Anton Veenstra's Textile Blog

What made you want to learn tapestry weaving? *** I watched a primary school teacher demonstrate tablet weaving on a piece of cardboard at a teacher’s college summer camp. I had a go. It was fun. But I was drawn to it, I sensed that this was part of my cultural dna.　

How did you learn? ***As above, then I taught myself, made a lot of mistakes, learned what worked, changed my settings, started to listen to other people, started to do some workshops: Ian Arcus, Lynne Curran, Archie Brennan, Susan Maffei.　

How long did it take for you to be confident with the techniques? ***Years. It helps to listen well, I was stubborn. There’s a delicate balance in learning: accept what the teacher offers but don’t crush your own impulses of inspiration. DISTRUST a teacher who is authoritarian & bullying.　

What is your preferred warp sett?  ***I now use 4 per inch on a wrap aroung loom, so that’s doubled. The warp size I use with that is 12/18 bung cotton. But by all means experiment. 　

What is your favourite weft material?  ***Multiple question: my weaving balances colour texture & luminosity. SO, I’ll use a polyester weft together with perhaps a linen thread, giving a “rouched”, boucle effect. But it depends on what you’re aiming for.　

What is your preferred method of finishing and presenting your work? ***A row of double half hitches top & bottom, then sew the warp ends onto the back of the work. I sew the tapestry onto canvas or other fabric attached to a stretcher frame.　

Are there any aspects of tapestry that you have to pay attention to every time you weave? ***Selvedge, the vertical edges on either side.　

How did you create your own ‘visual language’? ***It happens, it’s been happening all my life, I began drawing as a child, as a fetus.　

Is there any advice that you’d like to give to beginners? ***Trust your own impulses & dreams, but also be very self-critical. Respect even the flaws in your work, they are your signature, Slowly you must learn what you want to keep, what to develop, What to discard. In my work there is a self-taught quality, that has Often been criticised as not “an international style” or as “outsider art” But for me was naïve, now part of my visual signature. A friend who collected abstract expressionist art said: people always urge you to finish your work well, tidy, polished; I think it’s interesting to keep art rough. Of course this fitted with his viewpoint and taste. Always remember that advice is shaped by a person’s own taste. William Blake said the lion wasted a lot of time learning from the fox.　

Where can we find out more about your work? ***Study photos of my work, you will soon gain interesting insights, Some I may never have thought of, all of them relevant to your own work. http://antonveenstratextiles.com　

Of course you need supreme tact in dealing with teachers, teaching maks them co-dependant. In my Master’s my supervisor wanted to know what I was doing next; had to make it a cardinal rule we would discuss finished work only. BUT, finally, a question about joining: I started leaving gaps in my early work; only to hear Brennan say you sewed up each gap row by row; to me that was self defeatingly slow. But the gaping bits on a finished work looked yuk; my solution late in my career is the houndstooth join which gives a shimmer to edges as 2 colours are constantly made to jostle together. BUT a lecturer at ANU said the indigenous bark painters of Arnheim land talk of the shimmer as a measure of the spiritual strength of a work.

I’m using pictify [pictification?] to assemble, compare & contrast my recent portfolio of wild things,

you make my heart sing, you make everything. Vale, diva Donna Summer, bad girl, I feel LOVE.

There’s a new site set up by Saatchi of London, to show off art work. I’ve opened a page. It helps to have a lot of art work together in one hit, as it were. The collisionism often gives off good reverberations. You can often arrive at interesting insights from the adjacent placings. Please enjoy.

Just finished my latest tapestry, of a moggie.

Wild Cat with Golden Eyes. 14 cms H X 14.5 cms W.

I created this work, using a photo of magnificent Moreton Bay Fig branches, photographed in the Domain, Sydney. I captioned the work, as one does, with a line from a Shakespeare sonnet, “desiring this man’s [tele]scope and that man’s arse”.

Only recently have I interrogated my subconscious as to the shaping of the man’s head. The photo I referred to had him smiling, come hither, love to me. But my version had a more melted in the throes look. I decided it was linked to a mudra out of christian hagiography. In the passion, there is a moment where Pilate has Jesus whipped, a crown of thorns pressed onto his head, he is robed in purple royally and presented to the people: “Ecco Homo, here is your king”. Both El Greco and Guido Reni have painted renowned versions of the scene.

The look has always been linked for me with that excruciating public moment in central Qld when one’s public persona seemed to be judged as inadequate, effete, in fact, homosexual. Or as a classmate in late high school termed it, blue omo. It was a moment of razzing, of being judged by the public and found wanting. In my tapestry,having applied a cloak of sumptuous leaves and buds, and created of the man a resplendant spectacle, I feel it amounts to the apotheosis of outing. A glory.

As they say, 1 jpg = 1,000 words. The handsome gentleman of academic demeanour shares my domestics.

In the third year of my Bachelor of Arts degree I studied Paradise Lost by John Milton. It is the great Homeric epic of English literature. I did not successfully digest this turgid work; I remember going to my local Catholic church, attempting to make use of its contemplative quiet to ease my task, only to have the resident priest try to coax me back to regular church attendance.

The lecturer sought to explain that the writer of a great narrative needed to achieve a steady flow, like toothpaste squeezed from its tube.

How does this relate to the weaving of tapestry? The loom upon which a woven narrative is created allows only an ever upwards development. Starting at the baseline, images accumulate and fill the screen until completed. The steady onward roll of weaving has to be seriously considered as the driver of the story.

So it begins, the big hurt.

A lovely friend of mine responded a while ago to a video I sent him of Australian cattle being sadistically slaughtered in Indonesia: “Anton, I don’t reflect too closely on animal cruelty or I would go crazy. Can’t look at pics anymore or listen to the stories. Always enjoyed meat but now explain to others that it is an animal welfare issue. And given the practices in these here parts, health matter too. I have a rescue dog who gets meat but more veg these days. Still in a quandary about that. Don’t believe in “pets”. X”

As he writes infrequently I can’t ask his permission to quote him here. I’ll go ahead. At the time I thought it immensely wry of our species to express fondness for animals we raise, slaughter and consume. Yes, like my friend I continue to eat animal flesh in ever diminishing quantities. I feel conflicted about that, but have practised enough yoga to know that Hindus believe even vegetables have sentience and express anguish & pain when they are harvested.

But why air all this now? My correspondent, living in outer London with five[?] dogs raised me out of a slough of despond; an early winter upper throat infection got me to a grey depressive place, where creative choices were difficult. Reading my friend’s comment about PETS encouraged me to rethink things and the fingers are again busy shuttling across my loom. Another friend, Elena in Milan & FB is a constant encouragement with her beautiful images and constant posts about her diffident sub-bed feline.

Too early to be specific about themes & directions, but we froat… [misspelling intended]. Regards to the mothership.

The ugly post script: this week an abattoir outside Sydney has been sprung for workers unnecessarily beating animals during the slaughtering process. Enough that we consume living flesh: do we have to maltreat the animal not cunning enough to escape our intent. We all watched Indonesians behaving similarly, and suddenly the animals we were exporting there were granted Aussie citizenship. A wag was able to remark that we cared less for refugees attempting the wild seas between Indonesia and our protected waters. Of course, Ivan Milat, one of our worst serial killers, was an abattoir worker. It goes with the territory. As a small child, I sat outside the yard where my dad was doing the carve up in fly prone central Qld; there were vats of blood, offal, other less attractive byproducts; a fellow worker observed me & quickly told my dad: he’s gone a funny colour. I was sent home, and went gladly.