In contrast to artists who transform ugly material, I take perhaps a more challenging route of working with intrinsically beautiful material: silk. The fabric is dyed with care using traditional Japanese techniques. The inspirations derive from my childhood, growing up on a horse farm in Virginia and my life here on Squam Lake– either the immersive experience of color as light, or the direct image of a horse or landscape, floating like a dream on fabric.

I work with silk because I love color in all its complexity: from bright to subdued, from opposite to subtle. Solid silk carries the color; translucent silk layered on top can shift these colors from one shade to another, or from one tone to another. One can be direct and simple, or have multiple orchestrations in one piece of art.

The traditional Japanese method I use to prepare my silk is time consuming and a bit laborious: I soak the soybeans for 8 hours, blend them to create soy milk, apply that to my silk (on stretchers) using the Japanese deer hair brush Jikome, let it dry, apply another layer of soy milk and let that dry. I do all this to ensure that when I then apply the dye to the silk, that the soy will carry the dye into the protein of the silk itself. With this method, I ensure that my dyes are permanent and my colors are luminous.

Below is a list of the tools I use:

1. sand washed Charmeuse silk. 19.5 mm. (China)
2. Organza silk. 5 mm. (China)
3. TinFix acid-based dyes (France)
4. Jikome deer hair brushes (Japan)
5. Madeira silk thread (West Germany)
6. soybeans
7. watercolor brushes
8. Susan Moyer stretchers