Painting With a Needle...
the EXQUISITE art of Lynda McKinney Lambert
the EXQUISITE art of Lynda McKinney Lambert
I was
thinking this morning about our influences, and how we got to where we are
today as artists. Have you stopped to
think about where the ideas come from when you are creating your own art?
I thought about the choices we make. How do we
decide what to create?
I immediately
think of my MOTHER who patiently
teaching me to do embroidery when I was
a very young child. We were sitting side by side in my GRANDMOTHER’s
kitchen. She had purchased a kit. It
consisted of a piece of beautiful linen fabric, in white. There were three
colors of embroidery thread: Light blue, dark blue, and silver gray. I held those little skeins of thread in my
hands and moved them about to catch the light on them. They seemed to shimmer
as I turned them over and over again. They felt so silky soft in my small
hands. The colors seemed to me like they were magic; they were the colors of
the sky on a summer afternoon.
There were
two more thing in my embroidery kit;
there was a slender, sharp, silver needle and a round metal embroidery hoop.
As I speak of this day, I can still see my
mother bending over me, and showing my how to put my needle into the cloth, to
push gently down on it, and to bring it to the back of the linen cloth. I
searched for just the right spot where the needle would be pushed into the back
of the cloth, and gave it a shove and watched it pop up onto the front once
again.
That feeling
of pushing the needle gently into the fabric, then pulling the blue thread so
gently until it was completely through the fabric was something that stays with
me in my memories after sixty years.
My
imagination brings me once again to feel the silken thread, the tension of
moving it from the top to the back of the linen, and then the pull of bringing
it back up to the surface. It is a
feeling of the comfort of repetition and the solitude of working with fabric and
thread. It’s a quiet feeling that gently
comes to me when I remember the slender silver needle in my small fingers. I was about 8 years old at that time.
This afternoon lesson sitting with my
Mother, is one of the many precious things my Mother gave me. Did she recognize that I was a child who was destined
to be a maker of beautiful things? Somehow, she must have known intuitively
that it was important to take the afternoon and spend it with her oldest
daughter. Did she know that she was
teaching me a life lesson with three skeins of thread, a delicate needle, and a piece of
ivory linen?
Today, I recognize that this was my first painting lesson.
In the art I am
making these days, I am conscious that I am PAINTING with a NEEDLE, and the
THREADS are the SPLASHES of COLOR, my PIGMENTS.
Into this mix of fibers and threads, I add dashes of natural gemstones;
I gather things from Nature that will be part of my pictures. And, not only are my THREADS the strokes of
the painting’s surface, so are the glass beads, the pearls, the vintage
objects, and the crystals.
PICTURED HERE: Ilsa’s Butterfly Garden, Mixed Media Painting
on Fabric.
