Crochet as mindfulness meditation

The sunlight streaming through the windows of Ronni Simon’s home gallery, nestled in the Chilmark woods, makes her creative ventures glisten. Intermingled with the living room and sunroom furniture, the space feels as welcoming as Ronni herself, with her warm smile and welcoming air.

Ronni’s home is like a living museum, with her work on display, spectacularly colored afghans crocheted with unusually textured yarn, jewelry draped in semiprecious, sea-toned stones, and impressive, unique bead-and-wire wall sculptures. ”What excites me most about my art is the wonder of transforming simple materials into something whimsical, elegant, original, and yet timeless. The play of color, textures, and form manifests in varied ways, sometimes delighting and surprising me in the outcome.”

After her husband, well-known Island photographer Peter Simon, passed away in November 2018, Ronni has continued to honor his legacy while building her own body of work on the Island and elsewhere.

While Peter was alive, he and Ronni owned the Simon Gallery on Main Street in Vineyard Haven. Peter chronicled Island life in colorful landscapes and small moments, and he also documented the 1960s counterculture and rock music. With Ronni’s input, Peter published an immensely popular annual Vineyard calendar starting in 1988, featuring stunning photographs of the Island. Since his death, Ronni has continued the tradition, as Peter wished.  

“When he passed, I thought I should keep his legacy going, and his customers still thank me,” she says. His work is now collected and for sale through the UMass Amherst Library’s Archives Research Center.

While Peter took many months each year to prepare the calendar, Ronni and co-designer Charlie Utz have it down to a science, letting Ronni pursue her many artistic passions.

Crocheting was her first love, starting when she was about 12. As she looks at the display of her many alluring afghans, which beg to be touched, Ronni says she has long been drawn to yarn and texture: “When we had the art gallery, I taught knitting and crocheting as meditation.” 

Ronni has been playing with sharing her approach. “I want to do a YouTube video of me sitting and crocheting and talking about [the meditation aspect]. And it would be a vehicle to sell the afghans because as soon as I sell one, I make another, since I love it.” 

She continues, “I use crocheting to express myself.” Ronni works intuitively, changing the hues and textures as she goes along. The pattern is simple — horizontal lines of varying widths and hues. Focused on her materials, she says, “The yarn becomes the pattern, and that’s part of why you don’t have to think, which is soothing.”

Ronni became a serious potter for many years, first learning the craft in a Greenwich Village studio the summer before attending Bard College. “I learned how to make pots and got really into it, selling them on the street with a vendor’s license.” Later, living in Northampton, Ronni apprenticed to a master potter: “Then I got a scholarship in an artisanry program at Boston University.” During that period, she met Peter, and they were together within weeks. Peter lived in New York, but he had a house in Aquinnah [then Gay Head], where the couple spent a good deal of time, and Ronni worked as a potter.

By about 1975 or ’76, another expressive form soon called: “I started writing a lifestyle column for the Gazette. That got me into writing, which I hadn’t ever really done.” Clearly, she had a talent for it, including writing a proposal for a sitcom. Ronni made connections in Hollywood, and became involved in screenwriting. 

In 1986, she received a commission to write a television movie, “Addicted to His Love,” which became an “ABC Movie of the Week.” “But living here year-round, it was too hard to keep going back and forth to Hollywood,” she notes, “and the movie came out during the strike, and you could no longer pitch ideas, so that became the end of my writing career.” 

Ronni’s next artistic foray was as a self-taught jewelry maker, working with beads: “Then I got into crocheting jewelry using metal instead of string, creating my own designs, which took off pretty quickly.” She crochets precious metal wire, weaving semiprecious stones and freshwater pearls into signature cuffs, earrings, bracelets, and lariats. Like her afghans, we yearn to run our hands over Ronni’s jewelry — to feel their heft and the cool surface of the beads.

She continues to make jewelry, but ever inventive, Ronni expanded the crocheted portion into sculpture in 2012 after finding a piece of aged driftwood on the beach. She encased part of it with interwoven beads that recall elegant seaweed or beach glass washed up on the sand. “We were walking on Philbin Beach when it just clicked,” Ronni recalls.

Over time, she has expanded the technique, making impressive, large wall sculptures in a similar manner. When tightly woven, they recall unusual textiles. In other instances, they’re more freeform, sparkling spirals of color that twine in and out. The newest one hangs at Community Services, and Ronni hopes to get more commissions for public locations and private residences. “What I’m particularly good at is going into a space and coming up with the colors and what I should do. The sculptures are, in a sense, jewelry for the wall. And like the jewelry, what’s important is that a person loves it.”

You’ll find Ronni Simon’s work at the Holiday Gift Show at Featherstone Center for the Arts from Nov. 7 through Dec.16, and on her website, ronnisimon.com.