About Fiber Artist Diane Cadrain

The natural world inspires my work by offering constantly-refreshed images of arresting loveliness. Tolstoy said, “Love all creation…love every leaf.” In that spirit, I create images that combine fragility with strength and the evanescent with the eternal. The evanescent and the eternal appear, for example, in the sand ripples left by the departing water at low tide. Those ripples are always different, yet eternally the same.

My fiber artwork focuses primarily on landscape and encompasses two principal media types. One type of artwork is painted on cotton, then embellished with thread painting, backed with batting and backing, and finally quilted. The quilting adds dimensionality to the work. My other types of artworks are felted, meaning they are created by deploying a material called wool roving as if it were paint. I then enhance this tactile and textured medium with hand embroidery. 

In 2015, I retired from freelance work as a lawyer and writer specializing in employment law topics. Still, I’ve been sewing all my life, starting with hand embroidery and pin weaving, as taught by my grandmother at our home in Hamden, Connecticut. I learned machine sewing in the public schools of Hamden, Connecticut, and with that skill, I constructed my clothes and costumes. As a law student, I learned to knit, and later, in my early 30s, as a new mother, I began quilting. I took up felting in my 50s. My fiber artwork now includes hand-painted fabric, thread painting, felting, knitted embellishments, hand embroidery, and beading.