Nancy Crow: 2019 JRACraft Master of the Medium

[Music] would you please now help me welcome to the stage Nancy crow the 2019 James Renwick Alliance master of the medium in fiber thank you I'm gonna give you a description of who I am first can you hear me okay I'm an artist I am 75 years old I'm the youngest of eight strongly opinionated scrappy determined focused hard-working driven a perfectionist little boy a daydreamer obsessive obsessive obsessive used to failure a tough teacher I hate being short I wear a uniform so I am NOT getting dressed up for tonight I love Solitude my medium is quilt-making I love machine piecing I love the engineering of parts two parts I am a colorist I love fabric I love dyeing it I love cutting it up I work in provost I freehand cut all elements I believe I draw am drawing when I swing my arm using my rotary cutter I think of my work as drawings I also create mono prints and screen prints I'm starting with the year 1979 I'll be honest and tell you that I just could not take the time out of my life to take all my fill home images of my work and make them digital so that I you see one 1979 was a pivotal year for me because I had struggled from 1974 to 1979 how do I make quilts that are my own there in my own voice and I started out by a course reading books at that time there weren't very many looking at old traditional patterns trying to put them into my voice well in 1979 Paul Smith well loved this piece and he put it in the front window of the American Craft Museum in New York City and my career took off 1979 was also the year we moved to a farm I was 36 years old was so wanting to move to a farm thinking it was the most romantic thing that you could think of and then reality sat in when set in when I realized oh my gosh I don't have any friends anymore they're not here I have to learn to live with nature I have to learn to live back this long 1/4 mile lane but today 40 years later I am saying to all of you that once I go up this Lane and I'm closed by those big red oaks I planted on either side all of a sudden it opens up into my environment and I love it this is my first hardback that covered my work from 1972 to 1988 and then the catalog for my show at the mayor and craft museum covering work from 1989 to 1992 my solo show at the Renwick which then went on to Germany so the catalog is in both English and German and then Wow change in my life the year mm we basically opened up this wonderful teaching facility on our farm this is a huge German timber frame barn that belonged to our neighbors who happened to call up one day and say you want it get it because it's coming down so my husband and my two sons all of whom who are here in the audience we're at a time in their lives when they could move this barn and rebuild it it sat on the farm it sat on the ground on big boulders so we first had to develop an earthen hill and then pour the concrete walls so the barn could be put up on top of the walls so for this teaching facility I could have wet rooms downstairs and dry room upstairs I had been a freelance teacher for 20 years and let me tell you it's not fun but quilt-making could not be part of college and university art departments because I was told in graduate school application quilt-making stupid not intelligent enough so off I went on a freelance career trying to earn income to to buy things for my own studio work and now I have my own teaching facility that I can have it the way I want it which means big walls for students to work on ergonomic chairs great lighting natural lighting and then because I now have my own teaching facility on my farm and now today we're being slammed we can't even take all the people who want to come and to learn there over these last 20 years I've been able to develop what I would call a an in-depth coursework and figure-ground classical figure-ground composition because what I saw in quilt-making is that so many quilt makers did not understand it so little little I worked and worked and because st. often same students would be coming back I could push him to a much higher level when I said it was a tough teacher I'm a tough teacher so I taught people to draw - with black fabric to lay out their compositions on the wall and then how to go back into color on May 2014 we start my new big studio I begin saving money when I was 52 years old boy that money I put away for that studio that money did not get touched when I hit age 68 I said this is it if I don't get this studio built it is not going to happen and I had our time finding someone who could build a studio for my amount of money that I had saved and one of the things that we did is we attached it to the end of the existing studios were which were other timber frame barns that my husband had moved and renovated helped Randy will along with a carpenter this is a big addition 60 feet by 36 feet so this is what it looks like now and I have the first floor and the second floor the second floor is for storing work the bump-out is where I work on all my teaching materials this is my lower space that is 50 feet by 36 feet you can see it's already maxed out I just have a hard problem not maxing everything out you notice I have tons of tables I have a very good die studio down in the basement I've kept very good records over probably around close to 30 years of all my colors that I die I think it's important to being charge of my own colors that I use here they are laid out some of them you know unlike a painter we can't change a color just because we feel like stroking over what we don't like we have to have the colors already died at hand ready to be cut up this was the next big hardback covering my work from 1988 to 2005 as a really this book to me is just absolutely filled to the max with seed ideas I would say I am a person who on one hand gets bored gets impatient and I realized looking back that I had these wonderful seed ideas that I didn't develop well enough I didn't take them somewhere so I'm gonna just show you three pieces from this period I kind of veered from I wouldn't say I ever do really spare work but to really complex work I love complexity and of course I love color and then moving up into the - later later 2007 si I will also admit that all this renovation of timber-frame barns on our farm I could go a little faster according to Andrea we had lots of boards laying on pile so these three pieces kind of are about that I went through a period of wanting to do screen printing rented a space in Australia with a friend those are some of my images that I blew up four screens needed an assistant to pull these great big prints a piece from that time went on to cut doing monoprinting these are all things that I was interested in working on I had a little bit of instruction in mono printing and then became self-taught working on massively large mono prints on fab rique my dear darling husband was the person who helped pull these I would tell you at the imagery is about anxiety I have lots of anxiety this is major anxiety so this is a wall of some of my over 250 mono prints I've made another version of the board's overlapping from the barns and then a mono print this done with very very fine markings in which I had to develop layers and layers of groundwork before I came back and was the big tools and worked on the larger strokes last year is fortunate to have an exhibition in England of 75 of the prints and I'm standing in the hall there with Pauline burbage she's one of our great quilt makers who lives in Scotland and then back to strip piecing which is machine piecing which is cutting lines cutting strips this is again swinging my arm I happen to believe that how you swing your arm just like you draw that is who you are and these are part of sorry I'm getting emotional part of a group I'm working on these are not finished in this picture but again just think always about line I'm working with line I love line and then going on to something fairly severe this is line and again the boards the slats the shape of the slats these are all very large pieces giving you an idea amid let's say 8 feet by 8 feet 7 feet by 7 feet this is a little bit about my working method but not much because then here's the finished piece before it got quilted and then ending with the parts and pieces I made to do this color studies that I've been working on one of which will be up for auction tonight and these will feed into large pieces and this is what I do when I get anxious I don't drink I don't take drugs but I sure bake pies

Channel: James Renwick Alliance for Craft

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Length: 13min 57sec (837 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 13 2019