|
NewsSidebar
|
| 2012-13 Events & News From the Bryerpatch Studio and Caryl
Bryer Fallert-Gentry |
|
| 30 Quilts for 30 Years at the National Quilt Museum |
| Caryl's Studio in Paducah is For Sale |
| November 18, 2013 |
 |
Caryl and Ron will be relocating to Port Townsend, Washington in the Spring of 2014, and Caryl's Paducah studio is now officially on the market. We are taking a few weeks to find a private buyer before we list it with a real estate agent. We are, of course, hoping for someone creative who will love it as much as we do, and fill it with creative people, as we have. Suffice it to say...real estate prices are a bargain in Paducah at the moment. |
| 30 Quilts for 30 Years at International Quilt Market & Festival - Houston 2013 |
|
|
| New Studio in Port Townsend, WA - October, 2013 |
| October 2013 |
Life Takes Another Unexpected Turn:
After working for two summers in my beautiful, but cramped, little studio in Port Townsend, WA, Ron and I decided to look for a place where I would have more room to create. Fortunately, we discovered a house for sale just around the corner from our present house in the Kala Point community. It has a wonderful studio room where we have already replaced the carpet with a solid maple floor. It has even more beautiful views of Puget Sound than our present house. Just off the main entry is one of two large living rooms that will also serve as a gallery. The house is getting a face lift while we are in Paducah for the winter, and Ron is designing his dream kitchen. Eventually we will live there full-time. Below are a few preliminary photos of the new place.
The bitter-sweet news is that I will be putting my dream studio/gallery/home in Paducah on the market. I have loved every minute of living in Paducah, and hope my building will be adopted by someone who loves it as much as I do. If you know someone who may be interested, please contact us. Click here for the grand tour of the Paducah studio.
|
| Ron Gentry & Caryl Bryer Fallert-Gentry |
| January 2013 |
 |
Well the really big news is that I have remarried. After six years as a widow, I decided that being alone was not what I wanted for the rest of my life. A year ago, I was lucky enough to meet and fall in love with a wonderful, kind, brilliant man named Ron Gentry. We have spent almost every day together since April of last year, and on January 11, 2013 we were married in a private ceremony held at the National Quilt Museum in Paducah. The museum hung my quilt "Migration #2" in the main gallery in December and, since Ron and I are now migratory humans, (spending half our time in Paducah and half in Port Townsend, WA) we chose the museum, and this quilt as the backdrop for our ceremony.
For our wedding slide show, click here. It's an 11M PDF file, so be patient if you have a slow connection. Click on the little icon with arrows pointing in all four directions to get the whole picture on your screen, and use the arrow keys on your computer keyboard to go forward and backward so the control bar doesn’t cover up the captions. You can also click on the thumbnails below to see some of the pictures one at a time.
SO WHO IS THIS GUY ANYWAY???
Ron (Dr. William Ronald Gentry) spent 35 years as a research scientist and Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Physics at the University of Minnesota (10 years as head of the department). Before that, he was raised in Arkansas, attended college at The University of Redlands (CA), Ph.D - U.C. Berkeley, post-doc MIT. He retired to Port Townsend, WA (It's at the entrance to Puget Sound on the Olympic Peninsula) in 2000, with trips back to Minneapolis for one semester a year until 2005. Ron's wife, of 47 years, died in early 2011 after a long illness. Ron loves to travel, loves art, and loves me. He is also an amateur photographer, gourmet cook, boating enthusiast, and film buff. He is currently learning to ballroom dance. |
|
|
|
|
As you can see from the header (above) I have officially changed my name to Caryl Bryer Fallert-Gentry. |
Port Townsend Studio: Summer 2012
Ron and I will be splitting our time between Paducah, Kentucky and Port Townsend, Washington, where we have set up a second quilting studio in Ron's home on the cliffs overlooking Puget Sound. Click the thumbnails below for pictures of Bryerpatch Studio West. |
|
In 2012, Ron and I drove cross-country five times, commuting between our Paducah and Port Townsend homes. We call ourselves river-coastal.
SO HOW DID THE TWO OF YOU MEET?
Well, the likelihood of a scientist from Port Townsend and a busy artist from Paducah meeting by chance is pretty remote. The only place our paths might have crossed was Asilomar, where (coincidentally) both of us have taught.
So we met the modern, scientific way... on eHarmony. |
|
 |
Ron went to New Zealand and Australia for six weeks in February and March, and we Skyped and exchanged pictures almost every day. He showed me sunsets in Tonga and I showed him my latest work in the studio. He immediately loved Dancing Through the Blues #2, even before it was quilted, and reserved it for his personal collection.
Ron was brave enough to come back to Paducah for quilt show week in April, when nine women were living with us and helping in the shop. They soon discovered that if they got up early enough, they would find Ron in the kitchen making individual gourmet omelets or sour cream pancakes.
In anticipation of summer in Port Townsend, in a much smaller studio, I spent the winter making ten quilt tops. I didn't even remove the paper templates from the backs. It takes four days to drive from Paducah to Port Townsend, plenty of time to remove paper from ten quilt tops. We set up the PT studio for quilting, and by the end of the summer, all of the quilts were finished, plus four new pieces, completed entirely at Bryerpatch Studio West. Click here to see the 2012 quilts. |
|
| The unquilted tops were in my working studio during Quilt Week at the end of April. As always, Quilt Week in Paducah brought thousands of visitors to the Bryerpatch Studio. While our resident friends and helpers assisted eager shoppers in the gallery, I spent most of the week conducting tours of my personal workspace and demonstrating my techniques. Ron was our guest chef, assisting Darlene, our camp cook, in preparing our special Thursday night dinner. Click below for larger pictures. |
| You may have noticed that most of my recent quilts are exactly the same size. 2013 is the 30th anniversary of making my first ART quilt (Red Poppies • 1983). In celebration, I am making thirty 30" x 30" quilts for a solo exhibition (Thirty Quilts for Thirty Years) that will premiere at the International Quilt Market and Festival, in Houston in October/November. December, 2013-March, 2014 it will be at the National Quilt Museum in Paducah, and then it will travel to a number of other venues. Click here for pictures and more information about the show. |
| In May, right after Quilt Week, Ron and I spent a week on Grand Cayman Island, snorkeling, eating great food, and just relaxing. We looked ridiculous in our snorkel suits, but we had a good time with our underwater camera. The highlight of the week was a night-time submarine ride on the reef. The lights illuminated the coral and the colors were spectacular. |
|
|
|
This was a year of speed-limit birthdays for both of us.
In June Ron and I left Paducah with a big load of studio supplies and drove to PT. Along the way, we met my sister Pat Howell and her husband Rich at a resort in Coeur d'Alene, ID and celebrated my 65th birthday (yep!! I'm officially a senior citizen now.) with dinner and a cruise on the lake. We celebrated Ron's birthday a month later with three days on the waterfront in downtown Seattle. |
|
| In July and early August, we were back in Paducah for workshops at the Bryerpatch Studio, and in late August, we left again to teach at the AQS show in Grand Rapids. From there we went to Mackinac Island and spent a night in the Jacqueline Kennedy Suite at the Grand Hotel. It poured rain the whole time so we'll spare you the pictures. We drove from there to the north shore of Lake Superior where we visited with Lou and Inger Pignolet, former colleagues of Ron's from the University of Minnesota. From there we drove to Minneapolis, where Ron gave me the grand tour of the chemistry department where he taught and did research for 35 years. We had a wonderful dinner with a number of Ron's friends and former colleagues, a nice chance for me to put faces with many of the names Ron had often mentioned in stories about his life in Minnesota. |
|
By early September we were back in P.T. where I had exactly a month to finish my quilting projects (mentioned above).
We headed back to Paducah again in early October, stopping on the way for visit with my niece Becky and her family in Corvallis Oregon.
|
|
Dinner at Massa's in Houston |
In late October we headed to Houston for the big International Quilt Festival, where I taught seven workshops in five days. Ron enjoyed the show, and was a very good sport about putting up with all of the business stuff. We had several wonderful dinners with my friends and colleagues while we were in Houston, and one of my quilts won a cash award. All-in-all a successful, fun, and exhausting trip, made easier because I had a new partner with whom to share it. We had a nice visit in Arkansas on the way home with Ron's sister Janis, brother Larry, and their families. This was probably the last long road trip for Kermit, my faithful, green, 1998 Chevy van. |
|
November brought another class at the Bryerpatch Studio, my last for a while. With the exception of two sessions at Asilomar in February and March, I will be taking a sabbatical from teaching for the rest of 2013 while I finish the quilts for my solo exhibition.
Over the holidays we visited again with Ron's
family in Arkansas, and then served dinner on Christmas day (venison pot-roast and turkey with cornbread stuffing) to twenty-five neighbors and friends in Paducah. We also hosted the annual New Years Day Lowertown neighborhood game day and chili potluck. |
|
In November Ron asked me to marry him, and I said yes. We announced our engagement officially at the neighborhood Thanksgiving Dinner at Etcetera Coffee House and Ron bought me a beautiful ring by Claude Thibaudeau to commemorate our engagement.
After our wedding on January 11, we took a week-long honeymoon to Savannah GA, where we visited Alden and Karin Mead (former U. of Minnesota colleagues of Ron's) and my niece Sam Bryer (recent MFA at Savannah College of Art and Design). On the way, we spent a day at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta, and on the way home we had a wonderful visit with Bob and Barbara Hunter, who gave us the grand tour of their fabulous collection of western art. |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
