Cottonwood artist Michele Cokl Naylor creates a variety of mixed media art ranging from greeting cards to hats, all full of whimsical bright colors, funky patterns and a touch of humor.
Decked out entirely in purple, including a purple felt hat of her own creation, Naylor stands at her desk, surrounded by an array of tools, wooden hat molds and colorfully printed fabrics. Larger-than-life rainbow cats are painted on every door in the studio and tiny felt saguaros adorn a miniature Christmas tree.
Naylor grew up in Indiana and lived in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she met her husband. After they got married, he told her that within five years, they would be living in Arizona. They visited for several years before finally settling in Cottonwood in 1996.
Naylor was always a creative spirit and recalled how her grandmother taught her how to crochet.
“I was always doing something,” Naylor said. “Something” included creating Barbie doll clothes, drawing, sewing her own clothes and even making fabric dolls while part of an artists’ cooperative in Cincinnati.
While she now makes hats less often, partly as a result of the Arizona climate, Naylor took classes from acclaimed milliners on how to make hats in the traditional style, which involves steaming felt and shaping it to a mold.
Naylor’s most popular pieces are her greeting cards, magnets and cases for glasses. Her cards combine vintage photographs of babies, cats and dogs that she found humorous with funny or witty sayings. They were also inspired by a re-envisioning of her own family snapshots. She went through a phase of reworking family photographs, such as an image of her father, aged five or six, holding an American flag. “It’s a little homage to him,” Naylor said of the recolored image that she turned into a mixed media collage.
Another card incorporates a photo of her great grandmother and her sister operating a large farm machine, with the caption “Girl Power.” Naylor said that their parents only had two daughters, who helped out with the farm chores just the same.
“Every once in a while I meet someone who, not only are they not funny, they never laugh at anything,” Naylor said. “I have to laugh every day. Luckily, I’m married to somebody who’s very funny. I like to see humor in things and I like to share that.”
“I focus on color and composition,” Naylor said of her paintings, which are abstract, vivid and colorful. She began painting with her hands when she first became interested in it, but later started to use paintbrushes.
On one occasion when her husband was going away on a camping trip, she told him that while he was gone, she was going to paint one of their cats on their bedroom door. Naylor realized that there were five available doors, one for each of their five cats, so she painted one cat for every door, much to her husband’s surprise.
Also inspired by the desert and the Southwest, some of Naylor’s mixed media prints feature saguaros made of different textures and colors. Her other collages and mixed media prints incorporate newsprint, bus transfers, dress patterns and any other scraps she might have saved to repurpose.
Naylor has been a member of the Jerome Artists’ Cooperative for over 20 years and recognizes the importance of sharing art and creativity with others.
“I think that the average person really appreciates creativity,” Naylor said. “Most people think, ‘Oh, I could never do that. I could never be creative.’ I think everybody is creative in their lives in some way.
“My mom used to say I couldn’t draw a straight line,” Naylor continued. “But who wants to draw a straight line would be my question. Just because you don’t paint or you don’t draw, or you don’t create physical things, that doesn’t mean you’re not creative.”
Naylor holds an open studio on the first Saturday of every month from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. for the public to view her art, ask questions, see what a studio looks like and create connections.