The world in tapestry with Julia Mitchell

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Julia Mitchell’s tapestries embody how she experiences the world. Like the artist herself, her works have substance. The weight of the yarns contributes to the tapestry’s heft and varied surface textures, while their visual impact evokes a response deep within.

Mitchell roots her images in realism, but stretches their boundaries toward abstraction. We step back slightly from photographic reality to see the shapes, forms, and lines that together bring the very heart of nature to life. “I look at a landscape, a flower, or a blade of grass, and want to know what is driving it. Where is the dynamism? From the outset, that is what I wanted to find out,” Mitchell says. As a result, her rich tapestries possess a life force of their own.

Asked where this search for the spirit of her subject matter comes from, Mitchell replies, “I don’t know. I was born into an artistic family and given materials. I was told, ‘You do this. This is what you’re good at.’” Perhaps this abundant support cleared the path for Mitchell to see the world with a keen vision.

Mitchell’s journey to textiles began at the age of 15. Having grown up on the Vineyard since she was 4, she reflects, “I escaped the Island. It wasn’t a great place to be in 1965. Nothing was going on. So I dropped out and, as a scholarship student, went to the Windsor Mountain School in Lenox, which was the best thing that ever happened to me.” There, she discovered a vibrant artistic community of Old World intellectuals and socialists who had fled war-torn Europe. Most important was Edith Reckendorf, who became Mitchell’s mentor. A former student of the Bauhaus, a groundbreaking modernist art school established in 1919 that merged crafts and fine art, Reckendorf taught art history, design, and weaving. Driven by her passion, Mitchell studied medieval and Renaissance tapestries to understand their construction.

Mitchell forms her tapestries differently from the way regular weaving does. In the latter, you work from one side to the other, weaving the weft, which creates the design, over and under the vertical warp threads, and then returns, repeating the process in the next row. In tapestries, the weaving is discontinuous, never going all the way across. Mitchell goes partway with one bundle, and then uses another from the opposite direction to meet it.

Skeins of soft merino and Swedish wool, Scottish single-ply tweed yarns, Japanese silks, and Belgian and Swedish linens that enhance the luminosity of an image line the walls of her studio. Each appears impossibly thin until Mitchell explains how she bundles four or five strands together, which, in their various hues, contribute to her signature nuanced palette. She develops washes by frequently changing out single strands. In other areas, she weaves darker colors that contrast sharply with much lighter ones, to create striking differences. This combination makes her tapestries and rugs come alive. The two approaches enable Mitchell to produce subtle variations of color in tree bark, and a range of greens found in moss on rocks, or convey a sense of transparency in her cave tapestries, as if one image overlays another.

Mitchell’s compositions are immediate, some revealing the influence of Japanese scrolls and historical woodblock prints. Mitchell grew up with Japanese art, which came from her great-grandmother, who had brought back art from her visit to Japan in the late 1800s. “Our house was full of Japanese prints, netsukes, and fabrics, and my earliest memories of these still influence my view of what is beautiful.”

Inspiration for Mitchell’s luscious images often arises on her walks: “My subjects are from the natural world, and concern the effects of wind, water, light, and shadow over time. I observe, looking very, very closely at things. Again, I try to uncover what’s inside. I want to figure out how to transform that into something people can look at, and then feed it back to them. I know it works when people stare at the piece, or start to cry.”

Mitchell relates a story about her art’s impact. “One time, I was showing in Washington. I had hung little signs saying, ‘Please enjoy the tapestries, but don’t touch them.’ A guy walked up to one of the free-hanging pieces, ran his arms behind the tapestry, pulled it to him, and breathed deeply. It was powerful! I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. That makes me happy when I can achieve that.”

Designing tapestries and rugs since her teens, Mitchell notes, “I can’t not do it.” It’s also how she has made a living. Mitchell has shown widely, and has pieces in corporate, private, and museum collections, including ours here on the Island. “I’ve always interspersed the commissions with work that I do that is more experimental and more forward-moving, because the commission work is based on pieces people have already seen,” she says.

Working with clients is an art form in itself. Every commission yields a unique textile: “The process is very collaborative. There’s a lot that happens before you start weaving.” It begins with an in-depth conversation about what the client envisions for the design, color palette, mood, size, and where it will be displayed. Mitchell then creates a colored drawing of the design for feedback, and provides samples of the yarns, working back and forth until the client is satisfied. “It’s about getting what they are seeing in their minds,” she says. Once the contract is signed, but before weaving begins, Mitchell grids the working drawing and scales it up to the actual size on a cartoon, which serves as a template for the design.

Mitchell reflects that, ultimately, “I want to elevate people’s sense of inquiry, hope, and mystery through my tapestries. I create my work for its own sake, with the underlying message: ‘Hey! Wake up, people!’ Our world is so fragile, and understanding and preserving it is very, very necessary to the human spirit.”

For more information, visit juliamitchelltapestry.com, or email jmtapestry@mac.com.