Susan Hensel Gallery: quilts

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I have known Gwen for over 40 years. She and I were roommates late in our college years. She got a degree in Interior Design while I got mine in Fine Arts. She went on to a varied career including institutional interior design and, ultimately, library science. In the last few years she has returned to her first love: color. Using the skills of quiltmaking, she investigates how color and form influence each other.

2018-2019 Art Quilts

Gwen Schagrin

These works were inspired by a variety of situations: a guild challenge, workshops with art quilting gurus, techniques in books that I wanted to try, improvisational reworking of patterns combined with a new approach to three dimensions, and scrap piecing.

As always, I am motivated to create and explore by improvisationally manipulating color, form, composition, and balance.

The teaching and works of Rayna Gillman, Pam Beal, Jean Wells, and Cindy Grisdela have inspired and guided me.

Now through Halloween

Small Studies: Art Quilts

Gwen Schagrin

These small art quilts continue the investigation of experimenting with color, shape and composition in fabric that I began in 2015.

In earlier works, abstracting specific images (often architectural or landscape) drove the process.

In the pieces now on view, I worked somewhat differently, often striving to create a visual representation of a feeling in reaction to an event, place, or concept. Some works are experiments in combining form, mass, color, and using close hues, an effect which fascinates me. Trying to paint abstractly using pieced fabric continues to inform how I work.

The teaching and works of Jean Wells, Rayna Gillman, Gwen Marston, and Pam Beal have inspired and guided me.