Silence (with artist), 2003
Jacquard Tapestry
108 x 82 in.
TAPESTRIES BY ALAN MAGEE
I began working on my first tapestry, a nine by seven foot image of a stone cairn, shortly after my 2002 exhibition at Forum Gallery, Los Angeles. Artist friends Donald Farnsworth and John Nava attended the opening, and after seeing my recent paintings invited me to join them in their newly launched tapestry project. The two artists were just beginning to install over thirty grand-scale tapestries in architect José Rafael Moneo’s Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles—the largest cathedral in the US. The commissioned tapestries were based on paintings by Nava and were woven by means of an innovative process devised and refined by the two collaborators. The new method permitted an extraordinarily rich translation of painted image into woven fabric.
This new generation of tapestries is woven in Belgium on Jacquard looms—machines often cited as the eighteenth century precursors of the modern computer. Over several years of work on the cathedral tapestries, Farnsworth and Nava, using their own proprietary software and color palettes, stretched the limits of the present day Jacquard. The results were dazzling—even to the Belgian weavers who expressed astonishment at the complex imagery that their looms produced.
Following our meeting in California, Don Farnsworth taught me to use his new medium—to translate a painted image, a monotype, or a collage into the digital language of the Jacquard. My tapestry education involved hours of Cushing to Oakland telephone conversations, and many trial weavings to test my work. As a first project I proposed a large tapestry of stones for the Great Room of the new Riverview Psychiatric Center in Augusta, Maine. The finished work, commissioned by Maine’s Percent for Art program is now installed at the Riverview Center.
My recent tapestries are being displayed this summer at the Farnsworth Art Museum as part of a thirty-year retrospective of my work, and at Élan Fine Arts in Rockland, Maine.
Alan Magee
Cushing, Maine
