Artsy Shark

Enjoy the exquisite beadwork of Native American artist Katrina Mitten. Find out more about her work by visiting her website.

My name is Katrina Mitten. I am a member of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma. As a little girl, I was taught the importance of knowing who I am and where I came from. At the age of twelve, I wanted to learn an art that was traditional to my people. I was drawn to beadwork.

My people were removed from our homelands to reservations that was then called Indian Territory, what we now call Oklahoma. My family, along with four others, were alloted lands in Indiana and allowed to stay. Due to this removal, the small numbers allowed to stay in Indiana and the forced assimilation, our traditional arts suffered.

As a young girl, I was unable to find someone to teach me the techniques of Great Lakes style beadwork embroidery. I set out on my own to discover teachers and I found them in the beadworkers of the past. Through looking at family pieces, items in museums and diligence to learn this art form, I have arrived almost 40 years later.

My work is traditional in technique and in some of my pieces, traditional in design. I have created dance clothing for my children, cradleboards, bandoleer bags and tobacco bags.

I also create my own designs for jewelry and other items using those same beading techniques. The jewelry I create is wearable for today. I am known to bead items that are unusual. It has been said if it stays still long enough, I will bead it.

Enjoy the exquisite marquetry work of this talented featured artist, and see more of his work by visiting his website.

My name is Grzegorz Czarnecki. Currently I reside in Maspeth, New York, but originally I am from Poland. Ever since my youth, I have had a profound interest in carpentry. The job of designing and creating all sorts of finished products from wood gave me a feeling of great satisfaction and fascination. When I was 15, I first encountered the style of marquetry. My love for that form of art and, what I quickly discovered, great skill in the field that I had, opened up a whole new world to me, one which I knew I had to explore.

Marquetry, or wood decorative artistry, is considered to be one of the most difficult arts. Besides unrepeatable skills, it requires patience, engagement, and unprecedented precision. A beautiful item of marquetry is the fruit of a long and detailed process of picking, cutting, placing, and gluing which takes a long time. A real artist is able to combine factors such as grain, color and texture of materials to render desired aesthetic results as he would be using a palette to paint paintings.

The motifs applied in intarsia include elements of landscape, animals, flowers, people and geometrical details. I carefully choose the right wood, the right grain for each and every piece that goes into a final panel. The direction and type of grain can express motion, emotion and form, so it is crucial to choose every single piece (and a single work can have over a thousand  pieces… hundreds of individual pieces of wood hand cut and held together to form a final piece) with the final objective clearly in mind. It can make a huge difference in the outcome if this is done successfully.

It is hard to put your inspiration into words. Ideas come from everywhere: dreams, words, world events, a shape in nature, an emotion that seems important enough to express in form. I have a special passion for marquetry and anything to do with wood. There are so many wonderful species of wood in many colors and grain patterns which makes marquetry so satisfying. I get to see and use several of these different colors and textures in a single piece of marquetry, like oil painting that flourished during the Renaissance.

Marquetry is my way of appreciating the beauty of wood and expressing my creativity and my passion. I love being able to spend my time doing something I truly enjoy.

My works are variously defined. Some people say it’s a craft, and they pass by indifferently. For others it is a real art. They stop, watch, and share their expertise.

It is difficult to introduce art marquetry through photography. Photographed marquetry does not fully reflect the mood and impressions of the art piece. The art lives its own life, depending on time of day, and angle of light.

Canadian artist and naturalist Daryl Dancer-Wade presents her portfolio, which expresses her unique view of nature and habitat. See of her work by visiting her website.

Experiencing and teaching natural history, on the land and on the water, has been part of my paradigm for as long as I can remember. My appreciation of the landscape came about almost imperceptibly while spending summers exploring the shorelines of the sheltered glacier-carved waterways of North Western Ontario and Manitoba. This was the beginning of my journey of discovery through education and exploration of the Canadian Landscape.

My creative interests came about quietly in the background of childhood: building forts, dress-up parades, decorating bicycles, ballet, and learning to knit and sew. Some of my earliest memories are of my Grandmother and Great Aunties’ painting rooms with the overpowering odor of oil paints and turpentine. There are more memories, like those of my Grandmother stitching everything from satin wedding gowns to canvas tents on her Singer treadle sewing machine. The idea of becoming an artist came about only by happenstance when I came upon a college that accepted me as a student in their fine craft program. Three years later I graduated and became an artist working in fibre.

After three moves, raising a daughter, and many craft markets later, my work began to change from wool fibres to paper. I challenged myself to find a use for all the unsolicited mail, flyers and notices from school. After reading an article about an ancient Japanese technique of spinning paper, I developed my own method to create a thread from previously used paper, using a shredder and a spinning wheel. Once the thread is spun it is dyed, woven, stitched and appliquéd.

My last move landed me on Vancouver Island where I have had amazing experiences while working as a watershed technologist and as a wildlife naturalist, escorting guests to view grizzly bears in remote areas. I have had adult salmon swimming idly between my legs as they rested before heading up stream. Then watched quietly as a female salmon prepared her redd, where she would soon lay her eggs. I feel my connectedness to land when I observe grizzly bears in their natural surroundings, grazing on sedges of an estuary. To be able to watch a grizzly mom cautiously bring her four cubs of the year down to the river’s edge for the first time to fish salmon is beyond anything I have experienced.

When not working in the field or guiding during the summer, I spent my winters working on my bachelor of fine art. I took this time to research, examine and explore ways to express my connectedness to the landscape through my art. It was at this juncture that I realized, being an artist and a naturalist are one and the same.

Now I make art as a way to share my understanding of my natural surroundings and to examine how closely we are connected to all things living. For the foundation of my artwork, I am using the woven structure to represent the connectedness I feel to the land. The underlying structure in both weaving and nature is made up of several components, that are interlaced and connected to make each canvas and habitat structurally sound and viable.

The layering and textures in my artwork reflect the qualities and characteristics of the sensitive habitats in which I work. The appliqué and stitching suggest layering that occurs, such as the stratification found within a forest community or the inter-tidal zones that make up a marine environment. The materials I use to make my art, come from the forests and the fields, repurposed into the thread used to make the warp and weft of my woven canvases.

It is as an artist and naturalist that I hope to encourage individuals to explore their connections to the landscape on a more intimate level, to look through the visual surface and delve into a world of nature not readily seen by most.