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Stephen Tornero

Interview by C. VanWinkle
February 5, 2024

Let’s start at the beginning. Tell me about the prompt you responded to.

It was a drawing of a… leaf-person, I think? It looked like an abstracted face form, sort of shaped like a leaf, and there were falling leaves in the background. And there was this song-lyric type of poem that was about the past and the future, and maybe someday this relationship will be successful.

What did you think of it?

I thought it was interesting. I like leaves a lot, so I thought, “This is good already.” First, it reminded me that my great-grandmother wanted me to learn how to play the jazz standard “Autumn Leaves” on the piano. I worked really hard with my piano teacher, trying to figure that out. That was kind of an interesting memory for me.

It was an interesting prompt for sure. I was like, “What is going on with this?” I wondered why the person had a leaf shape; that part was kind of weird to me. I was just trying to go with my first gut impression of what I got out of that piece and move into something else.

Sure. How did you figure out where to go with it?

I have this trajectory of work where I make these little paper weavings out of vellum. I started out doing geometric shapes and it kind of had a Bauhaus feel to it. I ran out of, you know, square/circle/triangle, and I needed something else to do. I've been trying to look around for more organic forms, and there’s one that I’ve gone back to a couple of times. I have this plant, a triangle-leaf ficus, that has these tiny heart-shaped leaves. It’s really picky about where it goes by the window, and if it doesn't have the right sunlight or temperature, it will drop all of its leaves in frustration. When I first got it, it had full leaves and buds all over it, but it quickly shed them from stress, so I would pick them out of the pot and trace them. Every little leaf that fell off of this ficus felt like a tiny failure, but the shapes are so cool and I wanted to capture that in some drawings. This piece is maybe the second or third in a series that have these leaves in them, that are meaningful to me.

That's cool. How did this thing come together? I see a few different materials in here.

In the poem, I picked up on the theme of passing time, of past and future. In this piece, I combined this new drawing with an older drawing I made experimenting with acrylic ink and some floral motifs. As I was looking for a surface to draw on, I found some paper that I’d already done all these paintings on with acrylic ink. The leaves and the other shapes are with Posca markers. I have a bag now of maybe 50 or 60 Posca markers, and I just pull out two or three colors at a time and try to work in a color scheme. Then I draw those shapes on the vellum and they get interwoven together.

I teach art and I used to make these things with second graders. You cut the paper into strips and weave them back and forth. But because I'm a textile artist and I want to signal that to people, I always make sure it's some kind of different pattern. Maybe a twill, or something more complex, like going over two/under two, designing the structure within it. Then if somebody looks at this, they’ll think, “That person sort of might know what they're doing.”

Anyway, I started making these during covid because we were in quarantine. I used to go to Kent State University and use the looms to do my work, and then that wasn't a possibility anymore. I just needed to weave something, and I had all this leftover vellum from some drawings that I used to do. I started making these repeat patterns and weaving them back into each other and just seeing how that went. I think this one is probably like #100 that I've made so far because they're not that big. This is maybe 12 x 9, but they're usually little 6 x 6 thingies. It's just this way of working that tied together my weaving and my drawing practice.

Nice. I see on the internet that you’re weaving a lot these days. Are you still drawing too?

I try to flip-flop back and forth between drawing and weaving. It looks like I’m weaving a lot, but that's just because I post one picture a day when I'm working on something. What you're actually seeing is a lie because I'll weave like two inches, and then to make myself feel better, I'll post a picture of it. So if you're following along, it might look like, “Oh he did another whole thing today.” But no, I wove two inches and then got upset and went home. [Cody laughs] It's all a lie. I do it as my own documentation process. That's how I keep myself from having social media overload. This is about me, and I do one thing a day and then I leave. I do weave a lot more than I ever thought I would before. I didn't think that this was going to be such a big part of my life when I started teaching 15 years ago.

Yeah, surprise! How does this piece relate to the rest of your work?

I always have this desire to do fiddly things with my hands. I used to make those knot bracelets when I was a kid. It's manipulating the material together. I like the transparency of it. I think that’s something that I try to bring out a lot in my work. In the cloth, there are layers of the threads moving together and in this piece it’s actually transparent. With the vellum, I can do that in a way that's really visual. This is just another part of my work. And I think it helps me to do experiments where I don't have to thread an entire loom, which takes me about a day. When I'm just working on paper, I can go and come back to it and go and come back to it. It's more immediate and less time-consuming.

What about the imagery? Do you do work with themes of nature very much?

Not really, only since I started to draw these couple of plants in my house. I was trying to do more abstract things that might resemble a flower or a leaf or something, but that's not actually what it is. I was really inspired by Marimekko. They have their giant, abstracted flowers, so I have this flower shape in the corner, but I'm trying to figure out what my own flower is. I had these bedsheets as a child, I think they were Marimekko. They had all these crazy, abstracted, ‘70s plants all over the place. I had no idea where they came from, but I really really liked that one pillowcase and I have no idea why. I don’t really like to draw mimetically. I’m not trying to capture the flower. I just want people to look at it and see something that they can have a memory of.

I like that you can trace some of this influence back that far. You mentioned the theme of the past and the future, as well as making something new out of something old. Is this kind of idea meaningful in your work? Or was it just this particular prompt?

I think it is. I thought it would be fun to combine the old and new drawings as I think about what things I would like to bring with me from 2023 into 2024, and which things I should leave behind. If I went back to my documentation, I think every New Year, I try to do some experiments and not make it so precious. Last year, I put a giant white warp on my loom and just put whatever into it that I wanted to. There are pieces with cut-up shower curtains and straws and random stuff hanging around. This year, in my weaving, I was supposed to weave a bunch of tote bags, but instead I just wove a bunch of cloth and tried resist-dyeing it to obscure the design. I make all these plans, but then I wonder: Do I really want to do that? Do I really want to weave eight tote bags right now, or do I want to just have fun? So in this renewal period, I'm trying to remind myself that I am an artist. I'm allowed to experiment. The only person telling me what to do with my work right now is me. And the only person I could disappoint is myself, so I need to just let all that go. And try fun things.

Oh for sure! That’s something a lot of people have to re-learn over and over again. I think a lot of us get caught up in worrying about doing things “right,” the way that we think we’re “supposed to.”

That's true. There’s another thing I face, along with anyone else who teaches. I'm telling my 7th and 8th graders every day, “You have to have three colors and two patterns and this-this and this-that in order to be done with your project.” And sometimes I end up doing that to myself, which is to my own detriment. I think, “I don't have three colors, what do I do??” Sometimes I look around my studio and everything is a split complementary color scheme, and I'm like, “How did we get here again?” [Cody laughs] A lot of the education stuff kind of bleeds into this a lot for art teachers. It's hard to do that code-switching between artist and teacher, which is why I only used to work in the summertime. I would give myself a week off to decompress and then I would go into creative mode. But now that I have work and people want me to make things, I have to do it during the school year. So I have to shift gears and it's really hard.

I can imagine. Alright, now that you are on this side of this process, what is your advice to a new person getting their prompt today?

Honestly, I really think that the first reaction is the best reaction. “It's not that deep,” as my children tell me. So whatever little piece that they react to first, I think that they should just commit to it. That'll make the best result for them and hopefully for whatever artwork they make.

Call Number: C111VA | B113VA.toUnti

Stephen Tornero is an artist and educator from Canton, Ohio. His art practice is rooted in textiles, but explores the intersections of weaving, drawing, and non-traditional materials. His artistic mission is to create work and curate shows that put textile art in front of as many eyes as possible.