Color in Nature is my jumping-off place when designing new work. I like to take risks with unusual color combinations, “paint myself in a corner,” and then work to resolve the whole. In order to know in the end whether I have accomplished what I set out to create, I do write down my step-by-step plans for a piece and my purpose in making it, but I also listen to the silk and stay flexible. Uncertainty is where I do my best work because it makes me grow.I remember how frustrated I was when I first held a crayon and wondered why there were only eight colors in the box. (This was in the early 1940s before Crayola sold boxes of 120 colors!) I could see so many more colors out the window. During my early years of weaving and before chemical dyes were available to home dyers, my search for color was further frustrated by the limited palette of commercially-dyed weaving yarn.

As I studied color theory and learned how to use chemical dyes, gaining control over the process, my design world joyfully opened up to the ten million hues the normal human eye is capable of seeing.

My current exploration of color and design focus of the last decade has been the way Eastern Washington agriculture affects the landscape…varied squares and rectangles of fields, rows of crops converging on the horizon, irrigation circles which are not always circular, grids both formal and untidy, and the way agricultural crops change color throughout the four seasons.

I express my strong connection to this landscape through abstract silk collages which I dye and then add more visual texture with multiple layers of surface design using thickened dyes or textile paints. I so often hear the newly-arrived express that there is “nothing” here; and, yes, it seems this way when one moves from a part of the country with lots of woodland. I hope that my work will assist newcomers to the Inland Northwest to look more closely at the beauty and energy of the landscape which surrounds us.