Pleasant Surprises

 

This was not the book I was going to write about here, today.  I was, in fact, going to talk about Jack Lenor Larsen - a contemporary of Mariette Rouseau-Vermette.

I've told stories about my (brief) encounters with both, I think in my memoir A Thread Runs Through It.  I've certainly talked about each at one time or another, possibly even here.

But neither were particularly on my mind when I logged into my public library website looking for a new book by Kate Heartfield, due out in September, according to the announcement I saw on Facebook a few minutes ago.  (If you like historical stories imbued with fantasy/magic, you'll probably love Heartfield.)

I put the title of Kate's book into the search bar, but since the library doesn't yet have a copy of that, the search results spit up a bunch of books that didn't seem very connected to my search.  But!  There it was.  The biography of Mariette Rouseau-Vermette.  And it was already in the collection so of course I snagged it.

As soon as I saw it, I thought about Jack Lenor Larsen, which was who I was going to talk about in today's blog post, because Allison had a number of his books about contemporary art, textiles for interiors, his memoir, etc.  

And I also saw a notice from a weaver in New York today about Jack Lenor Larse.  And somehow all of those things snapped together and, well, here I am.

Newer weavers may not know who Larsen was, and the contribution he made to modern textiles.  He studied with Dorothy Liebes, just like Rouseau-Vermette.  And as I thought about those tendrils of connections, I thought once again about how, well, a thread runs through all of it.

Larsen put together a large number of books, some with Mildred Constantine (two of which are in the current guild eBay auction - just saying).  He was an advocate for textiles of all sorts.  And I managed to convince him to do the keynote speech at the ANWG conference held here in 1997 - because as he put it, I'd asked him 5 years in advance and he couldn't think of a reason to say no.  

Both Rouseau-Vermette and Larsen were of the preceding generation of weaver/artists/designers and sadly seem to have disappeared into the wings.

But we are our history, and both of these people made significant contributions to textiles and art/design.

I really hope someone buys Larsen's books.  And I hope that people will search out Rouseau-Vermette's bio.

We stand on the shoulders of giants.  These are but two of them.