly anonymous artisan-weavers crafted it, with great skill, in woven threads.  These tapestries are meaningful on several levels.  In their day, the French tapestries were in-your-face status symbols, emblems of the king's immense wealth and of French craftsmanship.  They brought to vivid life stories that people would only have known from texts.  Today, we notice that these pieces are not just translations of the artist Coypel's work, they are translations of translations--woven versions of paintings that illustrate a work of fiction.  Very meta, we might say.  And as Rebecca indicates in her discussion, today there is a sizeable contingent of tapestry artists who do not want to weave woven versions of paintings, even their own paintings.  These artists mostly skip the design stage of preparing a painting or cartoon that will guide the weaving, and simply sit down and start weaving improvisationally.   

 

Of course if like Archie Brennan or the late Silvia Heyden, you have been weaving for decades, it is probably not too daunting to simply sit down and weave.  The rest of us, especially relative newbies like me, tend to make multiple sketches, collages, and samples, to plan and prepare obsessively, because mistakes can be extremely time-consuming to repair.  This is the way tapestry is conventionally taught.  In my own practice so far I have discovered the truth of the late James Koehler's words, that you should make your cartoon as detailed and specific as possible before you start weaving.  

 

And yet.  I have found in all my fiber work, including tapestry, that some of the work that draws the most positive comments, are my samples--the pieces intended as trial runs, the ones I didn't overthink or stop to repair mistakes on, the ones I initially did for my eyes only.  They have a freshness, a looseness, even awkwardness, that seems to appeal to folks.  

Here's one early piece in the Mary series:

The central woven image, only about 4" square, was intended to be a sample for figuring out how to weave Mary's face on the for-real, "final," piece.  This sample is neither flat nor square.  . .  but it somehow works.  

And the piece below I also did as an experiment.  I took the same simple design and made an embroidered version and a woven version, to see which I liked better.  This is the woven one: 

 Again, it has flaws--now I might handle those slits differently--but on the whole I like it.

 

Of course every individual weaver and artist is entitled to their own way of working, and for most of us that process will evolve as we develop skill, confidence and new approaches to our art form.  Ultimately the way the image came to be woven, whether from following a cartoon or weaving improvisationally or something in between, is less important than the power of the image itself.  While I am impressed at the scale and workmanship of historical tapestries, I am most moved by the work of my contemporaries who design and weave from their hearts.