Painting With Fabric

Textile artist creates unconventional landscapes

By Jessica Laskey
September 2024

Water ripples around gray rocks. Pine trees and blue sky reflect in the water. The river bottom is visible beneath.

This landscape can steal your breath, but when you realize the Sierra scene is not a photo or paint, but fabric, you may gasp for air.

“I love doing landscapes,” says Merle Axelrad, the artist and wizard behind this textile trickery. “I think of them not as what they are—a rock, a tree—but as layering items in space to create depth and the play of light.”

Axelrad labors more than 1,000 hours on a fabric piece. She starts with a photo or drawing, which becomes patterns where she pins pieces of fabric. Colors, weights and textures vary. She works foreground to background, the opposite of painting. She considers her art form as “painting but the medium is textiles.”

The intricacy suits Axelrad. She has always been “pretty equally right-brained and left-brained.” From the start, her parents were supportive of her creativity. But they insisted she have a profession to support herself.

She studied government at Cornell before the pull of art became too great. She transferred to UC Berkeley to pursue a BA and arts instruction at the California College of Arts and Crafts. In her final quarter, she decided she wasn’t good enough to be an artist. She switched tacks and applied to architecture school.

Axelrad worked as an architect and project manager in San Francisco for 12 years. “It’s like sculpture, but with a function,” she says.

She moved Sacramento for her then-husband’s job, eight months pregnant, and traded architecture for motherhood. “I’m a workaholic and I never do anything halfway. I go all in and I went all in as a mother,” she says.

And she found a new outlet: quilting. She finished her first baby quilt the night before her son was born. She joined River City Quilters’ Guild to get out of the house.

In her first quilting competition, Axelrad won three blue ribbons. “I peaked early,” she jokes. But she was onto something.

She sold quilted pieces to health care facilities through an art consultant but longed to know what other artists thought of her work. Next came grant applications through the Metropolitan Arts Commission to hear what judging panels thought of her work.

Axelrad won a public art commission in 1999 with a series of eight fabric California landscapes that would hang in the CalEPA headquarters. She rented a studio at The Building (now called ARTHOUSE) at 10th and R streets and fell in love with the space. She celebrates her “silver anniversary” at ARTHOUSE with a two-night party Sept. 13–14.

“When my studio turned 10, I had a giant sheet cake,” Axelrad says. “I had a quinceañera for my studio at 15. At 18, my studio could vote and it was an election year, so I registered voters. I really wanted a 21st birthday party when my studio could drink, but that was during COVID, so I’m doing a big blowout for my 25th.”

Having a studio that welcomes the public to view her latest projects every Second Saturday has helped Axelrad’s career. Her livelihood comes from commissions by visitors.

“I love commissions,” she says. “Somebody says, ‘I want something beautiful to go on that wall.’ That’s the constraint? I can do that!”

For information, visit merleaxelrad.com and arthouseonr.com. ARTHOUSE is at 1021 R St.

Jessica Laskey can be reached at jessrlaskey@gmail.com. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram: @insidesacramento.