Who makes the item and where

It came to me in a dream. Like, it literally did. I dreamed the phrase "abstract impressionist embroidery" and I saw what the art looked like. I can still see it. I woke up excited--I wanted to see what it looked like in the real world. But google returned no results on the search term--abstract impressionist embroidery didn't actually exist. And that meant I had invented it.

It was about a year after I had quit writing for good and I was suffering through what I can only call withdrawal. Quitting was the right decision for me but it was painful, and it required a sort of re-ordering of my identity, my time, and my emotional state. Plus it was about a year into the pandemic, so nothing felt particularly solid.

I painted in my 20s and I learned embroidery in junior high. It took me a full day to realize that the canvas you paint on was fabric, which is also what you stitch on. A full goddamn day.

My sister-in-law had played with embroidery a bit and still had some thread and needles. And there was some acrylic paint in the house from various projects. I bought a small canvas. And I did some experimenting, which resulted in this:

It didn't look a lot like what I saw in my dream but I was kind of delighted with it, and with the possibilities of it. I felt like I had invented something new and thrilling, and that could fill the vacancy in my where writing had once been, and also enter the world truly representing my own contradictions: small, precise and intense, but also chaotic and undisciplined.

I made a ton of paintings over the next several years, and rented a studio for a year to see what would happen if I had a dedicated space. I even sold a couple of paintings during open studios, to my utter shock. But the other painters in that studio all sort of zoned out when I mentioned embroidery. I watched myself morph from painter to granny in their eyes. It made me defensive and self-righteous, and then tired.

I don't paint a ton right now; I'm not sure if I exhausted my interest or just my ability to hold my neck in the bend required for stitching. But every once in a while I come across something that piques my interest, like Caroline Harrius who embroiders pottery (!) or an article about embroidery as subversive protest. And I get pulled back toward it. We'll see.