In many places in the world, I have been drawn to folk art, the art of the people. My favorites have been embroidered on clothing, carved or painted on buildings in rural Central Europe and even valued enough to be exhibited in a museum. A few years ago, I encountered a film about a woman “folk artist” on Prince Edward Island. The artist often becomes famous after death when works of art are found by relatives in an attic or garage. I heard of such an artist in Poland, a woman who painted the walls of her cottage with angels as an effort to heal after her son died of an overdose. I love hearing of artists taking out paints and brushes and expressing what was in their hearts and around them and what they could imagine that might protect and nurture them. Sometimes, they painted what they wanted to see and sometimes they painted the horrors of what they had seen---to exorcise what what they remembered--such as memories of the holocaust by embroidered by a woman in Krakow, Poland. These artists used what they could afford for paints and canvasses, embroidery thread and cloth. They flourished even if only in that moment of creation when the painting communicated what they had in their hearts and minds. I wonder if they returned over and over to their paintings, as I do, looking at them, and pondering over what had emerged.

Long before I painted, I embroidered and knitted and used what was at hand to find voice for my love of putting colors next to each other. In my late teens, my love for a friend inspired me to embroider the Garden of Eden complete with fig leaves and humans and animals. The work has disappeared as so much folk art. What remains in my memory is a rabbit, larger than the lion, all done in blue French knots. 

The image I chose for this page is my imagined studio in the forests of Central Europe where my Celtic ancestors lived before they migrated to the coasts of Spain, France and then crossed the sea to settle in Ireland and Scotland. This forest is with me still, imprinted through centuries spent under its spell, the roots of trees that transmitted the messages of storms and drought and long ago fires. It is also the image of an abandoned stable in a village on the west coast of Japan that was my home for 14 years. This is where, I imagined, the bears could come for safety. The foxes were the keepers of the inn.