Features
WLSC Hosts Fiber Painting Exhibit
POSTED: April 6, 2008
West Liberty State College is now hosting “Painting with Fiber,” an exhibition the work of Susan Levi-Goerlich, in the Nutting Gallery at the college’s Hall of Fine Arts. The exhibit runs through Thursday, April 17.
Robert Villamagna, professor of art and director of the WLSC Art Gallery, said Levi-Goerlich’s fiber art work incorporates hand-dyed silks, layering and free-motion sewing machine embroidery. Using her 26-year-old sewing machine as a drawing tool, she blends and mixes colors by layering threads, creating a painterly effect with thousands of stitches. Texture is achieved by determining the movement of the fabric under the needle.
Levi-Goerlich gets her inspiration from gardens, including her own, and favorite parks visited during her travels. The union of color, texture and image results in strikingly unusual stitched paintings.
The Maryland resident is a full-time, primarily self-taught, fiber artist. She has been working with embroidery and hand-painted silks since 1986, building on the foundation laid by her degree in studio art. In 1999, she was the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award. Currently, she exhibits her work at craft shows and in galleries throughout the United States.
“Her images tend to be representational work, such as gardens or landscapes, but in the past few years, she has been doing more abstract work. This exhibition is a combination of abstract and representational imagery,” Villamagna said.
Gallery hours at West Liberty are 8:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. on weekdays. Evening and weekend hours at the gallery are by arrangement. For more information, call 304-336-8370 or send an e-mail message to constructart@comcast.net.
Levi-Goerlich’s fiber work has been exhibited at the American Craft Museum, Kohler Art Center, Pittsburgh Center of the Arts, Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft and the Stadtmuseum Penzberf in Germany, among others. Her work has also appeared on HGTV and Maryland Public Television and has been featured in the Baltimore Sun, Chicago Sun and Columbia Magazine.
In an artist’s statement, Levi-Goerlich commented, “My fiber art work celebrates texture, color and the myriad possibilities fiber offers to ‘paint’ an image using fresh and unusual techniques. My stitched paintings meld a blossoming interest in gardening with dyed silk and free-motion machine embroidery. As the first step in a multi-step process, I utilize both traditional and innovative silk-painting techniques to apply silk dyes to different weaves of pure silk.
“I have long been fascinated with layering as a method to enrich both surface and meaning,” the artist said. “I have used my work to explore the effects of layering fabrics, threads and yarns in order to create depth, rich color and texture in both my stitched paintings and collages. Movement and flow of color play an increasingly important role in my work, as do shadows and reflections.”
Levi-Goerlich began sewing in junior high school and was always very comfortable using the sewing machine. She studied art in college but said she was too practical to try to make her living as an artist, so she went on to law school.
“I was the only student in my law school class who, in between Torts and Contract classes, took weekly field trips to Washington, D.C.’s art museums, took a pottery class and created soft sculpture caricatures,” Levi-Goerlich said. “At one point, I saw some examples of sewing machine embroidery and was inspired to try it. I created my first stitched picture in 1984 while I was completing my law degree. My early work was very stylized, and I used the garment construction stitches and the decorative stitches that my machine had to offer. I discovered I was more comfortable using the sewing machine and fabric as drawing tools than pencil or paint.”
After finishing law school, and practicing government contracts law, Levi-Goerlich moved to Munich, Germany, in 1985. She was there for two and a half years, and during that time began more seriously creating her fiber art work. “I began selling my work as well, primarily to tourists, and my early work ended up in homes all around the world,” she said. “My appliqued and machine embroidered work was primarily landscape imagery, inspired by the German countryside and the park near my home.”
While in Munich, Levi-Goerlich took a silk painting workshop and discovered that she could achieve a much more subtle and refined feeling in her work by painting the background on silk first. She said, “I then began working with different weaves of painted silk which led me to create silk collages. When I returned to Maryland in 1988, my work became more abstract. For several years I worked almost exclusively with nonrepresentative imagery and various fabric manipulation techniques.”
She remarked, “A portion of my work dovetails with my interest in gardening and utilizes garden imagery in combination with free-motion machine embroidery. My fascination with layers — which began in my more abstract work — now includes layering threads and yarns to create depth, rich color and texture. In the past couple years I have tried my hand at felting silk, and this has taken me into some exciting new directions.”
Robert Villamagna, professor of art and director of the WLSC Art Gallery, said Levi-Goerlich’s fiber art work incorporates hand-dyed silks, layering and free-motion sewing machine embroidery. Using her 26-year-old sewing machine as a drawing tool, she blends and mixes colors by layering threads, creating a painterly effect with thousands of stitches. Texture is achieved by determining the movement of the fabric under the needle.
Levi-Goerlich gets her inspiration from gardens, including her own, and favorite parks visited during her travels. The union of color, texture and image results in strikingly unusual stitched paintings.
The Maryland resident is a full-time, primarily self-taught, fiber artist. She has been working with embroidery and hand-painted silks since 1986, building on the foundation laid by her degree in studio art. In 1999, she was the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award. Currently, she exhibits her work at craft shows and in galleries throughout the United States.
“Her images tend to be representational work, such as gardens or landscapes, but in the past few years, she has been doing more abstract work. This exhibition is a combination of abstract and representational imagery,” Villamagna said.
Gallery hours at West Liberty are 8:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. on weekdays. Evening and weekend hours at the gallery are by arrangement. For more information, call 304-336-8370 or send an e-mail message to constructart@comcast.net.
Levi-Goerlich’s fiber work has been exhibited at the American Craft Museum, Kohler Art Center, Pittsburgh Center of the Arts, Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft and the Stadtmuseum Penzberf in Germany, among others. Her work has also appeared on HGTV and Maryland Public Television and has been featured in the Baltimore Sun, Chicago Sun and Columbia Magazine.
In an artist’s statement, Levi-Goerlich commented, “My fiber art work celebrates texture, color and the myriad possibilities fiber offers to ‘paint’ an image using fresh and unusual techniques. My stitched paintings meld a blossoming interest in gardening with dyed silk and free-motion machine embroidery. As the first step in a multi-step process, I utilize both traditional and innovative silk-painting techniques to apply silk dyes to different weaves of pure silk.
“I have long been fascinated with layering as a method to enrich both surface and meaning,” the artist said. “I have used my work to explore the effects of layering fabrics, threads and yarns in order to create depth, rich color and texture in both my stitched paintings and collages. Movement and flow of color play an increasingly important role in my work, as do shadows and reflections.”
Levi-Goerlich began sewing in junior high school and was always very comfortable using the sewing machine. She studied art in college but said she was too practical to try to make her living as an artist, so she went on to law school.
“I was the only student in my law school class who, in between Torts and Contract classes, took weekly field trips to Washington, D.C.’s art museums, took a pottery class and created soft sculpture caricatures,” Levi-Goerlich said. “At one point, I saw some examples of sewing machine embroidery and was inspired to try it. I created my first stitched picture in 1984 while I was completing my law degree. My early work was very stylized, and I used the garment construction stitches and the decorative stitches that my machine had to offer. I discovered I was more comfortable using the sewing machine and fabric as drawing tools than pencil or paint.”
After finishing law school, and practicing government contracts law, Levi-Goerlich moved to Munich, Germany, in 1985. She was there for two and a half years, and during that time began more seriously creating her fiber art work. “I began selling my work as well, primarily to tourists, and my early work ended up in homes all around the world,” she said. “My appliqued and machine embroidered work was primarily landscape imagery, inspired by the German countryside and the park near my home.”
While in Munich, Levi-Goerlich took a silk painting workshop and discovered that she could achieve a much more subtle and refined feeling in her work by painting the background on silk first. She said, “I then began working with different weaves of painted silk which led me to create silk collages. When I returned to Maryland in 1988, my work became more abstract. For several years I worked almost exclusively with nonrepresentative imagery and various fabric manipulation techniques.”
She remarked, “A portion of my work dovetails with my interest in gardening and utilizes garden imagery in combination with free-motion machine embroidery. My fascination with layers — which began in my more abstract work — now includes layering threads and yarns to create depth, rich color and texture. In the past couple years I have tried my hand at felting silk, and this has taken me into some exciting new directions.”
Share:
Facebook
MySpace
Digg
Stumble
Mixx
Fark
del.icio.us
LiveSpaces