Varied style
In the picture, a Picasso-esque nurse shepherds two children through a doctor’s office. Her jigsaw-puzzled face is split. She is half mother, half care provider. The children are both ailing and on the mend.
The piece, which bears the title “A Time Stands Still” is a thought provoking look at the nursing profession that stops people in their tracks as they walk the halls of Tech Group Inc., a medical field employment agency in downtown Spokane. The style is interesting, but so is the medium – fabric. Hundreds of different patterns of cloth make up the vibrant colored picture. Such creations are Nan Drye’s trademark.
Drye, 43, is a Spokane Valley artist of some note in the Inland Northwest. Her art has been noted in Northwest Woman magazine, featured at the William Grant Gallery in Spokane and the Never Ending Garden in Spokane Valley. Drye also is a commercial clothier and her garments are featured at Pottery Place Plus. Some of her works can be viewed online at www.dryegoods.com.
“The things I like about her work is she selects fabrics that are unusual,” said Denny Young, an artist and architect who tends shop at Potter Place Plus. “She does things that are a little on edge. I’d call her work Obstreperous.”
What sets Drye apart from other artists is the number of different forms in which she works. Drye is a jeweler, a painter, a clothing maker. Her cottage-based studio is overstuffed with the odd ingredients of future projects, buckets of giant wooden spoons and forks, piles of handball-sized acrylic grapes.
Fabric is her preferred medium though, because it gets to the root of creative beginnings. Drye’s interest in art solidified in the linens department of the Bon Marche in downtown Spokane, though she’d come from home where art was encouraged. Drye grew up in Kansas City, Mo., a progressive art city that boasts more fountains than Paris. Her mother had a degree in art history. Drye’s father was an attorney.
Drye started out studying music in college, but got out of it and started a family. When she began working retail, the slightest opportunity to be expressive got her creative juices flowing again.
“I was in retail management for the Bon,” Drye said. “I was in linens, which I really loved because I helped people decorate.”
But Drye didn’t just want to decorate, she wanted to design. A woman she knew turned her on to quilting, which was a good start, but Drye didn’t want to express herself according to someone else’s pattern.
She began coming up with her own designs for large fabric murals and clothing. It’s the clothing that pays the bills for Drye’s art business.
Her wearable art, as Drye calls it, is a quilt-like creation of rich colors, sewn together in cubist-like patches and peppered with buttons for decoration. No two pieces of clothing are alike, in part because women who buy Drye’s creations are looking for one of a kind clothing, but also because Drye works in small pieces of fabric and seldom has enough to produce two of something.
Hanging in the back of her shop, is a beautiful waist-length jacket done in patches of ever deepening blue tones. The centerpiece of the jacket’s back features three orcas in a deep blue sea, with a slight touch of surface light warming their backs.
“Usually, I start with a feature fabric and work around that,” Drye said. “There’s some embroidery, some quilting.”
She describes her clothing customers as women in their mid-30s or older, who are looking for unique clothing that is truly expressive.
Her hanging art is similar in nature to her clothing. In 2004, Drye completed a 12-panel depiction of the months in earth-toned fabrics. Portions of the panels have been on display at the Never Ending Garden, 14115 E. Trent Ave.