Sue Beevers - Quilt Bliss: Art Quilts, Paintings, Textile Designs

Sue Beevers’ quilts demonstrate a reverence for the lessons learned from the practitioners of this traditional art form and, at the same time, meet the challenges of expanding its boundaries by combining handwork and art. Her pieces can be as intricate and complex puzzles or as a small number of powerful squares or circles floating on seemingly neutral grounds. Some comprise thousands of hand and/or machine stitched blocks, while others just a hundred. The geometric, irregular, or curved patterns have a painterly quality, which endows the works with dynamism. Beevers has an excellent sense of placement, of mapping out a flat surface into justly and spatially balanced partitions. Her definite color compositions correlate a knowledge of craft with fine arts…. She pursues the depiction of observed objects with the utmost economy of means, though not for the sake of natural imitation but for new schemes of visual co-ordination. She strives not for an increase or for a recovery of emotional power, but for an enlargement of her visual instrumental resources by intermarrying quilting and fine art techniques and vocabularies…

In Beevers’ work the emotional elements [though] cannot be separated from the perceived and experienced facts of life; they are transformed by the mind of the artist, thanks to an imaginative act involving hard, constructive labor and an indefinable factor for taking risks, and not becoming complacent and repetitive… Materials, forms, shapes, and colors, which to most quilters are commonplaces, are in her hand remade, dramatized, and invested with new combination. Quilters lay great stress on construction, on the necessity for design, and on organization and coherence of visual statements. Beevers, instead of rigid structure, substitutes pliable arrangements imbued with content. She ascribes the emotional power to the abstract arrangements and explores with structural devices known to fine arts. She examines problems of equilibrium from the simplest forms of balance to the most intricate allocations of weights, of centrality, and of proportional design… Shifting…from quilting to collaged and woven paintings…depends as much on tasks as on situations. In both instances, she maintains a single voice, and the general trend leans toward keeping the shift smooth from one medium to another, not on eliminating stylistic differences altogether.
 

Beever’s primary interest is in the natural cycles, shapes and forms of nature and seasonal changes of her rural landscape. We see her interests in her paintings that adapt to textile designs. The patterns, melodies and variations given in nature become paintings and repeated continuous design in textiles. Paintings and Quilts are woven from her love of the rhythms in her nature inspired passions. Her art quilts are held in collections in the USA, Japan and Europe.

Sue is married to David and lives in Deansboro, NY. She teaches Quilting, Weaving and other Fiber Arts workshops on the national and international level. She maintains her own branding for designs and provides fabric designs to international textile manufactures.

For more information, visit the Barrett Gallery Web site at www.utica.edu/gallery


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