“Painting” a landscape using fabric is a very tactile experience: the feel of the cloth beneath my fingertips, the way the needle glints in the light as I am stitching, creating folds to make mountains and hills, or using thread to grow trees and grass. I feel so much more involved with my art when working with fabric, needle, and thread.
There is a certain satisfaction in having someone see my work and not know that it is cloth until they walk right up to it to see the details from mere inches away. That “Aha!” moment when the viewer realizes these are not ordinary landscapes validates years worth of quilting and other “women’s work” from those women who came before me and who took the arts of quilting and needlework to new heights. These landscapes are truly not your grandmother’s quilts, but they owe their very existence to her skills and her persistence in perfecting the arts of needle and thread.
Karen Krull Robart is “a quilter run amok.” A years-long interest in quilting and needlework has evolved into a passion for pieced fabric landscapes and hand painted fabrics. Primarily a self-taught artist, Karen holds a Bachelor’s Degree in History and Education from Cornell College, Mount Vernon, Iowa. She is a native of Crete, Nebraska and now lives on an acreage near Shelton, Nebraska. Much of the inspiration for her work comes from the sunsets seen from the front deck of the home she shares with her husband, Bill. They have two adult children and three granddaughters.
Karen’s landscapes combine the arts of painting and textile construction. Each sky is hand painted on either cotton, silk, silk satin, or rayon; the result is a truly unique piece of cloth. Most of the other features in her landscapes are pieced using fabrics that have been hand dyed. Once the individual components have been created, they are pieced together to create a landscape. No patterns are used in this process, and using hand painted and hand dyed fabrics guarantees that each landscape is truly a unique piece of art.
