FIBER ARTS

Claire Detels is a retired University of Arkansas music professor who has recently moved from NW Arkansas to Taos, NM to pursue a second career as an award-winning fiber artist, specializing in free-form felting and crocheted art and accessories. She has studied advanced fiber arts techniques with Taos artist and Project Runway finalist Patricia Michaels, with Ashley Cloutman of the Taos Fiber Arts Center, and in various workshops in Colorado, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri. She had also studied abstract and realist drawing and painting techniques with Cheri Wollenberg, John Newman, Stephen Kilborn, John Robert Willer, Cedar Kindy, and Carol Cooper. Her major inspirations are nature and post-impressionist painting, especially Van Gogh and the American Ashcan School.

Claire’s one-of-a-kind artworks and accessories feature everything from wall hangings to shawls, scarves, table runners and fiber jewelry. She works without reference to pre-drawn patterns or stitch counting; but according to expressive mixtures of different fiber textures, colors and stitch-types. Her works have steadily won awards at the annual Ozark Folkways Fiber Festival in Winslow, AR, including “Best in Show” in 2009, People’s Choice in 2010, 2nd places for crochet and felting in 2011 and 2012, and 1st place in crochet in 2013. She also teaches felting at the Eureka Springs School of the Arts in Arkansas, as well as privately. A member of the Espanola Valley Fiber Art (EVFAC), Claire Detels currently exhibits her work at EVFAC, Moxie in Taos, and the Ozark Folkways Gallery, Terra Studios and the Eurekan in NW Arkansas. She has also shown work at the Bella Vista Arts and Crafts Fair (2011-13), the 2009 Fayetteville Goddess Festival, the 2009 and 2010 Arkansas Fiber Arts Extravaganzas, the 2011 Fayetteville Artini Fair, the 2013 Eureka Springs School of the Arts Show, and the 2013 EVFAC show at Ghost Ranch, Abiquiu.

Detels also maintains her former career as a musician, currently as piano accompanist for the Taos Community Chorus, and previously as pianist and music director for the Unitarian Fellowships of Benton County and Fayetteville in NW Arkansas; as lecture-recitalist for the Arkansas Arts on Tour, Arts-in-Education, and Mid-America Arts Alliance programs, and as violinist, violist, and pianist with the Bella Vista Strings ‘n Things chamber players, the Bella Musica Piano Trio (piano), and the Ozark Festival Orchestra of Monett, MO.