James Koehler

In the summer of 1999 I was making plans to move from my home in Oregon to Santa Fe, New Mexico, a place that I had felt drawn to for many years. I was looking through one of the weaving magazines one day and came across an article about tapestry weaver James Koehler. Though my chosen direction in weaving was doubleweave, rather than tapestry, I felt drawn to his weavings and the concepts he explored in them.

Several months later I had taken the leap and was starting to settle into my new life in Santa Fe. One day I got up my courage, picked up the phone and gave James a call. I introduced myself and told James that I would be interested in meeting him. He immediately invited me to come to his studio and share a cup of tea.

At that time James lived in a rural area outside of Santa Fe, down a rugged dirt road in a very small house that was completely off grid. Even though it was only seven miles from where I live it took half an hour to drive carefully on the road, open a locked gate, and then drive the last few miles down an even rougher road.

James welcomed me into his studio, and there was an instant sense of kinship and comfort with each other. During the course of our conversation James mentioned that he was thinking that it was time for him to take on an assistant in his studio. I hesitantly mentioned that I might be interested, if he thought he would want to work with me. He said that he would think about it and get in touch with me in a few months.

I took that as a gentle way of turning me down, but a few months later he did in fact give me a call. This time I invited him to my home because I thought that if he could see my aesthetic in the way that I live he would know whether we could be a good fit. By the end of our visit we had agreed that I would start working with him one day a week.

Each Wednesday I made the drive out to James’ studio. For the first year James spent the mornings leading me through his courses on color, design and tapestry weaving. I worked through his exercises, weaving small tapestry samples that explored various design principles. As I worked on my small pieces James wove his larger tapestries. Every now and then he would stop and ask me what I thought about a color or design decision he was making. I knew that he could make his own decisions just fine without my input, but I felt honored nonetheless that he shared his thought process with me.

At midday we would walk the few feet over to his little house and sit down and have lunch together. These were some of my fondest times with James, getting to know each other as friends. He was quite open with me, and over time I learned a lot about his life growing up, his years as a Benedictine monk, and his life after leaving the monastery and becoming a renowned tapestry artist.

In the afternoons I worked on his tapestries as they came off his loom. James was incredibly meticulous, and bit by bit I learned all the steps involved in getting his tapestries ready to go out the door - cleaning out the odd bits of debris, vacuuming the tapestries, steaming them to bring them into square, knotting the warp ends and sewing them back into the tapestries, sewing the hems by hand, sewing on the velcro attachments by machine, making and painting the boards that the tapestries hung from, rolling them up in fabric wrappings that he had custom sewn, getting them into their packaging and ready to be shipped out.

After a year I had completed James’ series of courses and he asked me to become his assistant working one full day a week. He was incredibly hard-working and prolific, and his goal was to have a new tapestry off the loom each week to give me when I arrived each Wednesday morning. It was quite a full day’s work to get all those steps done, but we always managed to have time to sit down, have lunch, and share what was going on in our lives.

By this time James was in great demand as a teacher, and in addition to traveling to teach workshops, students would travel to Santa Fe to study with him for a week at a time. Because it could be a challenge driving to his house whenever there was rain or snow, James decided it was time to move to the same community outside of Santa Fe that I live in. I helped him move into his new, much larger home and studio, and even painted the walls for him.

Over the following years a number of James’ visiting students stayed at my house because it was much more convenient than driving in from town, and they had the use of my kitchen and we could enjoy sharing meals and getting to know each other. It was actually possible to walk to James’ house on the greenbelt trails from my house, and it was a shorter route than driving.

James was also a fabulous cook, and he enjoyed having a few people over for dinner and forming connections between them. One time he introduced me to a friend of his with the statement “This is Jennifer. She suffers from wanderlust.” I said “James! I don’t suffer from it, I love it!”

James had the personality of a monk at heart, and even though he had left the monastery, tapestry was his form of devotion. Other than the two days a week that he spent at an outside job, the other five were completely spent at his looms, sometimes for as long as sixteen hours in a day. Aside from teaching, the only trips he took were to visit special art exhibits that he was interested in. He occasionally mentioned to me that if I weren’t involved in so many things and always running off on trips here and there that I could probably be as successful as he was. But as much as I admired his dedication to his work I knew that my path was different and I needed all the other aspects in my life to feel fulfilled.

James’ home was minimalistic and always impeccable. We exchanged gifts with each other at the holidays, and it was a challenge coming up with something that would fit into his life. One time, on a trip to Vietnam, I saw a set of coasters that looked like they could have been a design for one of James’ tapestries. When I gave them to him he told me that rarely did someone give him something that he felt that he could have in his house, but that these were perfect for him. They were one of the few things I asked if I could have after he died.

One weekend an old friend from college visited me for the weekend. We had a big snowfall that night and it was perfect conditions for cross country skiing. We got geared up and headed out my back door onto the greenbelt trails. I mentioned that James lived less than two miles away up the trail and my friend suggested that we stop by. I was kind of nervous about doing this because, as good of friends as we were, I just didn’t see James as the kind of person that you would drop by unannounced on, particularly sweating and covered in snow.

But when we rang the doorbell and James opened the door he welcomed us right in with open arms and fixed a pot of tea. He had just returned from a trip to Iceland, where he had an exhibit at the U.S. consulate and had given a workshop. He spent the better part of an hour showing us images from his trip and telling us all about it before we strapped our skis back on and headed home. I felt that I had gotten to see a special side of James on that day.

The last time that I saw James was in October of 2010. We had both just had our first books released and we had a celebratory dinner at a nice restaurant, exchanging copies of our books with each other. He mentioned that he hadn’t been feeling well, and thought that he might have picked up a bug on one of his trips. On the following March 2nd I gave him a call the day before I was leaving on a teaching trip. He said he had been quite ill, but was starting to feel better, and suggested we get together for lunch when I returned. Two days later a friend called me where I was staying in North Carolina to tell me that James had died that day.

Everyone who knew James was of course stunned by the news. We organized a memorial event with an exhibit of his tapestries in my community and people came in from all over the country for it. Several of his students stayed at my house for the weekend and we had a big slumber party, telling stories and celebrating his life.

James had a pair of photographer’s weights that he used to hold down his tapestries for tying the warp ends. I spent countless hours doing that job, and always wished that I had a pair of weights like that - they weigh about 11 pounds each and are much easier to use than a big book. When I helped some friends and members of his family organize a sale of his studio they asked me if there was anything I would like to have. I don’t have one of James’ tapestries or any of his hand-dyed yarn, but I do have those weights now. Every time that I pull them out to tie fringe on the ends of one of my weavings I feel James’ presence and am grateful for having shared in some of his life.

James Koehler ‘Harmonic Oscillation XXXIX’