Sedona, AZ: For thirty-five years basket-maker Betty Kaufmann worked at a successful e-commerce business with her husband Pat, and she is now settled in a beautiful Village of Oak Creek home enjoying the fruits of that labor. But all those years of not actually seeing tangible results have led her down an artistic path she could hardly have expected.
It began with a class in basket weaving at the Sedona Arts Center, that remarkable local resource that acts as a springboard for its students’ imaginations. Kaufmann rose to the challenge of not only perfecting the skills taught but expanding on what she learned until she found herself creating woven basketry unlike anything she’d seen before.
“I wanted to do something significant,” Kaufmann remembers. That eagerness left her stumbling onto techniques that others would later tell her simply couldn’t be done. Rising to the challenge of executing her unique ideas is what keeps Kaufmann inspired. Her first basket had 50 spokes four feet in length to weave off. It is still large, colorful baskets that are her trademark along with explosive wall hangings she calls “vortexes”.
When she brought her work to Sedona’s Turquoise Tortoise Contemporary Gallery it not only fit right in, but the artist found herself further inspired by the support and feedback of the gallery’s clientele. For Kaufmann, it is elements of color, size, unique shapes, and open spaces within her weave, combined with added beading or bases of gnarled pine baskets or even rock that makes her pieces so unique.
She employs a variety of weaving techniques and, with her husband, scours the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show for often-rare beads; and they scour the great outdoors for small rocks into which Pat Kaufmann can drill holes. Her husband remains an eager collaborator, drilling larger holes into beads that require it, drilling the needed holes into bases, and building the rotating oak bases the “vortexes” are woven onto.
When Kaufmann prepares to create a new piece she lays out her coils of custom hand-dyed reed to decide on a progression of colors and writes this down, along with notes about what type of bead she may need as well as where she may work a window or double-window into her weave and whether spiraling, backward weaving, or textures such as that supplied by weaving in custom-dyed sea grass could be added.
“It’s a left-brain and right-brain process,” Kaufmann explains, going on to point out that adding a profusion of rock beads, for example, could add weight both literally and figuratively to the side of a basket – creating quite a tilt if not properly addressed.
