Art is a Journey Toward
Restoration and Meaning
To Honor Something, Try to See It.
Before you can’t.
At first, you might be tempted to take one look at Nan’s pieces of bead art, shrug and say, “That’s intense,” and then walk away. Or you might examine a photo or some other piece of ephemera displayed around her studio. You might notice the wine-rack filled with clear boxes holding thousands of miniscule colored glass beads, carefully sorted by color. You might even be interested in the workstation with its various tools, and a light beaming onto one very small center-stage beading board, with a new work in progress.
Perhaps you grow a little appreciation with the thought, “that looks detailed,” or even, “My word, that must take a lot of time.” But even then, you would be missing the point.
If it’s really not about just the “beads”, then what is Nan driving at? It takes a tremendous amount of work to really engage with her artwork. But when you stand before a completed work, and carefully examine each individual word or phrase, you will begin to understand the heart, the thought, the journey off the artist. And then you get it. This is not beading simply for beadings’ sake. These are tiny bits of color, worked almost microscopically in and around one another through a process of reflection, honoring words and phrases meaningful to Nan.
You’ll find this paradoxical: A color-loving interpreter of words who works in a miniscule medium, slowly losing her sight from Glaucoma. As much as possible, she sits quietly in her studio by the river, putting tiny needles through tiny beads for as long as her eyes allow, in hopes that her mere attention and focus may bring honor to things that have touched her own life and heart. A gift.
Nan has said that it is enough that someone simply takes time to look closely at her work. Hopefully, the viewer will feel a connection to something they had not seen or considered before. There is a weighty irony at work when someone who is consciously preparing for the moment when they can no longer see, takes us by the hand and leads us to see, in an act of honoring both herself and others.
Loving Order
Behind every piece of Nan's finished work, there is, somewhere stashed in the studio, many sketchbooksthat looks like the diary of an engineer. Color schemes, and graphed words that help her to lay out the order and pattern of each and every single bead. These sketchbooks are thick binders, inches and inches of paper, clippings of images, pencil scratches barely legible without a closer look. Pencilled graphs for each word and number. All of this just as prep work - word by word - before even one single glass bead is threaded next to its nearest companion. Prior to stitching each word, pairs of colors are only combined in what she calls a “collateral strand:” tiny triangles strung together into a long strand which may grow to be as long as 24 feet by the time a piece of work is complete. These are just color-tests to make sure that the contrast is sufficient to make each word legible. Only after completing this will she begin to work on beading an individual phrase.
Breaking Rules, Sometimes
But like Jazz is still music, these self-imposed rules are there for her pleasure and joy. She doesn’t come to this art formally, her textbook is self-created and collated, not taught. She has discovered all of this, her entire life, from her own deep need to be curious.
