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The Mayor of the Infield
A Redondo woman threads her way to pole position at the Marlboro 500
by Mark McDermott
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Darcy Clodfelder shows Muhammad Ali her thread painting portrait of him. Photo by Brian Clodfelder. |
There are faces on the walls in Darcy Clodfelder’s living room. Everywhere you look, they look back: B.B. King squints over his guitar, Mohammed Ali jabs his finger in the air, Richard Petty stares out from behind his shades, and Einstein looks on bemusedly. The paintings have a special vividness, a finely drawn attention to detail, and it isn’t until you look closely that you can see they are made not of paint, but of threads--thousands of intricately embroidered threads.
This most definitely isn’t your grandmother’s embroidery. One wall is composed almost entirely of racecar drivers, and it is these portraits that caught the attention of California Speedway organizers. Clodfelder has been named the Mayor of the Infield at the Marlboro 500, the season-ending event in the CART racing circuit that takes place this weekend in Fontana.
"Its just amazing art," said Dennis Bickmeier, a spokesman for the California Speedway. "When all the nominations came in, it just set her apart. It’s fantastic."
As mayor, Clodfelter will preside over a village of more than 1800 RV’s that congregate on the speedway infield. She and her husband, Brian, will also have all-access passes to the entire 568-acre facility, a spot on Victory Lane, and will attend a dinner with the drivers. Bickmeier said that anyone with the patience to make such intricate art should make a perfect Mayor of the Infield.
"I couldn’t believe it when they called," said Clodfelder. "I never expected anything like this would come of it. I just do this because I enjoy it."
It turns out that many of her subjects enjoy it as well. The Clodfelders have met many of the celebrities she has painted over the years, including Ali, King, Paul Newman, and several racing drivers. Most of the stars have signed their portraits, and some have reacted ecstatically when they saw their likenesses.
One of Clodfelter’s favorite reactions came from one of her favorite subjects, Mario Andretti, who the Clodfelters approached while he was in his racing pit. Her embroidery of Andretti was one of her most ambitious, a large scale rendering of his "final lap" in the year he was to retire from racing. It took her nearly 400 hours of stitching, and when Andretti laid eyes on it he was dumbfounded. "This is fantastic!" he exclaimed, turning to the shy artist and giving her a big thumbs up.
"You have to understand, Darcy loves Mario Andretti," her husband explained. "She was wearing an ‘I love Mario’ button. When he gave her the thumbs up, she could have floated away."
The art is called thread painting, and Clodfelder is one of its rare practitioners. She has been making thread paintings for almost 30 years now, and she has yet to meet another person who does this type of embroidery. "People always said I should join embroidery groups, and I did several times," she said. "But nobody was ever doing anything like what I do, so I never stayed in the groups long."
Thread painting isn’t easy work. Clodfelder usually works from a photograph–most of which are taken by her husband–and each work takes at least three months. She embroiders a few hours every day, usually after her husband and daughters have left the house for work and school in the morning, and again at night after the family has left the dinner table. Sometimes the meticulous embroidering wears on her hands, and her husband helps out by working on the backgrounds.
"I’m just a grunt," said Brian Clodfelder. "She’s the artist. She has turned me into a little bit of an artist, though."
In fact, the Clodfelders are a very tight team, and have been since they were teenagers. They were high school sweethearts who married, and eventually even worked in the field together as Verizon technicians. Darcy, however, suffered a career-ending cervical injury that has left her living in nearly constant pain for the last 10 years. The pain sometimes limits how much work she can do on her paintings, but her husband said that the injury has also allowed her to focus more on her art, and the result has been that she has kept raising her standards. "She’s light years ahead of what she did 10 years ago," he said, noting that she has moved from double-threading to single-threading every stitch, increasing the level of detail she is able to obtain.
"None of this would be happening if it wasn’t for my husband," said Darcy, and in fact it was her husband who brought his wife’s work to the attention of the California Speedway. He said that after watching his wife’s artistry grow and grow over the decades, he finally thought it was time to let the secret out.
"Like any artist, I think Darcy would like to share her work with the public," he said. "She’s never really looked for the attention, but her art has just reached such a high level now. It’s just time to let the genie out of the bottle–and once the genie is out of the bottle, you can’t get it back in. This is one of the highlights of her life, and I think it’s great that her art is getting some of the attention it deserves." ER