VERO BEACH — Gathering pine needles has never been so painstaking as when Viola Pace Knudsen begins to make a basket. Never mind the physical pain she endures, crouching to gather them by hand in her back yard. Knudsen, 55, has endured more than a dozen surgeries for a congenital bone condition, most of them on her spine.
The latest was in April and she is still recovering.
That has not slowed an influx of orders for her pine needle baskets, from galleries as near as Vero’s Gallery 14 and as far away as Washington state.
Her basket making began as a sudden departure from painting, though the inspiration for her vivid, hyper-realistic tropical canvases also came from nature.
Soft spoken and thin as a twig, the elfin Knudsen could likely slip into her own landscapes undetected.
Despite the frailty of her own supporting structure, Knudsen’s works of art are powerful. Her paintings of wildlife are brilliant and assertive; covering the walls of her otherwise serene, they are an assault from all sides.
Her baskets, far more subtle visually, are equally vigorous.
She points out several that have held together through countless storms and a beating sun, perched around a veritable jungle of tropical plants on her screened porch.
Her baskets begin beneath the pine trees nearby. One by one, she has gathered the double needles, laid them in one direction in a pan and doused them with boiling water to clean, debug and soften them.
After letting them soak for an hour, she drains them and drops them into plastic bags to freeze them.
When she is ready to begin, she arranges herself in an armchair with a tray in her lap. With a small tool, she carefully scrapes off the bark-like sheath at one end so that the twin or triplet needles stay together.
That way, when she goes to weave, the needles create a smooth coil.
The bundle is held by a copper gauge that she slides along as she inserts more needles, lengthening the coil. Poking a sewing needle into the coil, Knudsen stitches the rope of needles with heavy waxed thread that itself becomes lines in the basket’s design.
Her stitches direct the coil – piercing it straight through the center keeps a straight-sided basket. But angling the needle into the coil directs it inward or outward creating a wave on the pine needle wall.
After years of experimenting, she figured out how to create baskets within baskets or pouches on the walls, and in those twists and turns, arrives at her trademark artistry.
The basket dried, she coats it with polyurethane to give it permanence and to make it mostly impermeable to moisture.
A typical large basket can take 120 hours to make, not including preparation or the drying and coating process.
It’s hard to be certain that in the 9,000 years of pine needle basketry, including Florida’s own Seminole Indians, no one has ever figured out how to create the particular basket she calls “Undulation,” but she has yet to see one.
The symmetrical waves spinning off a center bowl eventually led her to experiment with other forms, including a human torso, which won a prize at an exhibition at the Brevard Art Museum, and sold soon after.
Knudsen is self-taught, a lifelong lover of nature. Today, her backyard is registered as a wildlife habitat and she raised her two sons canoeing and kayaking on the area’s waterways.
Raised on acreage in Missouri and Iowa, Knudsen grew up tagging along with her father as he hunted and fished.
She never killed anything, she says, though he taught her archery; at 13 she placed third in a statewide competition.
What really drew his attention, though, was her talent for drawing.
“For Christmas, he bought me a drawing pad and a set of pencils. My parents weren’t the kind of people that praised you. But it’s the one thing he bragged about to his friends.”
After high school, Viola took off on her own and hitchhiked through the west. She came home to work in her mother’s upholstery business, at one point creating anatomically correct rag dolls for the police department to use with victims of child sexual abuse.
When she set about earning a more substantial living, she chose a very different field, earning a technical degree in electronics.
She was recruited by Harris Corp. in Melbourne in 1989. She lasted 10 years. In 1999, she had an epiphany and quit.
“I was fed up with my job. I had one of those moments when I thought, is this what I want to do for the rest of my life?”
Her father, who taught her so much about nature but with whom she had never been close, was getting older. His health in decline, she asked him a version of what she had just asked herself.
“What would you do if you could do whatever you wanted?”
“He told me, ‘I’ve always wanted to buy a place in the middle of the woods.’”
So that year, she found him a 40-acre tract in Iowa and put a trailer on it.
Knudsen moved out to live with him for a year, walking his property each day for entertainment. The bits of deer antler she gathered then she now weaves into her baskets.
It wasn’t until she returned to Florida around 2000 that she took up painting for the first time.
Her home is now a cacophony of brilliant-hued birds and animals recreated from photos through a meticulous grid process, a hint of her inner engineer.
She applies the paint, watered down acrylic, in as many as 80 layers to extract the maximum reflected brilliance.
Her works drew notice at various Melbourne galleries.
In 2004, she saw a basket that intrigued her, and set about figuring out how it was made.
“I was working on a palm basket when the hurricanes went through,” Knudsen recalls.
But it was the wind in the tall long-leafed pines that called her to try their offering instead.
It was two years before she began to sell her baskets.
Today, she is represented by Gallery 14 in Vero Beach as well as galleries in Charlotte, N.C., and Bainbridge Island, Wash.
Her works, some of them commissioned, involve dyeing, using a gourd or a pottery base, or weaving in objects like buttons, seeds, and horn.
Opening the plastic box where her needles are stored, the scent of fresh pine straw envelopes Knudsen as she gingerly arranges herself between two pillows, still in obvious pain from her surgery.
Her hours spent making baskets are limited by how much gathering of needles she can manage, and how long she can sit.
She hopes, though, to make it down to the gallery with more of her baskets, several of which have sold before they could even be displayed.
Her smaller works are next door at the recently opened Gallery 14-and-a-half.
