Art work of the week

 Father L. has a post on the tapestries in the Los Angeles Cathedral.


view north wall tapestries


view south wall tapestries
  
they have quite a mix of saints, most of whom I know about, meaning they left out the unpopular ones. And if they are "multicultural", well, so is the church.

here is one panel as an example:

...There are quite a few panels, but this one is an example of the mix of saints:

St. Andrew Kim,The first Koran born priest and martyr, St Agnes,young girl who was martyred in ancient Rome, the Anglo Saxon historian Bede, Alphonse a theologian in the catholic reformation, and good old Bishop Neumann, who worked with the poor illiterate Irish immigrants in Philadelphia in the mid 1800's.

What makes the art work more interesting is how the ancient art of the tapestry was done using modern computer techniques: Cathedral site about them is HERE.

Sending artwork to the tapestry mill for the usual process of in-house translation into weaving code would have taken far too long and would have put another hand between the artist and the finished work. To meet the time deadlines involved and to make the weaving reflect the source images directly, Nava, working with Bay Area artist Donald Farnsworth, developed a method of making weavable digital files of the tapestry designs. These final weaving files were then e-mailed directly to Flanders Tapestries near Bruges, Belgium from Nava's studio in Ojai, California. What would have taken in the 16th century decades to make with scores of weavers and dozens of looms, took twenty months of designing and two months of weaving.

Nava and Flanders Tapestries developed a custom palate of two hundred forty colors based on sixteen colors of fiber going in two directions to create the images. Multiple tests and "a hair-raising," as he describes it, twenty months of intense work brought about a precise calibration of the computer monitors and the woven output so that what Nava saw in his studio was what the mill would produce.

All of the tapestries are made from cotton with a small percentage of viscose to ensure the colors, a subtle interplay of neutral tones evocative of the ancient frescoes of Italy, will remain true. Cloth woven from cotton by the Egyptians has survived intact for thousands of years.