TAPESTRY — a process by Susan G Holland

Tapestry, you make my eyes smile with your colors flashing through some dark places.

Tapestry, I recognize the stitch and the selvage that made that switch ; remembering the time of turning the cloth and how you grew; — the change from red to green, from blue to sunshine. if you count you can find passages of seven days and some of seven years. Even seventy years!

The stitches count and they account for hours and minutes. And the threads of the floss, they count for seconds.

There was a grayness for a long time at the edge. Silver gray, then taupe, then blackish brown. A streak of white and then again the endless neutral that persisted.

Suddenly — an end! A shocking end to taupe and gray that consumed speech with ..was it fright? The weaver’s logic swooned and longed for pattern, some code or system or rule. The dun and darkness had droned and paced so predictably and then.. suddenly … nothing?

Instead ,instead of nothing — — — — a blaze!

Rich color brilliant and wild and struck with red and rust and green and blue and yellow. The yarns spewed from the spindle faster than the weaver could contain them and they intermingled in madness and joy.

A celebration and a toast! A grace said as if at laden table for the darkness of the sauce and for the brilliance of the entree. For the feast of my eyes and heart.

A music tied the threads into dancing pattern with piques of black against sparks of white.

An ocean rolled forth and caressed its boundaries with perfect contrast: wet to dry cold to hot soft to hard sharp to blurred and the music became an anthem.

Whose pattern though?

Neither yarn nor weaver plan such things.

The process evolved in mega-moments and nano-moments.

It grew itself into beauty the pattern a glorious pattern designed by Someone’s love and mastery.

The weaver applauds. She frames the tapestry in silver and gold.

• NOTE: The image is of a color study in watercolor that has been photographed and digitally manipulated into a tapestry-like rectangle. Another of Susan Holland’s “Spinoffery” projects…always a delightful process that gets intermixed with the real liquids and papers and brushes in the studio. The artist becomes a child with endless colors and ideas that come from Somewhere.

Originally published at cowbird.com.