Elizabeth Busch class at Empty Spools 03-29-15

Here is my not very good attempt to explain the class with Elizabeth A. Busch.  The title of the class is “Enriching a Surface From Within: Creating Small Works”.    I found it fascinating and difficult, but I think it did indeed enrich my work in the class.  Now to carry it forward. 

Elizabeth Busch is from Maine and teaches more art than quilt.  I have long admired her quilts and added one to TCQC last fall - it is the cover quilt on the Visions 2014 biennial catalog, "The Sky's The Limit" 

The class is about learning to see what is inside you and put that into your quilts.  We did many small exercises and created two small quilt tops, each expressing one of six emotions/sensations - Joy, Sadness, Hot, Cold, Chaos, Anger - using color, value and line.  I worked on Sadness (thinking of it as depression) and Hot. I started three or four pieces, but some didn’t work and I went “back to the drawing board”.  Elizabeth suggested we start with a fabric that we liked a lot and I did so for both of my final quilts.  On the last day we went around the room and wrote down what we saw in each person's two quilts.  It was an eye opener - only one class member truly expressed the emotions Joy and Chaos which we all guess correctly.  Some quilts, including one of mine, expressed four different words to different class members.  I can show images of my two pieces, neither of which are completed, but as a class the decision was made to not put each other's work online.  So, I will have to ask permission of individual class members for possible posting later.

My first piece is "Sadness", but others saw it as chaos, cold and anger, although several saw it as sadness.   I had started quilting on it.

 

"Sadness"  8"W x16"L

 

This is the bottom portion, it is a piece I painted in Elizabeth's class last October in San Diego.  It is on un-gessoed canvas and I moved the paint around with a plastic scraper to get the pattern. But the black on white piece in the middle was the "favorite" I started with.

 

"Hot"  18"W x 12" 

This is "HOT" which most people identified as I intended, but one person though it said "sad" and two thought it conveyed anger.

The true color is not so pink - more red/orange/yellow.

My intention is to stitch over the black lines with black threads, possibly using perle cotton to give some dimension. 

 

In keeping with Elizabeth's suggestion to start with a fabric we like, I started with this scrap from the painting class in San Diego.  I pulled it from the trash and have had it hanging on a design board ever since.  It is about 6" wide.  the dots were created by putting a bumpy shelf liner under the canvas before painting and the lines were created  using the edge of a credit card to pile up the paint.   A fun and intriguing process.

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