The Eagle Times recently featured Canvasworks in their “Arts and Entertainment” section. With permission, here is the article by Bethany Lasko:

From the antebellum South to the White House, local floorcloth artist brings history to life

By BETHANY LASKO
Staff Writer

PERKINSVILLE, Vt. — When you walk into the Canvasworks studio, you would think you were stepping back in time. Colorful cloths bring a refreshing flair to floorboards that have seen hundreds of thousands of sunrises. Windows seem to hang on the wall, framing a scene that has gone unchanged for more than 200 years. The only evidence that time travel has not actually occurred is the strip of track lighting that shines down on the table that nearly stretches from wall to wall and the radio in the corner.

From the carriage house of her 18th-century farmhouse, Lisa Curry Mair brings a part of early America back to life more than 200 years after it faded from the floors of the Colonists.
Curry Mair is a floorcloth artist, and if the number of museums that host her work are any indication, she’s one of the best.
When the first settlers came to America and built their homes, all they had to decorate with were the materials they found in the new country and what they brought with them. They cut up the sails from the ships and painted them, using the canvases to decorate their bare floors and walls.
Today, the process is a little more involved. Using five coats of polyurethane, Curry Mair does what she can to make sure her pieces are ones to live on.
“ I love to imagine living the way they did, using whatever you have on hand [to make a floorcloth]. Although I cheat — I use the computer a lot,” Curry Mair said.
Using CAD and Photoshop, Curry Mair creates her designs and then shows the customer what it will look like in their home. “I have them bring a photo of the room, and then I can show them what the room will look like once it’s completed.”
Curry Mair got into floor cloths in 1992, when she and her husband were doing some remodeling work on their Massachusetts home. “We were refinishing the kitchen floor and there was one piece that wouldn’t refinish.” Discovering the floorcloth in her own home, Curry Mair started to do her research, and found herself attending craft fairs that featured floorcloth artists.
“I saw one at a craft fair, tried it myself and instantly had five friends asking, ‘Make me one?’”
Soon after, Curry Mair and her 3-month old daughter, Lauren, were at their first craft fair, starting what would become Canvasworks.
Two years later, Curry Mair and her family moved from their home in Massachusetts to landscape painter Thomas Clark’s old farmhouse in Perkinsville, Vt., where she turned the old carriage house into her studio and started her business.
Fifteen years later, Curry Mair has finished and signed 765 floorcloths and made thousands of blank canvases for the do-it-yourselfers who frequent her Web site.
Three years ago, the interest in floorcloths increased and Curry Mair found herself in need of some help, so she hired Theresa Hooker from the neighboring town of Springfield to give her a hand with what Curry Mair now refers to as a “side business.” The do-it-yourself kits she sells to avid craftmakers via her Web site may all be blank canvases, but they still require the prep work that any of her other pieces do: shrink, prime, cut, hem, design.
All but one of her mail-order kits come with a template or stencils, to help lay out the piece like a paint-by-number floorcloth.
Hiring Hooker has allowed Curry Mair to get back to the custom pieces that are her “bread and butter.”
Most commissions come from homeowners who are trying to recreate a certain period, although there are also those who simply want something more durable than a rug to put down beneath their dining room tables.
And Curry Mair’s floorcloths are more than durable.
“I use a really heavy canvas so the piece will stand up to people and pets walking on it, and because you can still see the texture of the canvas. And it looks more authentic,” she said.
Besides the custom pieces that make up the bulk of her work, Curry Mair’s work can also be seen in museums throughout the United States.
Most recently, Curry Mair was asked to create two wall-to-wall pieces for the Rosedown Plantation in St. Francisville, La., a National Historic Landmark and domestic plantation complex. The plantation “embodies the lifestyle of the antebellum South’s wealthiest planters in a way very few other surviving properties can,” states their Web site.
While she worked on the 18- by 21-foot floorcloth for the plantation, Curry Mair listened to books on tape — five of them, to be exact, and all focused on the period.
The two pieces Curry Mair created for the plantation are among her proudest, and biggest pieces, though she has plenty of which to be proud.
Having been selected 10 times for Early American Life magazine’s “Directory of Traditional American Crafts” has given her the opportunity to which few artists in the country are privy. During the Clinton administration, Curry Mair was asked to create an ornament for the First Family’s Christmas tree.
“It was an honor to be asked to do that,” she said. “I have a photo somewhere of the Clintons standing in front of the tree. I’ve looked for the ornament I made but can’t find it. It’s a huge tree.”
A few years later, Curry Mair was asked to design an egg for the White House’s annual Easter egg hunt. “So I’ve got an egg and an ornament somewhere in the White House.”
Luckily, Curry Mair hasn’t had any problems in this economy. “I did see things slow down in the spring this year, but that was when I was finishing Rosedown. So when orders fell off I had a big project, which was nice,” she said. “This fall things have gone back to where they should be. It couldn’t have been better timing.”
Curry Mair rarely does the same piece twice, although “the Mariner’s compass gets requested a lot. People will tell me they’ve done their research on floorcloths online and really liked the compass. “It’s a strong design to put on a floor because it will draw your eye to the different points of the room.”
For Curry Mair, art is something she’s had in her from a young age. “I was always messing around with crafts,” she said. Growing up in Nova Scotia helped provide her with a plethora of materials, too. “At low tide I’d get this glob of red clay, put it on the turntable in my bedroom and I’d make a pot. I never caught any grief from my mother. She was great about that.”
Now, Curry Mair gives back by hosting classes to groups that are interested in learning her trade. If a group of people wish to take a class, they can work with her to set one up, so long as there are going to be enough students in attendance.
“My husband and I just retired,” said student Joan Turner of Suffolk, Va. “We’re touring the country and this is our first stop. I’ve wanted to take one of Lisa’s classes for years.”
Curry Mair smiles and calls out the next instruction for the Mariner’s compass floorcloths the class is working on.
“Recreating the past, that’s fun,” Curry Mair said. “I feel like, at least with the museum pieces, I’m leaving a mark.”

In an effort to make my classes more accessible, I am attempting to create some “virtual” workshops. The idea is that you can paint at your own pace, and I can keep my studio cluttered with today’s projects. It works for everyone, right? Maybe, we’ll see.

For a first try, I’m doing this “Wreaths and Stars” Placemat Kit. Here’s the deal: You get four #4 prepared 12″ X 18″ canvas placemats. These have been poly’d on the back, so they’re nice and stiff and easy to work with. You also get all the stencils, layout instructions and a complete materials list.

But here’s the kicker: you also get a 20 minute DVD showing you all the steps- from dragging and lining out, to cutting and using stencils. I walk you through the whole process. You can pause and restart and replay it any time you want.

Here’s a sample of the video :

As a gift to my fantastic local dressage organization, Canvasworks is donating a special floorcloth to next week’s Silent Auction. When I decided I wanted to do this, I felt I needed to come up with something really special; something that horse people would be able to use and enjoy in their homes or tack rooms. It is important to me to make this a very customized piece and I had so much fun painting my stairisers of all my horses, I thought , “Why not offer a portrait of their horse in the center of their floorcloth?”

So the sample piece is my own- my horse, my farm name, my town. This is a 4′ X 6′ floorcloth. The background is Hale Navy, the checks are Cottage Red and the lettering and border stripe is iridescent gold. For the CVDA auction, I will display a finished sample piece  as well as the floorcloth which they will be bidding on- a blue floorcloth with red checks and a center oval with a basic folk art background landscape. After the auction I will meet with the winning bidder and discuss what they would like in the oval and what text they want. I will take the floorcloth home and finish painting it with the customer’s personalization and seal it with many coats of poly. When the winning bidder receives this floorcloth they can put it on the floor in their tack room, kitchen, den or hallway for years and years of use.

Now this is where it gets fun! The details could be just about anything. For this group, I’m guessing it will be a horse, but it could be a couple of horses grazing, or a portrait of their farm, or a house… I’m open to suggestions! The text could be a farm name and town, or a horse’s name and his birth year and year of death.

If you are a CVDA member and you’d like more information about this very special floorcloth, just give me a call or drop me an email.This piece is valued at $720. Starting bid will be $150. If you would just like to order this without having to bid ( and then you can choose Hale Navy, Essex Green or Black as the background color), do so before October 24th, 2009 (the day of the auction) and I will donate 15% of your $720 order to the Central Vermont Dressage Association.

Here’s the same design with a house portrait:

This is the historic Willard House at Historic Deerfield, Massachusetts.

For now, I am only offering these as  4′ X 6′ floorcloths for $720. If there is enough interest, I will consider offering other sizes. Feel free to send me your ideas for themes too!

In our Intermediate Floorcloth Class last week we talked about how to apply texture and how it affects the overall design of your piece. The textures I will talk about here are faux marbling and sponging. Here is a Mariner’s Compass witout any texturing.

Each area of color is applied with flat color. The nice thing about this application is that you can line out the whole piece and paint it, one color or one section at a time. You can stop anywhere you want and restart at a later date and everything will look pretty much the same. With a strong design, such as the Mariner’s Compass, and on this relatively small scale (2′ X 3′), there is already plenty of detail. The design stands on its own.

To make things interesting you can add texture like marbling to the lighter areas and sponging to the darker ones. The way you do this is to line out the entire design,  paint the lighter checks the background color (in this case Monroe Bisque) and allow it to dry. Then you apply the marbling. here, I chose to colors: a gray and the Georgian brick I planned to use in the small points and border stripes. I washed over the entire are of the diamond shape, then dropped the gray color in, allowing it to bleed out n a vein-like way. before it dried, I went back and dropped some Brick into the gray veins. I repeated that for every tan-colored diamond. When that dried, the veins appeared lighter than they did when I first applied the paint- very subtle and nice.

Next step- paint all the black diamonds and the black border. When those were dry, I taped around all of the black diamonds to prevent paint from getting on my new marble diamonds. Then I sponged all of the black areas with a thinned version of the gray paint I used from the marbling. Sponging just breaks up the flat color of the surface. I sponge sparingly, so it still reads as “black”, but with variegation.

Another variation on this one was the background of the circle behind the center star being painted in iridescent gold. The way the light hits gold paint makes it’s own textural effect.

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Here’s the finished floorcloth with sponging, marbling and gold paint.

I’m guessing if I did a survey, about half of you would say you liked the solid one and half would prefer the textured one. I suspect that the strongest design might be with either sponging or marbling, but not both! What do you think?

A simpler version of this design is available as a kit.  Click here and scroll down the page to view it. We are in the process of developing a kit which will have this more complicated pattern already applied to the canvas. If you are interested in this you can call the studio (802-263-5410) to pre-order, or drop me an email and I’ll let you know as soon as it is available.

It started with a coaster class on the weekend, progressed to a Beginner Floorcloth Class on Monday and then an Intermediate Class on Tuesday and Wednesday. It was a fantastic group of people, with lots of laughs and lots of teaching. Everyone went home with their floorcloths proudly wrapped and ready to show off. We had participants traveling from as far away as Michigan, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, as well as New England. Oddly, there were no Vermonters! Theresa and I felt out-numbered!

Monday’s class did the Checks with Branch Stencil; the Intermediate Class tackled a Mariner’s Compass, complete with two-tone marbling, if they chose, and sponging. Three  of Monday’s students carried on into the Tuesday and Wednesday class. It was fun really getting to know each participant. Joan, traveling from the South with her recently-retired husband, and trying her hand at floorcloth painting for the first time; Joyce and Elaine, from Massachusetts, with some painting experience and lots of good questions; Joanne looking to start her own floorcloth business (You go girl!) and Sissy, fellow horseperson, marathon runner and floorcloth painter from Pennsylvania- what a blast!

Theresa was here to help whenever anyone needed a hand, and she was there to pack up all their goodies (kits, brushes, floorcloth blanks and books) when they left. Thanks Theresa! I couldn’t have done all this without you! And, as always, Theresa added her own flair and kept everyone relaxed and happy!

I only wish we could have had some time to go outside and enjoy the great colors out there. Next class I’ll have to incorporate landscapes and some Vermont scenery.

At the end of the class we did a one-hour session on how to use Photoshop to create and layout designs. Is this something my blog readers would like if I offered it as a webinar? Let me know and I’ll try to figure out how to do it.

Now it’s back to work painting all those orders that have been piling up. Sorry about the digression, folks. I’ll give it my best shot to have everything back on track by Monday!

A bunch of tough individuals braved the elements on Saturday and came to our Open House. The rain barely let up all day and by the evening’s Wine and Cheese reception people were slogging back and forth to the shop across the street to listen to me talk about floorcloths, Weathersfield history, and about living and working as an artist in Vermont in general. The sun came out on Sunday  morning and by Sunday afternoon we had so many people coming through, my husband had to take over a third of the tours while Theresa and I did double time!

The shop across the street, where we store canvas, supplies and work on the largest museum pieces, was set up to display all of the”Paint Your Own” materials. Everything from paint brushes to primed placemats, dog and cat cloths, and table runners to primed and hemmed floorcloth blanks in various sizes and floorcloth kits. I also borrowed the mural/hanging floorcloth I made last year for the Weathersfield school. It celebrates the history of the one- room schoolhouses in Weathersfield. Read my post from last year by clicking here.

It was fun talking with other Weathersfielders about the town’s history and their recollections of old homes and events from the past. Here’s a close up of the mural:

Today 9 ladies from as far away as Michigan and Virginia arrived on my doorstep for the Beginner’s Floorcloth Class.  They each lined out, painted and stenciled a “Branch Stencil” 2′ X 3′ floorcloth. It was a great group and a fun class to teach- paint was flying, blow driers were roaring and some good laughs were had. Everybody’s floorcloths looked fantastic. If you weren’t able to come to the class but would like to paint this one, it’s available in a kit by clicking here.

Tomorrow a group of 5 will work on Mariner’s Compasses for the Intermediate Class. I hope they can keep their sense of humor as I torture them with tiny points and lots of straight lines to paint! We’ll also be doing things like marbling and sponging, just to keep it extra interesting. i’ll try to remember to get some pics of that group too. Stay tuned!

OK, so the ABC crew is in Lyme, NH (about a half an hour up the road) and they have torn down a home and are rebuilding this week. They were in touch with me about possibly doing a floorcloth for the home. Yay! Only problem is, I’m still waiting to hear back… I went ahead and made a big 8′ X 10′ floorcloth, painted the center with black and off white checks and left a wide border for a “personalized” border. It’s a little tricky to personalize something when nobody knows who the family is, right up until the “door knock”, which happened on Monday. So yesterday the design crew was still scrambling, and I was getting very anxious… The family moves back in on Sunday, which means I have to have the piece to them on Saturday, which means polying by no later than today. So, I painted a border design which should go with just about anything- a nice black and gray feather scroll with occasional gray diamonds. It looks really pretty, but I had hoped to do something with a little more sentimental value for the family. Here’s how it looks on my work table:

Really, this is  8′ X 10! When you shoot them up on a table they magically shrink before the camera’s lens…

At the same time Theresa and I were working (very quickly) on this Extreme Makeover piece we were scrambling to finish a floorcloth for my dining room for the Open Studio tour this weekend. You might remember a post a few weeks ago, where I talked about laying out a floorcloth… I think I left it where I was going to sleep on the design and figure out what to do next. At the time I was planning to paint murals on my walls and I needed a floorcloth that would go with the murals, but not make things too busy. In the middle of the night, I woke up and had a “light bulb moment”. Put the murals on the floorcloth! I had been worried about how to pull off murals in a room where we have paintings, big windows, nice furniture, etc. How do you make the murals take a back seat, and not run away with the room? My middle-of-the-night idea was a good answer to that dilemma. So I went to work laying out an interior pattern with a wide border with a (coincidentally?) VERY personalized border. Portraits of my 200 year old home and surrounding countryside decorate the four sides of the 8′ X 11′ floorcloth. It was funny having both of these floorcloths on the table at the same time. One was to be for an undisclosed family in a yet-to-be-built home, somewhere in the Upper Valley. The design? Who knows? The other, was for me and MY family, as a gift to our home for putting up with us for the last fifteen years. As detailed and complex as it is, the one for my own home was far more interesting and gratifying to make and I love that it makes a statement about how much I care about this place which I call home.

So, here it is:

The four sides have scenes of 1) the farmhouse, with old Henry Gould plowing the field out front and a line of maple trees going up the hill to the cape at the end of the road, 2) the barn, where our horses live now and dairy cows lived a hundred years ago, 3) the dairy cows sharing the pasture with a far-away moose and 4) the covered bridge down the road.

Call it a floor mural, I suppose, but combined with the strong center geometrics , I think it’s something else. I don’t know what you call it!

By all means come and visit this weekend (October 3rd and 4th) during the Open House and check it out, along with the new stair risers and lots of other floorcloths and other painted things to see and/or buy. Hours will be 10 to 5 on Saturday and Sunday, with a Wine and Cheese reception on Saturday night 6-9. Hope to see then!