Eileen Lauterborn

Eileen Lauterborn was an art teacher and painter before she began art quilting. Her work is distinguished by the use of fabric, line and intense color in a very unusual way, and is included in many private collections.

Eileen Lauterborn Web site»

“My background is as a painter and I really love building up texture in paint, and so I had this vision of trying to solve this with fabric. Instead of painting fabric or dyeing it. I would use fabric to create surfaces. The background surface is a build up of a lot of different fabrics overlaid one on top of another. And then the image of the quilt is built up on top of that. So it’s a process of adding, adding, adding and eventually it gets to where it should be and I know that it’s done.

It’s a more difficult thing working with fabric. There are certainly a lot of fabrics to choose from, colors, patterns, but it’s not as malleable as paint. It’s stiff. Cloth is soft but it’s essentially stiff on a background so you can manipulate it. You can do a lot of stuff with it, but to get the painterly effect that I was looking for that took some imaging, some doing. So it wasn’t easy, but once I got started on it, I could see the possibilities for it and where it was going.

I don’t work from patterns or sketches or anything. I know what color I want to start with and that’s really where I start. I work on a design wall so I throw some stuff up on it and see what it looks like, and if it looks like it might move in some direction, then I start working it together and building it up. And that’s really how it starts, but it’s really all intuitive, just happens. That’s the fun of it.

I do it because it gives me pleasure to do it and I hope I have some skill at it. I hope that people like it and that’s really my main reason for doing it: that people will see it, that it will give them pleasure, that they will not only look at it but be drawn into it—into the details of it to see that it’s not just a superficial piece but that there’s a lot going on there that can engage them—and get somewhat the same feeling about the quilt that I had making it and that’s really just to give people pleasure looking.

Quilts or any art work is really about pleasure for the eye. Let it have fun looking and enjoying and I hope that’s what happens. That’s all, no other message.”