 Color Decoded. The Textiles of Richard Landis. Richard Landis is a retired weaver who lives in Prescott, Arizona. His work explores complex systems of related colors. Color and form have always, apparently since I could conceive of anything, those were of interest to me. And then, you know, Crayolas, when I was a little bitty kid, I mean, I was always marking up everything. And then later, I mean, in cooking and in selecting fruits and even vegetables, you look at the coloring to tell are they good or not. And so everything we do with our senses visually is interpret color in very meaningful ways that help us eat better and so forth. The way we were moved around, I got to see some of the lower southern part of Japan by train. And just the mountains, the country, and the way things are organized, I was thrilled. I just thought this was the neatest thing because I'd traveled a lot before that. But I really thought that that was just... There was something about the way design was considered and carried out that I responded to. I'm sure I never would have gone into weaving if I hadn't fallen in love with the fabric and OB design. And they would have these kimono lengths, you know, on display in the window. And they'd have five or six different ones and they were stunning. I mean, and I was just blown away by it. And that's what really did trigger me to think, God, maybe you may be weaving. Because the other arts never did really... I did life drawing and I even had a show. And some of my work went into offices of the people at ASU. And I was, you know, well-received, but it just wasn't personal. And the minute I got to, took these three days of weaving course with Mary Pendleton in Sedona, I then really started pursuing weaving. And very soon I became really engrossed and I sort of realized I was going to make a stab at it. When I first decided I was going to commit to using the loom. I mean, actually the day that I was at Mary Pendleton's and I started she was showing me how to dress a loom, how to wind a warp, how to put it onto the loom, and how to start weaving. You don't have a whole... there's so many technicalities that you have to get in the beginning that you're completely consumed in just trying to do it. Trying to do what you're told, trying to get it right. And then after a little while I started changing some of them. I saw that I wanted to do a different thing with it. And then one thing led to another. And I was, boy, I was diligent. I remember I had a warp that I was quite excited about on the loom when I went to work for the post office at Christmas. Which I did to get just a little bit of money. And so we were working 14 to 16 hours at night at Christmas time when it was quite cold. And then I would come home after that and I would put in an hour to weaving. Just so that I felt I wasn't losing track. So I was diligent at times. And then when the weaving really starts to get interesting, then it was really fun. Because while I say you can't see the whole weaving, but you can look at a certain area that you've just woven and before it gets wound on down. So you've got this little area you're watching. And if there's really, if it's working and it's really a beautiful color system in it, you're seeing it come to life because you've only imagined what you hope it will look like. But when you see the actual thing, I mean I would go all the way around the loom looking at it from like four different directions. Because the light is hitting it and that's the beautiful thing about weaving. So when I got into the, even the first warp with Mary Pendleton up there in the three-day deal, she usually had them start out with a white or off-white warp. And I chose to do a blue warp and then I was entering all sorts of other colors in it. And that's what fascinated me. So color, I could see that I could not only use the color, but I could blend these colors and come up with new ones that I didn't even have. I mean, you know, you cross two different colors and you get a third one. And especially when the finer you get, the more that is so. I mean, more obvious it is. Everyone always asks me, you know, how do you come up with your ideas? How do you get interested in something? And when I looked at art or when I look at nature, including in my gardening, in fishing and hunting, these things are never direct. They are inspirational. I get very involved in them. And it's the feeling you get from being very involved with something that leads you just little by little, leads you astray into whatever it is. One of my instructors, my sculptor instructor was Phillips Sanderson. And he and I went down to Organ Pipe National Monument and took steak and camped out. And I said, aren't there any artists around here that are really interesting? And he says, well, I've heard about a crazy artist in Prescott. And he says, I've always kind of wanted to meet him. And I said, well, let's do it. And he knew somebody that knew Frederick Sumer. And so he was our Virgil. And we called and he called Fred and they arranged one night. And then we picked up Philip Curtis, who is a well-known Arizona artist. And so Philip Sanderson and Phil Curtis and I drove up and got to Prescott in the afternoon. And we met down on Whiskey Row. Our Virgil came by and took us out to Fred's. Fred showed us photographs first. And here was the first time I saw in photography, I saw what I considered to be abstraction. He caught parts of nature that was abstract and completely composed. And I was blown away by the photographs. And then after that we saw drawings. I'm on the way home, driving the other two artists home. I said, you know those drawings were crazy. And I mean crazy. Fred was interested in a full tone scale. So he didn't want a lot of contrast. He wanted a real richness of tone scale. Well, that really did appeal to me. And you can take that right on into color. And I did. But I didn't do it from him. I did it from looking at the colors of a peach where it's blushing. And then it goes through all these shades. So to say that I responded to his richness of tone scale is true. And it did help me, I'm sure. I mean that was when I saw it in his work. I wanted to get some of that same effect. But as far as photography in the black and white, other than this beautiful tonal range, which is important. And the one thing that I consider in my work is that I was interested in tone and hue. So the tone scale and then the presenting of the color itself. But they're totally interrelated. And that was the thing that in weaving really got to me. When I first started, the first warp I ever did was with cotton. Because it's strong and plied, I used a plied yarn. Later I got interested in using things like, I went from that very early stage. I got into linen yarns and holed up from Sweden, I think it is. But the tone scale, the selection of colors was very limited. And so I picked out the best I could in those. And some of the things happened where I could saw that these groups would either make a solid block or they could neutralize. And then when I started working those things, even with a fairly limited tone group, I could work. But then later I was able to get a much nicer selection in wool colors than I was in linen. But I didn't, it's still, the wool was a heavier yarn and I wanted to get a finer gradation of blended colors. And Jack Larson told me about Annie Albers had used thread. And so I went to California, I went to Los Angeles. And I saw the thread market for coats and clark and a number of different places that sold these things. Half pound spools, it's like three miles of thread. And they were in almost infinite colors. So that's when I found that out, that's how I got into using thread. When I would get, when I would decide what my next project was going to be, what the program was going to look like, not finished, not worked out. I would put out the spools, the half pound spools, and I would make what I call the Greek chorus. So I was looking at all these colors I was going to use. I was lining up my palette. And if you didn't fit in, if you weren't a good part of the chorus, if you didn't operate with the other people in the chorus, you got substituted, something else got brought in. So I was working with real experience. I mean, I was seeing it before I ever selected. And that was very helpful. The little system itself was something of a formula. But then it was how to tease that into looking completely different and expressing itself in a different way. And in my work, if anybody ever finds out what I was doing, they'll see that that was what I was doing. I was taking something that was quite simple. It delivered the variation that I wanted as a possibility for sizes and continual movement from one thing to another. And the neat thing in a piece like this large one is that the last color, the last color in each unit is also the first in the next unit. So the transition happens. I mean, that was all taken care of in the way I worked this thing. And because otherwise you couldn't put something like that together, it would just look really haphazard. But they transition right into each other seamlessly. And then also, one of the things that I really loved was that I decided I would accept the absolute loom control. That it was going to be throwing shuttles. There was not going to be any lifting out here and then starting in again. I took a course in tapestry. And I was fascinated with it. But I just saw that's not what I want to do. I want to use the loom because these things are slow anyway. But on the loom, you've at least got the setup is there. And you can do very complex things if you have patience. And it doesn't take as long as you might think. On that big piece, I probably didn't actually weave more than four days on that piece. Which is pretty remarkable to get that much variation in four days. Well, as I said, it took a month to work out the program. So yes, there's no easy way. But anyway, the fact that these things are in stripes where the one color is on the front, then it changes and it goes on the back. The other one pops up and comes on the front. And Larson called them knife edge abstractions. But actually as far as the surface goes, it's plain tapestry weave all across. Every other thread is threaded. And that was kind of a discipline I put on myself. And I wanted to see what I could do within those confines. I wanted to get something more abstract and something that I could make a composition with. And so I started using the striped double weave, which gives you all this alternation possible. And then when you put that with a lot of different colors, they have written about my work that there were hundreds of different shades. Well, there really aren't. Because I always kept fairly reasonably limited pallets, not just six tones. But I mean, it was somewhat confined. Because that way you get a relationship that things when you make all the variations, they hold together in the end. They look like they're part of a work of art. And so anyway, double weave just offers you so many different possibilities of positioning. And that's the main reason that I wanted double weave. And I could work out very abstract compositions in double weave. I don't think I could have done some of these very complex pieces without having looked into that all the time. And then the little picture down there on the floor of the spring, the way the vegetation is all intertwined. And then my whole time, like up in the Sierra Anja and in the Wind River Range in Wyoming, I was looking at incredibly complex landscapes. And there's a place on the Salt River that we floated through in a little rubber raft that is the most chaotic piece of earth I've ever seen. It's just total upheaval. And in the most stunning ways and being comfortable in big complexities allows you to do complex things and to see them. And I really did see what abstraction was. And then when I saw Frederick Somers' photographs, I saw abstraction in photography of nature. And then I realized it was just freewheeling. You could abstract anything. You could just make something that would represent the natural living thing and it would be the symbol of what you had seen and in a way what you experienced. And of course, Kandinsky was one of the people that gave me permission. And I could always see how art related to nature. I mean, how it was trying to and trying to represent in ways that we could understand. And I thought I understood and I liked it. The more you understand in nature, if you're also dealing in abstraction, obviously it gives you a wider range that you can apply to your abstraction from nature. And nature's the big baby. I mean, my inspiration is simply life itself and all my different relations to different aspects. And the fact that there is, you know, cooking, gardening, cooking, eating, tasting. I mean, I think that I definitely have always been a real sensualist. I mean, my senses, I trust them and I have always cultivated them. And that is what gives you the inspiration to do anything. For the exhibition, Color Decoded, The Textiles of Richard Landis.