Hollis Chatelain - Textile Artist

Many people ask me what I am working on, where my work is being exhibited and how I am spending my time. This is a new addition to the website that will be updated monthly with the latest things that are happening in my life.

What can I say?!? I had written the October newsletter two days before leaving for Houston. There remained only the final tweaking to do and I’m afraid I ran out of time. It never quite got sent off. So this is a two-month newsletter.

October was cold in North Carolina. We had early frosts and the days were much cooler than normal this year. Halloween arrived with that autumn smell that always makes me think of trick or treating.

The International Quilt Show in Houston, Texas took place the last week of October. This is a show that I look forward to all year round and this year the quilts were spectacular.

November means winter is arriving. By the time I got back in mid-November, all of the leaves were off of the trees. We’ve had lots of rain this month and the dry creek that runs through our yard actually had knee deep water rushing through it Thanksgiving week. We had put in a small bridge and I could stand on the bridge and watch the water. It is much more impressive from a bridge vs. the six-inch wide plank we used to walk across!
Thanksgiving day was quiet since Gael is in Vietnam and Nadia is in California. During that weekend,I volunteered at the 37^th annual Carolina Designer Craftsmen Show in Raleigh. I have been on the board for the last four years and it is so nice to be able to help out at this wonderful show every year.

Below you will find the October-November newsletter. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact me.

My Latest
“The Gift” is finished!!! Rarely have I made a piece as fast as this one (but I must admit there were many many days when I got up at 2:30 in the morning to work). This piece is about economic refugees and is a profile on a woman I met last February. click here to see it finished.

Teaching
In October, I went to Cape Cod to teach a portraiture class to a group that is on year number three of my five-year study program. What a great group! We had lots of fun drawing faces from live models.
October 30^th-November 4^th took me to Houston for the biggest annual quilt show in the world. The International Quilt Festival is an amazing show and I taught every day and spoke at the noon banquet Wednesday, November 1^st about how Africa has influenced my art. For more information about what went on there, contact Quilts, Inc.
From Houston, I traveled directly to Lake Tahoe, California to teach a four-day workshop called Dye-paint Your Images/Bring Them to Life With Quilting at a wonderful conference called Art Quilt Tahoe from November 5th – 10^th. We had so much fun in this class. What an amazingly wonderful talented group of women! I can’t remember the last time I laughed so much.

Exhibiting
Two of my quilts, "Baobab Forest" and "Who Is Watching Whom?" were accepted into the International Quilt Festival show in Houston, TX. I was honored with a First Place Award in the Painted Quilts category with “Baobab Forest”. Yeah!

The International Quilt Study Center located at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln is hosting an invitational show called “Give and Take” from February 5^th – March 4^th, 2007. This show is inspired by the Quilt Surface Design Symposium. Nine outstanding teachers from the symposium were chosen to exhibit their work and each teacher chose one of their students to participate along side of them. Caryl Bryer Fallert was one of the teachers and she chose me. What an honor! My very first quilting class was with Caryl back in 1993 and I traveled from Africa to Ohio to take it! “The Gift” is the piece that will be in this show. For more information click here

There will be a solo exhibit showing my monochromatic statement work at Berea College in Berea, KY in April 2007. This exhibit will include much of the work from the exhibit I am putting together called “Hope for Our World”. Each piece in the show will be a different color and will carry a message about social or environmental issues. My Desmond Tutu piece will be shown for the first time in this exhibit. “The Gift” will also be there.
Berea has also invited me for a convocation event April 19, 2007. I will be speaking on “The Emotion of Color and How it Affects Activism in Art”. In the last years, I have been working uniquely with monochromatic color schemes in my statement art. Since each color evokes its own emotion, this is a topic that truly fascinates me. This convocation event will be open to the public. For more information click here

Turchin Center for the Visual Arts at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC has invited me to do a solo exhibit October 5 – November 17, 2007. click here for more information.
I will also be teaching a 5-day workshop at the Mountain Laurel Quilt Guild October 1-5, 2007. For more information, email Candace St-Lawrence.

We decided to make this print in an unlimited edition because several people have paid me the highest compliment by saying that the statement behind Precious Water is so important that everyone should be able to own a print of it. Making unlimited edition prints allows us to make it in several sizes and offer it at a much lower price. But don’t worry, the quality of the prints are still as beautiful as the limited edition prints.

With these additions, we now have giclee prints of "Ecuadorian Girls", "Precious Water", "Fatima’s Son", "School: It’s Never Too Late to Learn"," Nature’s Gift", "Blue Men", "Burkinabe Mother" and "Untold Secrets", and they are all beautiful. click here to check out all the prints.

All of the threads that I designed for Superior Threads are for sale on the website. They are sold in packs of 25 because I have found that quilters use threads differently when they have the opportunity to “audition” a number of different colors (just like we do with fabrics) before making their final choices. click here