Sheila O”Hara has been weaving tapestries for half a century. The art form has kept her interested and busy for the last 50years for the same reason she picked it up: it satisfies her artistic ability, her mathematical sensibilities and her tactical side.
The unique textiles will be on display at the Lake County Wine Studio until Jan. 31. The studio held a reception for O”Hara Friday, Dec. 5 and will hold a second one tonight, 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.
O”Hara owes many of her artistic tendencies to her mother, who was a talented artist herself and encouraged her children to follow in her footsteps.
“My mom was an artist and she always had us doing a million projects all the time,” O”Hara said. Her mother would take them to many a museum, the symphony, concerts or just to the picturesque parks in the area. She encouraged them to take art classes and embrace creativity every day.
At 10-years-old, O”Hara”s mother sent her and two of her sisters to the Josephine D. Randal Junior Museum in San Francisco to take summer art classes. After dabbling in many different art forms, such as painting, drawing and ceramics, she decided that weaving was the thing for her. “I took a lot of different art classes, ceramics and painting and drawing, but the weaving kinda just appealed to me the most with the texture of it,” she said.
Both an artist and an athlete, during high school she continued to take art classes at the Junior Museum after school when she wasn”t sweating it out at volleyball or softball practice.
When it was time to consider colleges, O”Hara found a catalog for The California College of Arts and Crafts in her guidance counselors office. She was surprised to learn that she could major in textiles, and applied to the school. When she got in, her parents were obviously happy, as they had always fostered O”Hara”s creative side. O”Hara says that many of her siblings were practicing art and it seemed only natural that she would as well.
After her graduation in 1976, O”Hara began her career in textiles and is a professional tapestry artist today. Her artwork has been shown nationally and internationally and she has been published in The New York Times, American Craft, Metropolis and Fiber Arts Magazine. It used to take months for O”Hara to finish a tapestry, but with a new loom that was given to her in 2008, she can work much more quickly, as well as make two tapestries at once. “I have this fancy loom that”s a hybrid between an industrial loom and a regular hand loom and it allows me to make them,” she said. “For 24 years I used a different technique that was very slow and time consuming.”
The ability to make multiple tapestries at a time doesn”t only benefit O”Hara, but her customers as well, as it brings the price of a piece down. With her old methods, all of O”Hara”s tapestries were one of a kind, taking a good length of time to complete and were consequently more expensive.
The tapestry making process is quite involved, with a variety of steps to go through before a piece is complete. “First is starts with inspiration of an idea,” explained O”Hara. “And then you have to convert an inspiration to a graphic design Then you have to put that into the software so then you combine the graphic image with the weaving details, the colors, the textures, the different weaves, and then you have to weave it.”
But once she get”s to the weaving part of the process, things are far from over. O”Hara has to manually construct the tapestries from that point on. “Basically I”m sitting at the loom and I”m throwing the shuttles and pulling the beater manually and I might use up to 35 different colors in one tapestry It”s not a power loom. The loom does not weave by itself.”
The majority of O”Hara”s time went to learning the software in the beginning. “Using the new loom I had to learn how to use new types of software,” she explained. “So there was a long learning curve to use this new loom It”s not how much time it takes to do one, but how long it takes to get to that point.”
O”Hara weaves a variety of art pieces that showcase her talent, appreciation of the outdoors and her sense of humor. “It”s a way to express my love of nature,” she said. “The beauty of nature and also my humor.”
She”ll take photographs of her work and use some software to transfer them to tapestries or she”ll draw upon her rich imagination to make something new. “I can convert some photographs that I”ve taken into tapestries of those images. And I create my own designs too, that are not from photographs.”
In addition to her originals, she recently created tapestries of photographs by another artist. She was very inspired by the photography of Edward Curtis who spent 1903 to 1933 traveling around the United States taking 40 thousand pictures of 80 different Native American tribes.
“They”re really amazing photographs,” said O”Hara, who became interested in Curtis when she did a commission for Ceago del Lago Winery, who requested she create tapestries of his images.
“The first ones were woven in a commercial mill but then I started working on them myself,” she said.
She also draws inspiration from political events and expresses herself through her art form. “One of my tapestries was about Prop 37,” O”Hara said. The proposition, which would have required that all foods with genetically modified organisms be labeled accordingly, failed in 2012.
“So I did this tapestry called GMO OMG and it”s kind of a protest, a reaction to that,” she explained.
O”Hara gets her ideas everywhere, which her tapestries express. “It”s a mix of politics and nature… Wherever [inspiration] comes from, I”ll take it.”
She often has shows in Lake and Mendocino county and will occasionally show her work in San Francisco. All of these shows allow her to sell her work and continue running her tapestry business, which she”s just as excited about as ever.
“I first learned when I was 10 and now I”m 60 so I”ve been at it for half a century,” she said. “So it”s kept my interest all this time.”
