Caron McCloud is a writer, artist, designer, and entrepreneur. She was born April 25, 1937 in Oakland, California . She has spent most of her life in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she had art galleries; and, in partnership with her mother, Eden McCloud, founded a women's clothing design and manufacturing company. Experience in these businesses led to teaching and public speaking. Since 1996 she has resided with her partner, Jimmie Bing Wilson, in Port Townsend, Washington.

McCloud writes and performs poetry, and is a member of the Washington Poet's Association where she has been a semi-finalist in the "Bart Baxter Performance Poetry" competition three out of three tmes entered, and in 2000, besides winning a "Carlin Aden Award" for her Alexandrian sonnet, Last Trump Tango, she was 1st place winner of the "Charlie Proctor Award" for her poem Holmes Ranch Hags, which she also read as the introduction for the Alice Walker/Sue Sellars event "Neighbors and Artists." She was a participant in the "PoetSpeak Reading Series" at Frye Art Museum in Seattle, with poems published in "PoetsWest Literary Journal." Her poem Common Ancestry was 1 of 14 of the 400 contest entries selected to be included in the poetry contest chapbook, Saltwater. She has been a guest on several radio shows, and was a reader for the poetry collection by J. Glenn Evans CD, Windows in the Sky. Besides publications in various other venues she has over a dozen chap books to her credit, and has recently published Rachel's Bag In Search of the Qabalah of Our Mothers, a book about the radical actions of Old Testament women, for which her youngest daughter Shiloh did the introduction, the cover, and the illustrations. Caron is currently working on a book on Qabalah to be used in a workshop format.

Caron had art galleries in Sausalito and Sonoma, California. The McCloud Clan legacy in the arts continues with her youngest daughter, Shiloh McCloud. Shiloh had galleries, starting in Port Townsend, followed by Sonoma, Sausalito, and San Francisco, and currently has Wisdom House Gallery www.wisdomhousecatalog.com in Mendocino, California. Along with her oldest daughter, Shannon Johnson McCloud, Caron is involved in Shiloh's business and projects, such as Cosmic Cowgirls www.cosmiccowgirlsink.com.  Besides her daughters, Caron has a son, Brent; three granddaughters, Kirsten, Morgan, and Haley; and four great-grandsons, Dillon, Cole, Cody, and Austin.

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

Heritage and Spells - Paths and Light

Each and everyone of us can recall some moment when the light fell in a certain way or on a certain thing and cast a spell calling us to a creative path.

My earliest memories are of being caught in the spell of some creative process—reading and writing, singing and dancing, drawing, coloring, painting, sewing, crocheting, knitting, carpentry—making things, the feel of a tool in my hand. Even when I was a little kid, I knew there was not going to be time enough.

My love of poetry and drawing came from spells cast by my father, Gene Grant—poet, musician, carpenter, fisherman, who used to sign his gifts and letters to me: "Love, Trust, Dare." I added "Create" and "Pray" and made it my slogan. I remember my father’s hands in the lamplight, 

peeling the wood with exquisite precision from a yellow #2 pencil with his pocket knife, the smell of tiny shavings and lead scrapings drifting from the emerging, long, shining point; my ecstatic anticipation while waiting to feel the pencil between my fingers, and the excitement of the exact moment when that point would make contact with my clean, white, 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper, and then—getting to watch where that little trail it laid down would lead me. I have produced over a dozen chapbooks of poetry.

Sitting in the light of the fireplace with my step-mother Lillian Grant—also a poet—I fell in love with the Bible. Her romantic approach to everything in life cast a spell over the scriptures that brought the people and their message alive. I continue to want to know all about them. What tribes were they from? Who did they love, hate, go to war with? Who were their children, their children's children? How did the Creator use them? Where did they go? I feel like a detective, my excitement growing as, following clues and making notes, I relentlessly track them through scripture and history and into the world — into my own heritage. I just published a book about women and the Buble, Rachel’s Bag, In Search of the Qabalah of our Mothers.

Though both Mama and Daddy were builders and handy with tools, it was my step-father Daddy Ed who taught me how to use a hammer, starting with the claws to pull and staighten twopenny nails from old lumber so that not only the boards would be salvaged but also the nails re-used. I was so amazed at how few strokes it took him to drive a nail compared to my battering away. I remember how it felt with the summer morning casting its spell over the Sacramento Valley as he showed me just how and where my little hand needed to grip the hammer handle in order to be at one with it, line things up, strike, and follow through with intention. It was the same when he taught me how to handle a gun—the way it feels in the hand, the heft of the thing, how to stand and sight and shoot. These things led to my loving and knowing how to work, how to hold my ground, and how to hit the mark.   

My love of fabric started with the delightfully printed cotton sacks in which feed companies used to package grain for farm animals. As a child, I watched my mother, Eden McCloud—also an artist, poet and story teller—empty these sacks to feed our chickens, and then transform them into beautiful little dresses for me. This cast a spell informed by the feel of warm powdered dust between bare toes on a path leading to a chicken yard, the sound of soft cluck-clucking, the smell of scattering barley, sunlight in Mama's hair. Little did I know where that dusty little path would continue to lead. Thinking of her, I see that gesture with which she became identified—rubbing a piece of fabric between her fingers, "testing the goods." And finally that magic Mama made whirring away on her Singer sewing machine. Whatever I could draw, she could cut and sew, from doll clothes to prom dresses to wedding gowns. This led to a career in the fashion industry for both of us, from which we are now retired. In 2002 Mom, with her Landscapes in Thread was on the Art Port Townsend Studio Tour, and  this year I am on the tour with my McCloud Cover Tapestries. In 2006, at age 95, Mama won a Northwind Art Center award in the Earth, Air, Fire and Water exhibit. 

While my main focus is writing, I am still involved in the visual arts, painting, stained glass, and working with fabric—the one thing crossing over and informing the other, as all skills do. Some of my poems are inspired by my tapestries and some of my tapestries arise from my writing. I am currently working on a tapestry inspired by Rachel's Bag.

Materials from former businesses have provided me with a vast collection of fabrics, remnants, trims, buttons, beads, lace. Because Mom raised us—as evidenced by my little feed sack dresses—on axioms such as, "Necessity is the mother of invention," and "Waste not, want not," I take great satisfaction and pleasure in putting together the pieces to create what I call McCloud Covers: Coverings for Body, Bed, and Wall. I even think of my poems as coverings: "Thought covers" to warm—or sometimes to warn—the soul. I also design using themes and color schemes customized for my clients, trying to include their totems and spells. I love the feel of "the goods" of my palette of textiles, my tools, and working with my hands provides me with a much needed balance and reprieve from the intense concentration and involuted process of writing.

My parents continue to inspire me, as my children claim that I inspire them. But it is my children who light the path and cast the spells. I pray to bring some form of expression to the light pouring from and the spells cast by all those I love—including lovers past, but still casting; and precious friends, my brother Bob and sister Janet, their amazing offspring, the Cosmic Cowgirls, all those I think of as McCloud Clan, especially my partner, Papa Jimmie, who is also an artist. And then, yesterday, there was the sun shining on this red-headed girl on a bicycle, and..and..and there is this way that the light loves the cheekbones of my beautiful children….   

I am so blessed and grateful to be doing this work under the spell of my artist's dream of a perfect studio in the Baker Block Building, in the poet's dream of a perfect town, Port Townsend, Washington.

LOVE . TRUST . DARE . CREATE . PRAY. DANCE