Textile artist Julie Sevilla Drake has spent much of her career in the service of storytelling. As founder and owner of a popular used bookstore in Anchorage, her trade was in compelling titles. For 27 years, she spent her days wrapped in a patchwork of colorful spines.
In 2017, she and her husband Steve Lloyd sold the business and moved to Fidalgo Island to become full-time artists. They landed about a mile inland from Deception Pass State Park, on a rural property at the end of a forested gravel road.
In pursuit of their artistic dreams, the couple added a studio on site — a barn built from a kit during the long days of the pandemic. They have separate work spaces on the ground floor, and what would have been the hayloft is a display room for Lloyd’s driftwood art and Drake’s vibrant quilts, which offer her another medium for sharing stories.
“I call this the retirement home and works in progress,” Drake jokes. The bright, windowed barn is filled with the piles of cotton fabric, spools of thread and sewing machines she uses to make her boldly contemporary quilts, which hang around the space in various states of completion.
One section of the studio is devoted to tall rolling carts that hold stacks of hand-dyed cotton, organized by hue. A devoted student of color theory, Drake relies on a three-ring binder full of meticulous formulas (devised by textile expert Carol Soderlund) to dye big batches of precise shades in her basement “wet studio.”
Drake says she had a different understanding of color in Alaska, where she often worked with crystal hues: pale blue, lapis, periwinkle. “Cold colors,” she explains, “because that’s what I saw all around me.” But since moving to the Northwest, Drake’s approach has become more complex. “Here, my knowledge of color has deepened the more I work with it in practice.”
Rather than dyeing colors for a specific quilt, Julie Sevilla Drake hand-dyes cotton in batches so she’ll have options at the ready. (Brangien Davis/Cascade PBS)
Around the studio, quilts nearly leap off the walls in electric combinations. Drake says color is what first sparks her idea for a quilt — the desire to see how different hues vibrate against each other, and discover what feelings their juxtaposition might express. Next come the shapes, abstract yet suggestive, which she makes without a template or pattern.
“I love big shapes,” Drake says. “I couldn’t figure that out for the longest time, but I’m not a dainty or delicate person. Where I grew up in Wisconsin, dainty and delicate was more rewarded than robust. Finally, I learned that that is truly my personality — kind of robust. Rambunctious.”
Growing up as “a softball-playing kid,” Drake remembers learning how to sew from her mother and aunt. “The Filipino ladies,” she says with a smile. “They were both very artistic, but there wasn’t a lot of opportunity or support for women artists, so they had to be something practical.”
She fondly recalls a time when her mother secured some “shiny disco fabric” somewhere. “It was crazy abstract stuff,” she says. “We were making doll clothes out of the scraps, so my Barbies had disco clothes.”
On first glance you might call her quilt work “crazy abstract” too. But Drake says, “I don’t like pure abstraction that’s too cerebral. I always want beauty in my work.”
“The Fog, the Forest and the Fierce Beast” by Julie Sevilla Drake. (Courtesy of the artist)
She achieves that with color and form but also “good quilt hygiene,” which she learned back in Alaska from the mentors who taught her traditional quilting methods.
Drake pays close attention to ironing and facing, each clip and stitch of the quilt even when the precise work feels less than creative. She calls this “the drudgery,” and jokes that avoiding it is why she has many unfinished quilts hanging around.
But once she pieces her colors together like an expert tailor, she gets back to the fun: working on her prized Bernina longarm machine.
Moving this 12-foot-long apparatus across the triple-layered textile, Drake is able to quickly sew countless lines of improvised thread patterns, adding texture, heft and movement to the fabric. Driving the two-handled machine is an intuitive process that looks a lot like partner dancing.
“I’ll put on ‘Snoopy jazz’ and just dance and move all over the place,” she says. Her music selections seep into the threads and show up as swirls, petroglyphs or geometric figures she calls “Keith Haring shapes.”
Echoes of Drake’s bookseller life ring through the studio too, as seen in the biographies scattered across tables and splayed open. Faith Ringgold, Henri Matisse, Jacob Lawrence, Nancy Crow: it’s no surprise Drake’s favorite artists are virtuosos of color, experts in speaking volumes without words.
A poet herself, Drake takes pleasure in finding the right name for each piece. “Poetry sometimes drives my work,” she says, evidenced by the quotes, poems and postcards taped on the walls of her studio. For Drake, quilts are poetry, the intense glimpse that alludes to a larger story.
Julie Sevilla Drake working at her longarm machine. (Still from ‘Art by Northwest’)
During COVID, she named her quilts “Viral Load,” “Droplet Mismanagement” and “Tulips and Tombstones” — the last of which refers to the nearby Skagit Valley festival, where flowers were plowed under during the pandemic. A fly-fishing trip to southern Idaho inspired “Big Sky. Relentless Sun. No Cover,” which burns with a bright solar system of hot yellow and orange orbs.
Drake’s recent “fog series,” muted and misty, embraces the weather that tumbles in from the Salish Sea. This was a new phenomenon for her, coming from Alaska. “There’s more fog in the summer here, because of the cold ocean,” she explains. “We can watch it roll in over the trees here … it’s really magical.”
Titles in this series include “Fog Eats All,” “Fog, the Forest, and the Fierce Beast” and “A Field Guide to Foggy Mornings,” this last based in a visual haiku (five squares, seven squares, five squares).
But Drake says the title that fits every one of her quilts is “Mestiza Goes Walking.” “Mestiza” because she is mixed-race (“part Filipino and part everything else,” she says) and walking because she finds artistic inspiration on daily hikes into the woods.
Stepping out her front door, she heads into the surrounding trees, where she feels attuned and indebted to the longstanding presence of Samish and Swinomish people in this area. She often walks her dog Buster up to a viewpoint where she can look out across the landscape and take in all the trees, all the green.
“I didn’t know how to work with green,” she recalls of her first years in this place. “I remember telling somebody, ‘I’ve got to learn how to work with green.’ Not because I’m trying to replicate what’s around me, but because I look at it and go, ‘Oh my God, that’s so beautiful.’”
“Field Guide to Foggy Mornings” (detail) by Julie Sevilla Drake (Still from ‘Art by Northwest’)
That doesn’t mean she’s going all-in on green. Drake mentions the Northwest Mystic painters of the 1940s and 1950s — one of whom, Morris Graves, had a cabin nearby. “These guys really really went with that foggy color, the green-grays,” she says. “But that’s just not me.”
Since leaving her own fog series behind, she’s returned to the deep and striking colors that feel like the most genuine expression of who she is as an artist.
“Everything in every quilt is true, what I see with my eyes when I walk through nature and life,” Drake says. “The colors, the shapes, the jumble and the calm.”