Lily Schlien - printmaker and mixed media artist

Artist Statement:

Lily Schlien has spent three decades designing, manufacturing and retailing quilts and pillow in Santa Fe and Mexico City. The putting together of colors and shapes and how those combinations would present a completely different “personality” or mood never ceased to amaze her ... she always thought of them as stories or “cuentos” as one phase of the business was named.

Now she has put that medium aside and for the last several years has turned to creating the stories with printmaking; working thru the mediums of woodcuts and linocuts. Working with these materials offers the physical pleasure of the carving and the chance to “feel” the lines that define the structure of the subject at hand. For some of the pieces, when color is called for, the lines of the linocuts and woodcuts are combined with a collage of handmade papers or inks or gouache. The for some of the images only the carving of paper will do and the entire piece is composed of only cut paper shapes ... reminiscent of the assembling of the quilts.

Imagery comes usually from Lily’s immediate surroundings, such as the ravens that fly by at eye level at her mountain home, the irises and corn growing in her garden, the colors and shapes of the rocks of Abiquiu. Trying to reflect not only what she sees but how she responds to nature ... even if it is only fragments or details of the whole. “Sometimes it seems to me that our world is moving so fast, is so complex, that it is only the fragments we can hold on to and it is only the natural world that will offer us sustenance.”

Lily has a degree in art education and has taught in public schools in New Jersey and Mexico City. She moved to Santa Fe in 1978 where she still makes her home.