Judith (Jude) Larzelere
Editor’s note: The following is an edited transcript of a recording made at Jude’s home. Joining me on that day was my wife, Ginger, which accounts for Jude’s occasional gaze away from my camera. We began with tea in her home, then were toured through Jude’s studio. In the photos below, Jude sits under her quilt titled Translucency and Kaleidoscope.
Biography
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My name, Larzelere, is pronounced Larza Lear. It's French, from the French Huguenots who fled in 1684, went to England, and to Staten Island, and then spread out. I grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan. My father was a dentist and oral surgeon and had a private practice. My mother stayed home with four children until my brother was in kindergarten. She was trained as an English teacher but segued into homebound teaching. From early childhood on, I was used to being outdoors a lot. Right after coming home from school, I’d change into play clothes and then out the door, no matter what the weather. And another part of childhood that affected me was watching both of my grandmothers doing handwork. My father cast and made all his own gold for false teeth and bridges. He had won a college scholarship, building a prize-winning miniature Fisher body coach. It looked like a Louis XVI gilded coach with all working parts: little doors that opened up, little windows that went up and down, and cast golden eagles on four corners at the top. It's exquisite. So that was in the air, this ability to create things with your hands and be skilled at it. So that's the family saga.
I was taught to knit when I was seven. I made my first cross-stitch embroidery at that same age. So I was working with fiber at an early age, and I was a child who also enjoyed sitting quietly and doing something. I made my first pair of knitted argyle socks at the age of 11 as a Christmas present for my grandfather. I was doing stuff like that all the time — not so much drawing or painting or that type of artwork. In high school, I never took an art class. I didn't feel I had any art talent at all, no ability to create the shape that I wanted, to look at something and put that same image down on a piece of paper. That is something that eludes me.
Instead of art, I took anthropology courses through college. I was a very good student, but I never retained much. I would study like crazy. I would write papers that got A's. I would get A's on exams, and the knowledge would evaporate. I was in dread of having to take a comprehensive exam for the Phi Beta Kappa awards. I never took them because I figured I couldn’t remember anything. So, along the way, I had married and had a child, and we moved to Rutgers, where my husband got his first teaching job. And there I happened to take an art history class as an audit, and I could remember every single image. I could tell who painted the “mystery painting” because I knew what that artist's work looks like. I said, Oh my gosh, this is something I know how to do. And then I started thinking about color. I remember that, as a child or a young teenager, I could remember all the colors in the yarn department and where they were placed. If you told me to find this or that color, I could go right to it. I thought, that's something not everybody has, and maybe this is where my skills are. Color, color, color. This is the passion that has carried me through my life as a fiber artist.
After graduating with an MFA in painting, it dawned on me when I did not get a teaching job that I was unlikely to earn much money, and I had to figure out what to do. By this time, I was living in Newburyport, Massachusetts with two young children. I was divorced and living with a partner who was an architect. In 1978, the Whitney held a one-man show of Rauschenberg’s work, and one of the pieces they displayed was “Bed.” It was a framed antique quilt covered with paint splotches. The architecture and design world went nuts. They wanted fabric for their walls. And I knew this because I was reading Art Forum magazine. I thought, I can sew, I can make a wall hanging. That is how I got started; sewing was something I knew how to do. So I made three samples, went to some architects’ offices in Boston, and said, "I know how to do this. I'm looking for work.” And I got commissions. Very primitive sort of stuff, compared to what I did later, but I saw there was money to be made if you could find the right places to approach.
The field of art consulting was just beginning to be a job category. At the time, artists were still going around and talking to an architect or a designer, one-to-one, but very shortly, within three or four years, the art consultant became the interface, and you could not approach an architect directly. Suppose an art consultant, really a high-class decorator, said, “I will provide all the artwork under budget, and I will hang it for you. Give me the work.” Then the individual artist, like me, had to find an art consultant who would work with them, and it became harder and harder for us to get in the door.
The other sales avenue that worked for me was craft shows. There were three or four major East Coast craft shows, all juried, but I could get into the Baltimore craft show every single year. The Philadelphia Museum show, the Smithsonian Museum show, I could get in maybe once every four years. They were very competitive, and fiber was like the stepchild of crafts. I don't know why. I mean, pottery, woodworkers, jewelers, garment makers, those were the craft fields that the promoters wanted to feature. At a 300-booth show, they might have five fiber booths, so it was tough to get in. If I got into these shows, it was usually a source of income for several months. Yeah, yeah, Providence is a real hub for artists, as you might imagine, but not for sales.
The other problem was that after the 2008 recession, everybody in the craft movement lost patrons and sales big time. It never recovered, partly because the patrons were aging out and no longer collecting. They were getting older and downsizing, and their children were not buying crafts. I'm just wondering what's going to happen.
How did I end up in Westerly? I had been living in the Boston area since 1974, and during that time, I never had a studio space of my own. I was renting. At that time, I was making quilts, going out four or five times a year to major craft shows to sell the work, to earn money, and I taught quilting. I was paying a total of $700 a month for housing and studio space and realized I could afford a mortgage. My parents were generous and said they would give me a down payment if I found a place. Boston was out of reach. Ipswich was out of sight. But I had a friend who lived in Charlestown, Rhode Island, who said, If you come down and stay with us, you can stay as long as you want, and we'll help you find a house. She drove me all around Peacedale and Wakefield, and all the towns over that way.
Finally, we began exploring Westerly, and this house was open to a realtor's tour. My realtor said, I think you might like to see this, so I came with her. There were no plantings, just grass. It was a sturdy house that needed a complete paint job. As important, there was this workshop in the back. It had lots of room, was heated, and had electricity. It had high ceilings and windows overlooking the yard. It had everything I needed. I stood in there looking out the windows and said I want the house. Because it had been a sheet-metal fabrication workshop, it needed work. I had a crew come in, put a roof on, put a floor in, put in insulation, and sheetrock. On both sides of the walls, there were huge, long, heavy-duty workbenches that had to go. So it was a dream come true.
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I love my huge side yard, too. I had always wanted to have a garden, you know, grow vegetables, have perennials, and not just trees that can cut off the sunshine. It’s wonderful to watch the things pass through the seasons. I love that. I don't have an extensive social life, but this is the way I want to live.
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Quilt: Red Volunteer
Artwork
I’m one of the rare artists who can support themselves through their work. I had to make a pretty clear decision that the things of the world are not important because I wouldn't have a lot of money. Never have, but I’ve had the freedom to do what I really want to do, and good fortune in that what I wanted to do, I could sell. I've now and then had what I call pickup jobs. I packed apples one season when my kids and I moved up to Newburyport after my graduate school. I worked in a small company that produces tracker organs, cutting open the pipes with a little knife. Once, I cleaned toilets in a restaurant. I mean, you know, you do what you have to do. But I never wanted to get an indoor job just sitting. I can do it, but I don't want that. In my art, my legs are working, my arms are working. My head is working. No, I could never sit at a computer.
My first career was as a professional quiltmaker, making quilted wall hangings. With a quilt top made in a traditional way, you take pieces of fabric, cut them up, and sew them back together. All the classical quilt patterns other than log cabin are made this way. My approach to art quilts was a whole different process. I cut bands of equal length fabric and sew them into striped fabric sheets. These sheets are recut into lengths that are about 1.5 inches wide. Those form the basis for my design work.
Using my method, there are ways to create directional changes, but it is not effective in creating imagery of landscapes or geometric patterning. I had a career in art quilt making for 35 years and created over 250 major quilts. This was enough. I knew when I was done. I haven't quilted for 10 years but, still, I have a reputation for something I did in the past rather than for what I do now.
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Teal, Coral, Gold
Live Falling Stars 
Red and Blue Reach My studio is currently devoted entirely to weaving. How do I do what I do? Here are the steps I take to make a weaving. First is to acquire the raw material, which is yarn, and on a warping wheel I wind the yardage that will become the warp.
Warp is the word that means the long threads that will be the structural background of a woven piece. Yesterday, I was threading these warp strands on the loom, from the back, through the heddles one at a time. Which of several heddles I pass the weft through will determine the pattern of a weaving.
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Then the threads are passed through what's called a reed, which will serve to beat down each weft thread after it has passed through the warps.
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Each warp thread is tied onto a metal rod in the front to tension the strands.
Down below are pedals called treadles. The words trod and treadle are related in English. Each treadle will raise its corresponding harness and its set of warp threads.
Finally, I’m ready for the weaving to happen. You trod one or more treadles at once and that raises selected harnesses to spread the warp apart just so. Now there's an passage through which you can “throw” the shuttle that houses the weft yarn on a spool, from one side to the other. You release that treadle, beat down the yarn with the reed, then raise another set of harnesses and send the shuttle back.
And that's how a pattern in weaving occurs. You create color in two ways, with the warp threads and the weft threads. It's lovely how a third color emerges without losing the characteristics of each. Here it’s the gray and the green plus something new.
Quilting is not like that at all. If you want to make a pattern in a quilt, go to your yardage, see the colors, cut the shapes, sew them together, and the color does not change. After 35 years of quilting, I had developed a taste for solid color that doesn’t apply to weaving on a loom. I'm continually having to compromise what's in my vision and what the loom does. You have to really think, then look and see what’s actually happening. I can think what I want, but sometimes I don't get what I was hoping for.
Navajo rugs are made in a somewhat similar way, except that the shapes they tend to weave are linear. But look at these hangings of mine. Making circles is really, really, really, really hard. For example, you can see in this piece that it's not a perfect circle. The sun, or moon, is compressed.
A way to create a better illusion is to interrupt the circle with a line. I discovered it looks more circular than it is. Your eye does the job.
Sundown Barn Island
Magical Landscape
Spring Moonrise
Phases
I don’t put in a 40-hour week. I can't physically do it anymore. I can weave maybe two hours at a time, then I have to quit. Maybe I'll come back in and do something else, or garden, or clean house, or go see a friend. It's interesting that weaving is physically harder to do than sewing. The sewing I did was never a physical issue; I could sew quilts for 6 hours a day. But weaving is physically more difficult, especially as I get older. You know that all really makes a difference.
Westerly Village
As for my Westerly Village membership, I need to go back to the year after I turned 75. I had great difficulty walking. I was in a great deal of pain. I was having a lot of trouble climbing up and down the stairs in my house. I was so concerned; I even put this house on the market. I had two offers and had accepted one. But I suddenly backed out of it. I said, "Wait a minute — the condo I'm supposed to move into is on the fourth floor." I'd be looking at brick. There will be no garden, there will be no pet. I'm making a huge mistake. My realtor was wonderful. She said, All we have to do is this and this, and it'll be over, and it was. COVID was a difficult time for everybody, and it was difficult for me too. I was very concerned, because my children live far away. I might need help with a ride somewhere and some sort of support system. As it happened, at the library I talked to a social worker about this, and she said "Do you know about Westerly Village?" I joined three years ago.