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Q1 What made you decide to be an artist?
My fine arts education really began when I was a little girl. My parents encouraged me and my brothers in our creative pursuits, and for that we're really grateful. I grew up in a very small farming town in rural Illinois where access to the arts didn't exactly abound. But our house was full of art books, photography books as well as the best of comics and commercial art. My father was a photographer and an industrial/educational filmmaker and my mother had been an art teacher. I started taking independent art classes at the age of five and took many drawing classes as an adolescent, I studied painting privately with a local painter, I sat in life drawing studios in Paris when I was a nanny and tried to keep my drawing abilities fresh. As teen I read a lot of independent and underground comics which were as influential and important to as any drawing lessons I took. My father taught me photography and I kept a darkroom at home. I studied music too, but visual art was my primary passion. |
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I started college as a double major but I dropped out of the art program to complete a degree in French instead. I was already showing my work in galleries, and the college and my professors took little interest in the work that I had been doing up until that point. I was expected to go through the grinder, which I did for two years and quit. I wasn't acquiring new skills, so I looked elsewhere to grow.
Q2 What inspires you to design?
I'm inspired by what I don't see. I visualize a piece and then carry it around in my head until I can attempt to execute it. I don't know where these ideas come from. They're things I've never seen from anyone else and I think that's why I'm compelled to create them. I want to bring them into being. Any artist who can draw a fine line inspires me. I love comic art, illustration as well as painting, music, design. When someone else has made something out of seemingly nothing, and its beautiful, I'm inspired. That always excites me into making something of my own. |
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Q5 Who is your favorite designer (or an artist)?
I love comics as much as fine art. Great comics are great art. Krazy Kat, Robert Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, Liberatore who did Ranxerox, Love and Rockets, Peanuts... My art isn't informed so much by comics as my drawing is, I guess. It's also informed by ecclesiastical and religious iconography. Some of my favourite artists tend to be Polish artists from the early 20th century like Bruno Schulz (artist/writer) and Stanislav Szukalski, |
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Q6 What's a highlight of your recent design career?
Well, when I first started working in embroidery, I really liked the idea of collaborating with other artists where I would create an embroidered version of their work. This led to a collaboration with Dame Darcy. For Sublime Stitching, I wanted to expand that idea and offer sheets of embroidery patterns by some of my favorite artists and illustrators. Kurt Halsey, Mitch O'Connell, Julie West and Lisa Petrucci have all agreed to design sheets for Sublime Stitching. I'm super excited about all of them participating. I love their work, and think they'll make for really great embroidery patterns!
Q7 Is there a dream project that you'd like to do?
So often embroidery is work of minute detail and unless you are the embroiderer, or an admiring needle worker yourself, it's not really examined closely and fully understood. I certainly didn't appreciate it or understand it until I did it myself.
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Jenny Hart is the founder of Texas-based Sublime Stitching, the little company that rocks the needleworking industry. Jenny is an internationally published artist/illustrator, an award-winning author of two titles for Chronicle Books and a founding member of the infamous Austin Craft Mafia. Due to an overabundance of bunnies and dull, outdated instructions, Jenny independently founded Sublime Stitching in 2001, taking embroidery where it had never gone before: with hip and stylish Embroidery Patterns and the first all-in-one Embroidery Starter Kits. Her instructions entertain and educate a new generation of crafters who've never held a needle and thread and re-inspire veterans with fresh designs. Sublime Stitching's innovations with embroidery were met with worldwide attention and hordes of loyal crafters, thankful for something to stitch other than geese in bonnets. Jenny's own works in embroidery have been exhibited and published throughout Europe, South America, Mexico, and Japan. Her work has been featured in zines and publications that include SPIN, JANE, Real Simple, Rolling Stone, BUST, ReadyMade, Family Circle, Entrepreneur and The Wall Street Journal. Her hand-embroidered portraits are included in the collections of the Roger Miller Museum, actress Carrie Fisher, comedian Tracey Ullman and Elizabeth Taylor. Jenny's work includes collaborations with the Flaming Lips and The Decemberists (because embroidery rocks). |
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Q3 Can you talk about the various creative aspects of your job?
I launched Sublime Stitching in 2001, about a year after I started embroidering. Since I was so surprised at the soothing aspect of it, and I loved it so much, I wanted to turn others on to it. No one, except die-hard needleworkers, did embroidery. It was a dying hand-craft and I thought this was due to the extremely lacking quality of designs and themes (almost exclusively country-cutesy animals and folksy themes). As an artist, I was making my own designs in embroidery for my work, but a hobbyist relies on patterns. So, as an artist, I decided to create quality, commercial designs of more contemporary themes that would entice a new generation to take up embroidery. I also saw a need for updated educational resources- instructions that were entertaining and easily understood. I couldn’t find a single embroidery book with instructions that didn't read like a military drill or make the stitches seem more difficult than they actually were. |
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Then, there was the fact that these books spoke solely to a generation for whom it was safe to assume their mothers and grandmothers had taught them how to embroider.... so nothing explained the basics. Product for embroidery hadn't been truly innovated in nearly 40 years.
Q4 If you could rewrite your history a bit and take on a totally different career or lifestyle, what would it be and why?
French teacher? |
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| So, the extension of my work is really to put embroidery in front of viewers who previously didn't consider it- either as work worth admiring or doing themselves. So, I'd love to create larger, sculptural pieces that show how embroidery interacts with a plane- like a large wall embroidered with rope. I'm looking for a collaborator for that piece! |
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