Painting With Textiles: Five Days at Anderson Ranch With Melissa Joseph
For five days in Snowmass, Colorado, I stepped away from oil paint and into a studio filled with wool, thread, and fiber. Led by New York–based artist Melissa Joseph, whose solo show Casserole Culture opens at Charles Moffett this September, “Painting with Textiles” invited a small group to rethink painting through the language of textiles, and the questions of materiality and memory that come with it.
The setting was Anderson Ranch Arts Center, a cabin-style campus where adults of every skill level cycle through ceramics, woodworking, painting, printmaking, and kinetic sculpture. Days ran 9 to 6, meals included, and the place had the loose, unhurried feel of somewhere people actually want to be.
What We Made
Appliqué, embroidery, wet and needle felting, and image transfers using Citrusol and acrylic medium, all logged into a fabric sketchbook that became a working record of the week. Alongside the making: an ongoing exchange of artist references, open calls, and conversation about what it actually means to sustain a practice.
Melissa Joseph, Teaching
Joseph’s approach is loose by design. Each day centered on a technique, but the structure existed to be departed from: the sketchbook was a container, not a curriculum. When a participant knew more about a given process than she did, she’d hand them the floor; student and teacher traded places all week. That instinct traces back to her own path: she arrived at needle felting only after trying nearly everything else, and her current work still folds in ceramics and found objects alongside fiber. Her method is trial by doing, and she pushed us to work the same way: try it, see what happens, fix it under pressure if you have to.
What It Cracked Open
I came in expecting to paint sideways: abstract textile pieces, maybe large-scale. What I got was slower and more physical: hunched-over, materially stubborn work that didn’t move at the speed of a brush. That friction turned out to be the point. I’ve always been better at starting work than finishing it, and the repetitive, haptic nature of fiber process pushed me to completion faster than painting ever has. It also brought back something old: I used to hand-weave compulsively as a way to keep my hands busy and stop picking at my skin, though those pieces never held imagery. This time the weaving did both: occupied my hands and built toward something. By the end of the week I was craving oil paint again, which told me what I suspected: this isn’t a replacement for painting, it’s a second register for the same concerns that already run through my work.
What Worked
The conversations were the unexpected core of it: about living artists, many Black and brown and underrepresented, and about the actual mechanics of surviving as an artist. The daily rhythm (morning presentation, afternoon technique, the occasional field trip to a sheep farm) gave the week shape without boxing it in. We talked heritage, navigation of the art world, and how those things show up in material choices, not just subject matter.
What Could Improve
Five days isn’t enough to work large, and the fabric sketchbook format caps scale by nature. Materials prep had gaps: beads with no beading needles, tulle nobody used that could’ve gone toward more felt or embroidery thread, though working around those shortages became its own creative exercise. A few of us wanted access to the printmaking studio and wood shop and were told no; opening the rest of the campus to workshop participants would make an already strong program better.
Who Should Take This
You don’t need to be a working artist: this is close to an art-school experience for anyone who wants one. Textile artists will pick up new methods; painters will walk away with a wider vocabulary and techniques worth folding into existing work. Intermediate practitioners will likely get the most out of it, though beginners and advanced artists alike will leave with something. If you’re drawn to materiality, the history of craft, or social practice, and you like detail-oriented, hands-busy work, this is your class.
Final Word
9.8/10. Highly recommended for anyone looking to expand their range. I’d take another Joseph workshop in a heartbeat, especially one that pushes into the other materials she works in. This one changed how I think about what a painting can be made of, and I’m curious to see where that goes in the studio.