72 postcards - 8" x 5.25" 2003

Recently I arranged that seventy-two colleagues and friends return these tapestry woven postcards to me, by mail, from around the world.

I had adapted an airline map (JAL) that was centered on Tokyo to cover the entire world with the North Pole at its center.  This view of the world is as distorted as any flattened world map must be.

It is also symbolic of the inevitable reality that each of us carries on our own world map.  Ours is an individual map laden with conditioned points of view, with biases that grow out of our own limitations.  It goes beyond the accident of geography.  Our maps encompass our environmental, social, national and personal experience.

As a more general comment, I have mailed some 100 tapestry postcards and packages all around the world for more than 30 years.  Perhaps surprisingly, not one has failed to reach its intended destination.

Archie Brennan

“Seated Female Nude” (Drawing Series LXI)

A first glance at this tapestry may suggest that it is based on cubism, but it grew from the reality that when drawing on paper you get the space between any two lines or marks that you make for “free;” ie, it is the untouched paper. When weaving tapestry however, that “space” has to be woven, sometimes even before the drawn lines or marks get woven. And it is not an anonymous space. As part of the tapestry cloth it can have a very positive presence, a presence that can be orchestrated to have an important role in the overall work.

Pictorial drawing on paper is essentially about the illusion of form, volume and space. In this tapestry the major concern is the interplay between this illusion, the seated female, and the real presence of varied cloth surfaces. It builds on this spatial contradiction and the picture plane—here, a heavy tapestry cloth.

….like his drawing series, his postcard series, his historical series.  There will be more about his series in upcoming posts!

Archie is making a 3-selvedge warp for a large project.  The cartoon is behind the loom on brown paper. There is also a small loom in between the loom Archie is warping and the cartoon, on which he made some woven color studies. 

This warping process is quite involved.  The rod at chest level shown in this photo is wrapped in a certain way to create a selvedge.  Instructions for making a 4-selvedge warp can be found on Archie and Susan’s website.

Archie holds the entire spool of cotton seine twine as he makes the warp, carefully tensioning each wrap as he passes the spool over the top of the loom,  around the wooden dowel in the middle, then around the bottom and back up to the top.  The wooden dowel can be moved as the weaving progresses to allow the already woven section to be turned to the back of the loom.

This tapestry will probably be exhibited at GAGA Arts Center in September.

“Under the Influence/Objects of Obsession” — Susan Martin Maffei

“Exploring Woven Tapestry” — Archie Brennan

Sept. 10 – Oct. 3, 2010

GAGA Arts Center
55 Railroad Ave
Garnerville NY
(845)947-1155

Opening Reception: Friday, Sept 10th  4- 8PM
Gallery Hours Fri 4-8, Sat 2-6, Sun. 12-4 or by appt. 646-796-9798
Artists’ Lectures: Fri. Sept. 24th starting at 6PM.

I hope you can be more patient than I am!

Stay tuned!…

detail of "Henry VIII with 'Coptic' beard - A Reconstruction of an anonymous 16th century portrait," 2006.

From ATA (American Tapestry Alliance): For the next month the Archie Brennan online exhibition will continue to be available for viewing.  It is curated by Anna Byrd Mays and includes a large body of tapestry images and some essays by Archie which give insight into his work.

Don’t miss it!

www.americantapestryalliance.org/Exhibitions/WebExh.html

Come winter, I hitchhiked to Paris, and in time was asked to weave a tapestry for a fascinating man who ran what was surely the first hippie group ever. Raymond Duncan, brother of the late dancer Isadora Duncan, had formed a commune in Greece, pre-WWI. Around 1919, he purchased a very valuable piece of jewelry in Berlin, resold it in Paris at a huge profit and bought an entire old town house on Rue de Seine. It was a classic grand Parisian townhouse with a private cobbled courtyard surrounded on four sides by three floors housing all the activities of the commune: bedrooms, library, weaving studio, hand printing press, painting studio, dance studio, dining hall, kitchen, etc.

Courtyard photo taken by Hans Gallas in 2009, see http://gertrudeandalice.com/blog/2009/08/19/august-in-paris-in-the-sandal-prints-of-raymond-duncan/

The courtyard was Raymond’s stone carving area. Daily he was there, in his seventies, wielding his seven pound hammer and stone chisel. Along with the main leaders of the commune, he was always dressed in a loose, long white, handwoven linen toga, tied at his waist with a silver braided cord. His long silver hair and thick lens glasses, and his short, slight build did not conceal his physical agility, endlessly chipping away at his large sculptures.

The commune’s income was provided by a changing number of members from around the world, mostly older, wealthier women, at times accompanied by their husbands. I recall in great detail a trip to a major super market to purchase some lengths of light wood to adapt the floor loom I was to use. There were three of us. We drove across the town in a large new diesel Mercedes owned by a very slight, short Japanese-American husband of one of the commune guests. We wandered in line through the big store: Raymond leading in his toga, the Japanese man immaculately dressed in a beautifully tailored black business suit, white shirt and tie, and I, lagging behind trying to appear as if I were not part of this trio!

My agreement was to live in the commune, eat in the dining hall (a totally vegan diet!), and be paid every two weeks. On pay day I would go out alone to have a large meal of steak, cheese and a litre of milk. The communal meals were extremely simple, held in a dining hall with two long tables. The cooks were American, full time “members” of the commune. We simply stood in line and our plates were filled with a range of vegetables, cooked and/or raw, then fruit. We drank water. I cannot recall what breakfast was, but I am sure there was no coffee!

Yet there I learned much about an alternative approach to living. Everything was by hand, even the publications. First the typeface was hand cast in lead, the paper was hand made, and hand bound after printing. My first huge shock was the source of the weft yarn I would use to weave my tapestry. Although the warp was a commercial cotton yarn, when Raymond handed me the weft yarns it was a sack of clippings direct from white, brown and black sheep! First I had to hand card a range of “colors” by blending on the carders, which I then had to hand spin on a drop spindle (no spinning wheel!) before and during the weaving. This was all a totally new experience for me! I accepted this—it was the philosophy of everything that was produced in all the workshops, and it opened my mind to rethinking everything I had learned in my 24 years of living. During my time there I became too efficient at controlled hand spinning so I switched to a left handed approach to “free” my skills. I did not adopt this approach in the long term. Even after more than 50 years, this skill is still with me, and because of my experiences during this time,  my creative thinking is bound by the ever present question,“I wonder what would happen if…?”

There are no photographic records of my weaving with Raymond. At that time there was no way I could afford a camera! Somewhere there must be a publication or book on Raymond Duncan.* The commune worked by offering the experience of a lifestyle for paying guests, and they had further income, I guess, by Duncan’s occasional return to tour around his original home base, giving dance threatre and lectures around San Francisco. The domestic set up in Rue deSeine was good. I had a huge personal, third floor room, and a well lit weaving studio. Raymond was more of a philosopher than an artist, but I wove from one of his paintings that he had once exhibited in the Salon de Refuse where many later successful artists, like Picasso, had exhibited when rejected from the annual French Academy show, probably around 1908-1910.

From Wikipedia, Raymond Duncan with his Greek wife, Penelope, and their son, Menalkas, c. 1912.

For further reading about Raymond Duncan:

*The Raymond Duncan Collection, which includes his correspondence, newspaper clippings about him, and various other records is housed at the University of Syracuse and is available for perusal by arrangement with the University.

Article from the “Harbor Grace Standard” in Newfoundland, Canada, with photos of Raymond Duncan, circa 1949.

“New York Times” article about Raymond Duncan’s arrival in Berlin in 1907.

Wikipedia information on Raymond Duncan.

–This is a fascinating time in Archie’s development as an artist, and if you have further information about Archie from this time period, or Raymond Duncan or this commune I’d like to hear from you!

ATA Web Gallery Exhibition

Detail from “At a Window,” 1974.

Welcome to the Archie Brennan Project blog!

A wonderful idea surfaced among members of the Wednesday Group, the diverse group of  students who study tapestry design and weaving with Archie Brennan and Susan Martin Maffei.

(Archie at the opening reception of “Henry’s Hudson,” an exhibition of works by the Wednesday Group which commemorated the quadricentennial of Hudson’s sail, at the Artists’ Society of Kingston, NewYork.)

The idea is a book about Archie!… a large format, art book that could showcase  his tapestries and drawings,  his writings about the nature of tapestry and of art in general, his process of creating tapestries, with a liberal dose of his fascinating life story. We want this book to be loaded with color plates of Archie’s work as well as having a full catalogue raisonne in the appendix.  We are aiming high!

This blog will be a place where we can post some of Archie’s writings and photos, as well as record updates on the  progress of the book.

We hope you enjoy it!