![Transcription Center logo](/themes/custom/tc_theme/assets/image/logo.png)
This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.
their marriage. "When he died," she says, "it was really bad. And it went on like that for years. But I think that's what made me an artist because I went deep down into myself." At the time, she was 36 years old. For 16 years, she had lived in Chicago, having left her hometown of Lorain, Ohio. She had worked as a proofreader for a legal publisher and spent her evenings studying at the Art Institute of Chicago. Although the seeds of art had been sown, it was widowhood that brought the often painful introspection, silence and loneliness that forged Lenore Tawney the artist. From 1946 to 1948, she trained in sculpture with Bauhaus exponent Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Modernist Alexander Archipenko, after which she turned away from clay and bought a loom. The next several years proved seminal. She studied tapestry with Finnish weaver Martta Taipale and traveled frequently through Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Syria particularly stands out in her mind, partly for the ancient art she discovered there, partly for the sheer adventure. During a trip to Lebanon, "I went to Syria by taxi," she recounts. "That was the only way to get there then." Then was 1956. Tawney was 39 and traveling alone, discovering as much about the world as she was about herself. It is difficult to pinpoint the subtle changes that travel induces in the psyche, but one thing is certain: Tawney never dressed the same again. From then on, she has made all her clothes, "square and easy to fold." But not without the occasional dramatic flair. For an outing on a chilly fall afternoon, she slips on over her white tunic a black coat edged with feathers and adds a black velvet hat for a rakish, extravagant look. It clearly delights her. "Give the street a thrill," her eyes say. The same independent spirit that propelled her travels fueled her work. Time and again, she stretched the limits of the loom, worked with open weaves, created sculptural forms with threads and, essentially, wove the foundations of what later became the fiber art movement. Although she never worked on a Jacquard loom, she studied it workings in Philadelphia in the late 1950s. In today's parlance, she was blown away by the trilling threads, which she compares to music. These gave rise to intricate geometric drawings in which fine lines in red and blue and black crisscross in intricate and varying patterns. "I had to keep my mind right on the line," she says, holding one up. "If you don't, you go off." At the time, she was reading Jacob Boehme, a cobbler at the turn of the 17th century who had had an enlightenment experience. Not surprisingly, Tawney's art reflected her spiritual interests. She moved to New York in 1957, and for the next 15 years or so, her woven work thrust ever higher, the way Gothic spires soar toward the heavens. Some of her weavings reached as much as 28 feet in height. "I was searching for the source of myself, that's why they got so tall," she explains. The names she gave them attest to this: "The Path," "Spirit River," "Secret Path," "Dark River." All were vertical and most were monochromatic, except for some, like "King I," which were black and white. Of these, Tawney says, "I was trying to integrate myself. I never really managed it," she adds with a smile. TAWNEY STRETCHED THE LIMITS OF THE LOOM, WORKED WITH OPEN WEAVES, CREATED SCULPTURAL FORMS WITH THREADS AND, ESSENTIALLY, WOVE THE FOUNDATIONS OF WHAT LATER BECAME THE FIBER ART MOVEMENT. 58 * AMERICANSTYLE SPRING 1998 [[image]] Feathers began appearing in Tawney's work after a 1963 trip to Peru, where she was entranced by ancient feather art. This mixed-media assemblage, "Feather Music," was created in 1987. [[image]] Left, a shelf of embellished milliner's hat blocks is a longtime work in progress. [[image]] The linen weaving "Shield" is one of many that Tawney wove in the late 1960s and re-worked with cutting and knotting in 1991. As often happens in life, the answer she sought came in a different manner altogether. In 1969, she traveled to India "sort of looking for" a spiritual teacher. Before that, she had been involved in Zen Buddhism. But in 1974, she went nowhere, except around the block to meet an Indian teacher whose lectures she had attended some years earlier. "When I met him the second time," she recalls, "I got Shaktipat and I was his." At first she didn't believe "all these things. But then I saw it," she says. "We are all one." In the Hindu tradition of Siddha Yoga, Shaktipat refers to a master's special ability to raise the primal energy (kundalini) of another. When this occurs, in Tawney's words, "it is much easier for the person to get through to realization." Far from denoting an escape from the world, "realization" involves seeing through the fictions our minds elaborate to experience the world as it truly is. "It's also called liberation," Tawney explains. "It's when you see that you are SPRING 1998 AMERICANSTYLE * 59