It's a Festival year and the Silkworm is featuring the unusual and the sublime.  We're stretching silk painting to new levels with Kerr Grabowski who brings her skills at what she calls deconstructed printing. We also talk to SPIN Signature Member about her motivation for creating the image that became the face of Festival 2014 - an homage to Georgia O'Keeffe.

In This Issue

Kerr Grabowski
Maker of Beautiful Things
by Tunizia Abdur-Raheem with Kerr Grabowski

I had been reading about Kerr Grabowski for quite some time.
I’ve been looking at the clothing on her website and hearing the comments of her students about the great work she does and how much fun her classes are. Kerr will be teaching at Silk in Santa Fe this July and I caught up with her to ask her a few questions about her work.

Fiber artist, or a surface designer, Kerr considers herself to be a maker.  “I really am a maker. A mark maker or a clothing maker or a maker of stuff.” And she loves making marks.  “The thing that fascinates me is a mark, the residue of an action.”

What kind of mark? “It can be a smear made by a dirty finger, lines from a dye filled syringe, bird prints in the sand, insect eaten leaves and bark.  I like the ones that are made almost by a life process.”

How does a mark maker learn her craft? Did she start with a formal art background? Does she have advanced degrees in art? Or did she start as a hobbyist? How did she learn to do this kind of work?  (To read more, go to Vol. 21, Issue No. 1.)

With All Due Respect by Linda Bolhuis

Linda Bolhuis’ Thousand Words
by Ashley Nichols

“A picture is worth one thousand words” is a common phrase usually used for pieces of photography.

Of course a photo can conjure thoughts and bring back specific memories. It can remind you of how you felt during that time, but can it make you feel things you never have or force you to look at the world from a different perspective? Can it make you nostalgic for a place you have never been?

Maybe it can, but for me this only happens with paintings. “I found I could say things with colors and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way – things I had no words for,” said Georgia O’Keeffe.

I did not have much experience with silk painting, but the more I learned about it, the more captivated I became. Art, in general, is amazing to me. To be able to capture a moment in time with paint and canvas is simply wonderful and something of which I wish I was capable. Since I am not artistically talented, I use my eyes to explore the artwork done by people like Linda Bolhuis and Georgia O’Keeffe.  (To read more, go to Vol. 21, Issue No. 1.)