Lorraine Roy Art Textiles

NOVEMBER Update

2009-04-20T09:34:00.000-07:00

Hello friends,

October is speeding by so quickly, I am going straight into November for my update this time... For once, I am on top of things!

Since my return from Italy in May, I spent most of the summer putting together my solo exhibition for the Alberta Craft Council's Discovery Gallery in Edmonton. The title of the show is Saving Paradise: Trees of the Canadian West, and it's a logical extension of my previous work inspired by native Canadian trees. You can see the images in the appropriate gallery on this website... or, you can go to Edmonton! The show has been held over until November 20, so there is still time!

The Dundas Studio Tour on October 3 and 4 was, as always, a great success for all the artists who participated, and a real treat for visitors. Our new artists were thrilled with the feedback and exposure. If you are an artist and you would like to join our tour, we are always looking for new and original work. Go to the Studio Tour website for information on how to apply.

On April 18 and 19, fourteen participants joined me here in Dundas for a workshop on Collage with Nets. Everything went smoothly and it was a great success. My next 2-day workshop will be in Spring 2010, tentatively set for the week-end of May 1 and 2. Please send me your email address if you wish to be on my notification list. If you are already on, you can expect to hear from me shortly. But if you are ready to jump into the deep end and want a 5-day experience, I will be teaching at the Peters Valley Craft Center in New Jersey from August 6-10, 2010. The inf0rmation and application for the class will be up on their site at the end of November. This will be an in-depth exploration of the Collage with Nets technique. You are also welcome to check out the other fantastic workshops in all media. It's quite an exciting place to go!

Now, last but not least, I will be presenting my work and giving a lecture at King's College, London, Ontario on November 26 at 7:30 pm. The lecture takes place in the Elizabeth A. Labatt Hall, and is part of the Religious Life Lecture Series inspired by John Paul II's Letter to Artists. The subject of my talk will be Nature as Spiritual Guide. I hope you can join me there!

Oh yes, one more thing... I recently did an e-interview about life as an artist on the Rurban Fringe, a loose term coined by Jennifer Brooks whose Blog covers a fascinating hodge podge of rural-urban values, perspectives and situations. The interview is now published, so if you would like to see it and wander through the rest of Jennifer's world, click here.

That's all for now. I'm always happy to hear your comments so drop me a note any time, or call ahead and stop by at the Studio... visitors are always welcome.

Lorraine

PRICE LIST

2009-02-14T06:28:00.000-08:00

WEBSITE PRICE LIST for Lorraine Roy
All currencies, Visa, MC, JCB and AMEX accepted.
Shipping to national and international destinations at prearranged cost.

GALLERIES

Saving Paradise: The Arboretum Project
This exhibition toured until August 2004. All pieces are now sold.

Saving Paradise: Trees of Western Canada
(price includes the Tree and the Seed)
Bebb Willow $1800
Black Spruce $1800
Black Cottonwood $1800
Fireberry Hawthorn SOLD
Lodgepole Pine $1800
Paper Birch $1800
Subalpine Fir $1800
Saskatoon Berry SOLD
Tamarack SOLD
Trembling Aspen $1800

NEW TREE WORKS
Aspen Copse 4 $375
Aspen Stand $1500
Birch Copse 2 $875
Blue Copse SOLD
Eastern White-Cedar SOLD
Hawthorn $1500
Red Maples 5 SOLD
Red Maples 6 SOLD
Striped Maple SOLD

Escarpment Gallery
Aspen Stand 2 and 5 $700 each
Aspen Stand 3 $425
Aspen Stand 4 $375
Between Now and Then 2 $3600
Burning Bush 10 SOLD
Copse #1 SOLD
Escarpment 5 $900
Escarpment 11 $1000
Escarpment 14 $1100
Escarpment 17 $1100
Escarpment 21 $600
Escarpment 22 $1100
Outcropping 2 $900
Outcropping 3 $625
Red Sky $600
Tough Roots $650

Small Wonders Gallery
Seed abstracts, framed 24x12 $525 each
Seeds, quilted hangings 20x20" $550 each (Hawthorn is sold)

Ponds and Streams Gallery
Fish Eggs 2 $625
Fish Eggs 3 $1600
Luck and Skill $1600
Ova 2 $1600
Ova 4 SOLD
Ovulation 1, 2 and 3 $850 each
Ovulation 4, 5 and 6 $950 each
Pond Life 1 and 2 $700 each
Pond Life 4 $500
Pond Life 6 and 7 $1500 each
Pond Life 9 and 10 $1100 each
Spotted Gar 2 $650

Abstract Works Gallery
Blue Dots on Gold $600
Bonbons 1 $1300
Etcetera $900
Green Tangerine $900
Jazz- Honey Tones $725
Ladders SOLD
Petit Fours, Tray 1 and Tray 2 $1600 each
Revelation $950
Sheet Metal 2 SOLD
Melange Riopelle 2 $900
Melange 3 $1600
Third Day $2500
Transition $3500

2008-04-22T15:56:00.000-07:00

Hamilton Interiors Magazine, Spring 2008

SuperNatural by Tor Lukasik Foss

To hear Lorraine Roy tell it, nobody decides to be an artist suddenly – it happens in increments. “My mother taught me to sew and let me do all kinds of things with her big box of scrap fabric. I loved playing around,” she says. “Even though I can confidently say that I never made a piece of clothing I ever wanted to wear, I always loved to sew. It just took me a long time to think about using it as a means to make art.”

Roy describes how she became an artist as an accumulation of skills and interests and experiences. Those factors have slowly woven themselves into a successful arts practice, one she runs from her Greensville home and studio (a space she shares with her husband, photographer Janusz Wrobel, also a successful full-time artist). In a way, this story is very much like the textile art she produces: a collage of disparate elements that somehow manage to weave together to form a fluid and cohesive image.

“My first inclination was to science, so I never entertained the possibility of an arts education, pursuing instead a degree in Ornamental Horticulture, specializing in native trees. After graduating, it was great working in garden centres, but it’s hard work and in the winter it’s quite cold, particularly in London where I was living at the time. So I began looking for other things to do. London had a great Embroiderers’ Guild and I managed to get myself involved with some great workshops. It really got me going, got me thinking that there might some kind of future for me in art.”

If there was any crystallizing moment for Roy, it likely came in 2002 when, with the help of an OAC grant, Roy was able to produce a touring exhibition of wall hangings called Saving Paradise. It consisted of tapestry portraits of 17 rare species of trees. The exhibition toured 13 public and private galleries throughout the province and by the end of the tour, every work in the exhibition had sold. “That show really gave me the boost I needed,” Roy acknowledges. “It gave me the confidence to truly consider myself a full-time artist. An interesting side effect is that I became known for trees. And to some extent, that means trees are going to remain a big part of my practice.”

It’s hard to pinpoint the kind of psychic space Roy’s work occupies. On one hand her images owe something to the kind of sketches you find in a botanist’s field journal – a fascination with the minutiae and precise details of the subject matter. Yet this clinical curiosity is matched by fluid transitions of colour and texture and line, patterns that pulls the images away from the scientific and plunges them deeply in the realm of poetry.

The layering and patterning that typifies Roy’s work is part of a technique she developed herself. Wanting to retain the strengths of embroidery while minimizing its slow, hard on the eyes aspects, Roy devised a way to mesh all the pieces of fabric together on a background, and added elements on top with appliqué and embroidery, and finally quilt over the top to give a kind of unifying texture to the entire piece. This allows Roy to work faster and on a bigger scale. It’s still an involved and intricate process, but Roy insists that it allows her to produce work without getting bogged down or frustrated.

The biggest challenge in making the work, she says, is maintaining a stock of fabric and threads large and diverse enough to allow her to create the subtly shifting and complex fields of colour. Sourcing material is a major time component of her practice.

“I’m lucky now to have a big studio space, and just looking around it I can see a big rack with three big levels to house larger pieces of fabric,a baker’s rack for smaller pieces separated into colours, then six large laundry baskets filled with yarn, and 18 boxes of thread, not counting the box of thread I need for sewing.

“Organization is a big part of the work,” she concedes. “Sourcing the fabric is also a fair bit of fun. I love going to old fabric stores in small towns where you can dig up leftovers from the ’60s. I’m also lucky to have enough friends passing on the remnants from their sewing projects. It’s important to have a lot of sources because fabric stores will only ever carry colours that are in style, and to make this kind of work you need a full spectrum of colour. So second hand stores are essential. It’s like walking through a garden of burrs with a fur coat on – it just collects on you as you go along.”

The last few years have seen Lorraine Roy pushing beyond trees. Her recent works are still heavily based in the natural world, but have stretched into very organic abstracts, or studies into pond life, seeds and roots. An exhibition slated for the Grimsby Public Art Gallery this fall, will be a series of seed and pod studies. Roy’s abstracts and stream studies are even more subjective. Spotted gar fish are camouflaged within a cubist mélange of plant leaves, water streams and coloured detritus. Pure abstract pieces bristle with the organic minimalism of Kandinsky; they are simultaneously spiritual and natural mediations on colour and line.

“Some people who know me for trees will look at the abstract work and will get it immediately. Others refuse to even look at it. What’s important is pushing myself creatively. I will always go back to trees, but because of this new work, it means I will go back to them differently, think and design them differently.”