Artist: Pilar S. Coover of Providence, Rhode Island, USA
Interview 93
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Interviews published by Gareth Bate & Dawne Rudman.
Biography
Pilar Sans Coover was born in the old Roman city of Tarragona, Spain, during the first year of the Spanish Civil War on 16 September 1936, the fourth child of a poet mother and doctor father. She majored in biology at the University of Barcelona, married the American writer Robert Coover, and spent several years studying classical guitar. They moved to the Kent coast of England in 1969 where she was introduced to the art of needlework, discovering in it the perfect medium for her artistic and narrative impulses, and she devoted herself to it thereafter. Since 1979, they have divided their time more or less equally between Providence, R.I., and London, England with extended stays in Barcelona, Venice and Berlin.
Her embroidered tapestries, which have won numerous awards in juried shows around the country, were first exhibited in the Portal Gallery, New Bond Street, London, in 1979. She had her first one-person show at Artworks at the Wayne, in Providence, Rhode Island, USA in 1981, and one-person shows followed in Paris and in various locations in the U.S., culminating in a lifetime retrospective in 2006 with an exhibition of nearly 100 works gathered from private collectors around the world. Pilar's website.
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Artist: Pilar Sans Coover. Photo: Robert Coover. |
Tell us about your work?
My approach to needle art is to seek to transcend the limitations of traditional needlework by opening every possibility between the thread and the canvas. My four years of university biology and my love of music and narrative all play a part in my work.
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Beyond the Frame, 21 in H x 24 in W, 1989. Wool, cotton and silk threads on needlepoint canvas. Photo: Abar Color Labs. |
From where do you get your inspiration?
I have been inspired by my love for nature (I was once a university biology major, fascinated by fins and feathers and over the years since then, I have enjoyed a lot of gardening); by the large-scale narrative nature of old tapestries seen in cathedrals and museums in Spain; and by the work of great artists like William Blake and Hieronymus Bosch. I grew up in Cataluña in the Franco era, a period dominated by an almost medieval Catholicism, with its grotesque images of martyrdoms, its hooded penitential Holy Week processions with their self-punishments, their "pasos" and tall puppet-like "gigantes", its morbidly fantastic outlook on life, and all this has had some effect. But Cataluña was also the home of the great modernist architecture, with its cheerful free-flowing forms derived from nature and its imaginative introduction of new materials, a kind of structural resistance to rules and regulations; and the 20th century Spanish painters most admired by me and my generation including such iconoclasts as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Salvador Dalí, all associated with Cataluña.
World of Threads Suggests: |
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The Seed, 30 in H x 30 in W, 1982. Wool, cotton and silk threads on needlepoint canvas. Photo: Abar Color Labs. |
What specific historic artists have influenced your work?
On a school trip to Madrid, we were taken to El Prado, where I discovered the 15th century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch for the first time. I was so taken by the imagination and theatricality of his paintings that I had to be pulled out of the room. His extraordinary Garden of Earthly Delights not only embraces earthly delights, but the terrors of Hell are also included in his sensuous embrace. It is like an astonishing vanguard 20th century work painted five centuries earlier. Encountering Bosch was a kind of revelation and its impact has cast a spell on much of my work.
Another artist who had a major influence on my tapestries was the English painter and poet William Blake (1757-1827), a romantic who rejected the modern trends of his time, letting his art follow his spiritual beliefs in an artistic new age. Again, it was primarily the narrative quality of his work, together with its dancelike fluidity of movement, that most fascinated me. His springing open-armed figure in Dance of Albion speaks of innocent enthusiasm, while his print of Nebuchadnezzar shows a maddened man become a crawling animal. I loved his engravings for The Book of Job and The Divine Comedy and found in him a complex spirit akin to my own.
World of Threads Suggests: |
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The Sacred Tree, from the Pilar's Forest Series, 31 in H x 27 in W, 1981. Wool, cotton and silk threads on needlepoint canvas. Photo: Abar Color Labs. |
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Tamino, from the Magic Flute Series, 26 in H x 25 in W, 1981. Wool, cotton and silk threads on needlepoint canvas. Photo: Abar Color Labs. |
What specific contemporary artists have influenced your work?
I suppose I have been attracted most to the Spanish surrealists. Surrealism being one way to show what's under the surface of the daily reality, and in particular to the Catalan painters Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí, as well as Pablo Picasso who studied in Barcelona and whom Barcelona has adopted as one of their own.
Picasso was born in Malaga, the son of a traditional artist and teacher, but when his father got a position at the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona, the family moved there. Picasso was something of a boy wonder, entering art school at the age of 13. After a period in Madrid as an art-school dropout and El Prado pilgrim, he moved to Paris and became a leading figure there of the Parisian avant-garde. Famous before he was 25, he continued to divide his time in the early years between Paris and Barcelona. Of course Picasso has, in one-way or another, influenced just about everybody. For me, it was the great theatricality of his figures, especially the harlequins, which affected the way I approached the designs of my own work. But I also admired his cubist period, the way of using pattern to bring out the essence of the work, its spirit. In paintings like Girl on a Cushion, I felt I was witnessing the subject of the work metamorphosing before my eyes, and I wanted to capture something of that effect in my own tapestries.
World of Threads Suggests: |
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So Many Moons! So Many Tales! Will the Rocks Remember?, 48 in H x 59 in W, 1989. Needle work on canvas with wool, cotton and silk threads, mounted on screen frame with silk material on the back of the screen. |
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Sarastro, from the Magic Flute Series, 32 in H x 30 in W, 1982. Wool, cotton and silk threads on needlepoint canvas. Photo: Abar Color Labs. |
Miró was in some ways the most radical, the most methodical, and the most Catalan of the three. He was the one who wanted to "assassinate" traditional painting, and his paintings were always amazingly innovative, yet rich with local colour. His paintings always made me smile. He was influenced by Catalan folk art and by the Roman frescos and church art that had such an influence on my own designs. I often felt a close comradeship with his work, which was intimate and dizzyingly vast at the same time. It was so easy to get delightfully lost in them. And he also eventually worked in fibre, designing several splendid and world-renowned tapestries.
Dalí was born in 1904 in Figueras, north of Barcelona. Like Picasso, he was also very precocious, having his first exhibition of drawings when he was only 15. He entered the Madrid School of Fine Arts two years later, where he soon became a friend of the surrealist poet Federico García Lorca and the equally surreal filmmaker Luis Buñuel. He had a reputation for eccentricity, which was finally too much for the art school and he was eventually expelled. Whereupon, he left Madrid and went to Paris and, on Joan Miró's recommendation, met Pablo Picasso, 23 years his senior. You can see the impact of these two artists on his work. He had great gifts and could paint in almost any style, though I was most taken by his very "realistic" paintings of surreal dream images.
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Uprooted, 46" in H x 33 in W, 1979. Wool, cotton and silk threads on needlepoint canvas. Photo: Abar Color Labs. |
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Queen of the Night, from the Magic Flute Series, 29 in H x 25 in W, 1981. Wool, cotton and silk threads on needlepoint canvas. Photo: Abar Color Labs. |
Why did you choose to go into fibre art and how did you decide on this medium?
Like every Spanish girl of my generation, I was taught how to use a needle in primary school. I was much more interested in drawing at the time, and somewhat hated those classes, but unwittingly I learned a skill that would serve me very well many years later. We moved to a small coastal town in England in 1969, and one day a sweet elderly neighbour showed me some of her needlework, mostly made from pre-designed kits. Out of politeness, I showed some interest, so the next morning she came to my garden with a little canvas and needle and some threads for me, and I decided, just for fun, to have a go. My husband had just read to me a passage from the novel he was working on, The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, and a wintry image stuck in my mind, so I pulled the needle through it. He was very enthusiastic about the result, so I went ahead with a few more pieces, stimulated by his enthusiasm. At the time I was studying classical guitar, but it wasn't long before I had put the guitar aside and was working fulltime at the needlework tapestries.
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Papageno, from the Magic Flute Series, 26 in H x 25 in W, 1981. Wool, cotton and silk threads on needlepoint canvas. Photo: Abar Color Labs. |
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The Obscene Bird of Night (after a novel of that name by Jose Donoso), 34 in H x 29 in W, 1974. Wool, cotton and silk threads on needlepoint canvas. Photo: Abar Color Labs. |
Please explain how you developed your own style.
My style grew out of my own drawings, my love for imaginative literature, and preference for complexity and colour in art. From the beginning, my designs tried to tell stories in colourful unexpected ways. I began always with charcoal drawings on the canvas, rough cartoonlike outline sketches that could be developed with needle and thread. Wherever we traveled, I gathered hundreds and hundreds of threads—cotton, wool, silk, metallic, anything that could be threaded into a needle and pulled through a canvas—and these became my palette, spread out around my studio room, ready to be snatched up whenever I thought they might be useful. I liked to invent my own unique stitches, creating textures that sometimes were Dalí-like in their close imitation of nature, sometimes calculated yet free, like the surreal patterns of Miró.
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A Midsummer Night, 35 in H x 28 in W, 1992. Wool, cotton and silk threads on needlepoint canvas. Photo: Abar Color Labs. |
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The Meeting Point, 30 in H x 72 in W, 1979. Wool, cotton and silk threads on needlepoint canvas. Photo: Abar Color Labs. |
When did you know that you would make a career in artistic creation?
Maybe I was lucky. I had not made more than seven pieces, when a friend introduced me to the owner of the Portal Gallery in London, England. The Portal often carried a number of imaginative "craft" pieces. They loved what I was doing and included me in their next group show in 1979. That gave me the courage to start some much bigger works, which were finished coincidentally about the time we moved to Providence, Rhode Island, USA. There was a nearby gallery, Artworks at the Wayne, which also did framing. I took one of my new pieces, The Obscene Bird of Night, in to be framed and they were very enthusiastic about it, inviting me to prepare enough for an individual show. I worked very hard and in January 1981 had my first one-person exhibition there. From then on, I became totally devoted to my needlework tapestries. On my website www.pilarcoover.com there is a complete list of all my major exhibitions and awards.
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The Making of the Storm, 21 in H x 25 in W, 1994. Wool, cotton and silk threads on needlepoint canvas. Photo: Abar Color Labs. |
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The Poet's Garden, 19 in H x 25 in W, 1995. Wool, cotton and silk threads on needlepoint canvas. Photo: Abar Color Labs. |
What role do you think fibre art plays in contemporary art?
At present, most of the crafts have achieved a fairly good artistic standing, helped perhaps by the recent enthusiasm for installation art, which has often used fibre, wood, metal, found objects, mixed media, etc. Museums and galleries have become increasingly open to all kinds of materials and many art schools now have a fibre art center, so fibre is well established in the art world.
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Grandmother Pilar, 34 in H x 32 in W, 1981. Wool, cotton and silk threads on needlepoint canvas. Photo: Abar Color Labs. |
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Giselle, 32 in H x 30 in W, 1987. Wool, cotton and silk threads on needlepoint canvas. Photo: Abar Color Labs. |
Do you find it more difficult to show and sell your work than non-fibre artists?
I don't know. My non-fibre artist friends often find it difficult as well. Art is a chancy career and there are all too many stories about great artists who were not discovered until very late or even after their death. Luckily for fibre artists, there are many craft art magazines and now websites as well, which are very good at displaying artists' work and announcing opportunities for competitive multimedia exhibitions, contemporary and innovative craft shows, fibre celebrations, etc., your own World of Threads Festival site being an excellent example. It's also a good idea to keep an eye on galleries to see which are interested in carrying craft and multimedia along with more traditional forms and media.
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Gene-Unlogical Tree, from the Pilar's Forest Series, 32 in H x 30 in W, 1992. Wool, cotton and silk threads on needlepoint canvas. Photo: Abar Color Labs. |
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Fossils, 21 in H x 25 in W, 1983. Wool, cotton and silk threads on needlepoint canvas. Photo: Abar Color Labs. |
How does your early work differ from what you're doing now?
With time, my work got bigger and more complex in design and texture. As I accumulated more threads, new colours and textures entered in. I became interested in thematic series, one piece inspiring the next. For example, I completed a series of twelve different tapestries on Mozart's The Magic Flute, another set of six imaginary trees which I called Pilar's Forest, six Mythological Women, and so on. I also became fascinated with the narrative possibilities of folding screens, which led to some of my personally favourite works.
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Delilah, from the Mythological Women Series, 30 in H x 20 in W, 1986. Wool, cotton and silk threads on needlepoint canvas. Photo: Abar Color Labs. |
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Celestial Grapes, 21 in H x 25 in W, 1994. Wool, cotton and silk threads on needlepoint canvas. Photo: Abar Color Labs. |
What do you consider to be the key factors to a successful career as an artist?
To be totally committed to the work itself and to exploit all its possibilities. It's also good to be fully aware of what is going on in one's own medium. Sites such as yours can be a great help.
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Birth of a Star, 27 in H x 22 in W, 1975. Wool, cotton and silk threads on needlepoint canvas. Photo: Abar Color Labs. |
Tell us about your studio and how you work:
My studio is small, comprised of a comfortable place to sit, drawers and drawers full of different threads, and a table or desktop for drawing. We have traveled a lot, living in England, Spain, Italy, as well as Providence, but canvases and threads are very portable. I can work anywhere.
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Artist: Pilar Sans Coover. Photo: Robert Coover. |
What interests you about the World of Threads festival?
The dimension of it; its openness to innovation and a wide range of artistic concepts; and its active engagement with artists. By its very existence, it makes a big statement about the growth of fibre art in the serious art world. There are many very fine artists among those selected for the interviews on your website, and I am flattered to be among them.
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A Holy Ghost, 27 in H x 24 in W, 1977. Wool, cotton and silk threads on needlepoint canvas. Photo: Abar Color Labs. |
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Penelope, from the Mythological Women Series, 12 in H x 14 in W, 1983. Wool, cotton and silk threads on needlepoint canvas. Photo: Abar Color Labs. |
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