Elizabeth Busch - Outside, Inside: Creating a Painted Quilt
Course Description: Using Pro Chem's Textile Paints and canvas along with other fabric you bring from home, each participant will create work that portrays an idea from within. I will share samples of my work, discuss how I find inspiration for my quilts, show how one piece leads to another and how to 'listen' to what your work is telling you, and review basics of good composition and design. Process is the key to my work, and I will share the 'how' with each participant in the group. You will each paint, play, explore, and sew, creating two or more quilt tops by week's end. There will be exercises employing line, shape, and color to lead you to create your personal work.
The group will paint half the time and sew half the time, though each participant will work at his or her own pace. We will also learn how to look at the finished results individually and as a group, establishing a way to be objective about our own and others' work in order to use constructive criticism as a positive tool. We may also discuss any other topics of your choosing - i.e. commission work, making a living as an artist, etc.
Artist's Statement:
Having been an artist all my life and an art quilter since 1983, I've come to realize that my art is all about process. Whether I am airbrushing, spreading textile paint on fabric taped to my table top, hand quilting, or weaving painted acetate through netting for one of my large kinetic sculptures, I am responding to that voice within that tells me that today, it's time to create. If I do not hear that voice clearly, I know it's time to write an artist's statement, to send out some images, or to continue that workshop or commission proposal...or to drive to the beautiful Maine coast and just breathe.
The subject matter for my quilts is very personal: it most often comes from something that is happening in my life at that moment. This something may not be visible to the viewer, but for me it is the source of the piece and I believe it is this source that connects my work to the viewer. I must be fully present, physically, mentally, spiritually, emotionally, when I pick up fabric and brush and begin, or the piece will not work.
Viewers have often said that my work has an architectural sense to it. Perhaps this has to do with the fact that I worked as an architectural designer for eighteen years. Or perhaps it is simply my love of geometry, spacial ambiguities, layering of transparent and translucent planes, and contrasts in temperature. I look forward to the last steps in the making of a quilt: the hand quilting and embroidery. This final and very meditative process allows me to become physically reacquainted with a work created at arm's length on the wall. The simple, repetitive act of stitching adds another visual dimension to the work. The details often surprise me.
My passion for each of these processes leads me to the next work, and that seems the key element in this daily gift that is my life.
Artist's Biography: Elizabeth Busch is an internationally renowned artist who has a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She has been making painted quilts since 1983 and has been making a living as a self employed artist since 1987. Her 'personal quilts,' which is what she teaches, feed her soul. From such work she has won numerous awards, including the Best in Show and the Quilts Japan Award from Quilt National. In 2009 she was given a retrospective exhibit at the Visions Quilt Museum in San Diego. She has taught workshops throughout the US and abroad since 1985. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States, Europe, Australia, New Zealand,
Canada, and Japan.
Website: www.elizabethbusch.com