Ancient Arts in a New Land : Weaving New Life : Polish Woman Finds Freedom of Expression

Ten years ago, tapestry artist Monika Chmielewska did a self portrait. She depicted herself in profile, with dark spaniel eyes looking despondently into the distance.

“Everybody says I look sad there,” said the Polish-born artist, whose eyes seem to brim with laughter these days. “I was very uncertain about my life. Living in a communist country is not the funniest thing.”

Shortly after she completed that tapestry, she left Poland and embarked on a career in the United States. Her life has been full of benign certainties since, she said.

There has been, for example, the certainty that she will continue to make tapestries in her adopted country, without fear of censorship. And there is the next-to-certainty that her tapestries will be well-received by buyers, who have paid as much as $20,000 for a Chmielewska piece.

Chmielewska’s work is on display at the Pasadena branch of Coast Federal Savings & Loan Assn. on South Lake Avenue, where her 35-foot woven depiction of the city’s major landmarks looms behind the tellers, with the domed City Hall in the center and Gamble House, Cal Tech, the Rose Bowl and a half-dozen others extending toward the edges in pastel shades.

“It always attracts the attention of new customers,” said Stan Smith, Coast Federal branch manager. “You can see them looking at it, picking out the different buildings.”

Another Chmielewska tapestry on display in the lobby of Temple Beth Hillel in North Hollywood. This tapestry is her conception of the passing of Jewish traditions, with an elderly rabbi directing a girl with a far-seeing look in her eyes, as an impressionistic-looking Torah rolls across the sky.

She has even done, on commission, woven portraits of Pope John Paul II (displayed for him during his visit to Chicago in 1978) and John Travolta and scenes of Monet-like lily ponds.

The daughter of a celebrated Polish children’s cartoonist, Chmielewska settled in Pasadena seven years ago. “Anyone who comes from Europe wants to live in a huge house,” said the artist, standing in her broad living room that she uses as a studio. “You’re not able to have that there.”

It was space that drew her magnetically to this country, she says. Not just physical space, but artistic space. In Poland, artists must belong to a union and get government approval for major projects.

“My father has been constantly oppressed by the censors,” she said. “They look over your shoulder and tell you what to do. I didn’t want that type of life.”

Tapestry-making is a seldom-practiced skill these days, she said. “The work is actually done sideways, which can be very confusing,” she said. “You can’t really look at it until it’s completed.”

What if she makes a mistake? “Sometimes you can make little changes by unraveling what you have done,” she says. “But that’s very rare, and it’s very time consuming.”

Chmielewska usually works from a black-and-white outline drawing. “But the colors and textures--those come from your mind,” she says. All of her tapestries are made of thousands of 2- or 3-foot pieces of yarn, each dyed individually. The flush on a subject’s cheek or a russet field contains dozens of colors worked into the tapestry.

A single tapestry may take as long as a year to complete, Chmielewska said.

But the rewards are monumental, she said. “You have this wonderful texture that can only be achieved by weaving and the softness of the thread,” she says.

Trained as a sculptor, Chmielewska found herself dissatisfied with her early career. “There was something missing--the colors and the softness of tapestries,” she says. “I would have the concept of a wonderful sculpture and take the hammer. . . . “ She shrugs. “I wasn’t strong enough. Tapestries are a very feminine type of work.”

Chmielewska may have been destined to be an artist from childhood. “My father would put me before a still life and tell me I couldn’t leave the room until I painted something,” she said.

Henry Chmielewski, who created the cartoon character, Tytus, a whimsical chimpanzee beloved by Polish school children, is visiting his daughter now. “I wanted her to be a dentist,” he said, jokingly. Under his daughter’s influence, Henry Chmielewski is making tapestries of his own--bright, expressionistic landscapes.

Her father instilled in his daughter a love of traditional art. “I hated cartoons,” said Chmielewska, though she concedes that Tytus “paid for my diapers.” Visits as an art student to museums in the Soviet Union and France first introduced her to both ancient tapestries and contemporary tapestry-making techniques.

Determined not to wrestle with Polish art apparatchiks, Chmielewska flew out of Poland in 1978, the day she earned her degree from the Fine Arts Academy. She first lived with her mother in Dearborn Heights, Mich., a Detroit suburb, before following her brother, Bart, a Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer, to Pasadena.

Chmielewska’s first works in this country were woven on a converted bed frame, with her tapestries-in-progress stretched out on nails. (“That’s how I did some of my best work,” she said.) Now she has an assortment of professional looms, a 35-foot-long studio with skylights carved into the ceiling and all the yarn she can ever use.

“Sure, there are people living in tiny apartments here, too,” she said. “But here you have a future.”