Born into a creative, Do-It-Yourself Wisconsin family, Sue Benner grew up with a love of nature and the desire to make things with her hands. Her mother taught her to sew while her father taught her about art, drawing, and painting.
While earning her undergraduate degree in molecular biology and master’s in biomedical illustration, Sue Benner began to combine her study of science, the drive to make art, and her skills in sewing to make expressive works with textiles. A studio artist since 1980, she has exhibited her work throughout the United States around the world including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and three US Embassies.
Her textile constructions and quilts are in many private, corporate, and institutional collections including the International Quilt Museum, National Quilt Museum, BNSF Railway Collection, Golden State Warriors Chase Center Collection, and Green Bay Packers Collection.
Benner is also an educator, lecturing and teaching workshops internationally in the areas of surface design, quilted textile collage, and artistic inspiration.
Benner lives in Dallas, Texas, with her husband, Craig Jett, and works in her backyard custom-built studio. She is a devoted walker, exploring and photographing nearby White Rock Lake Park in its many moods. She is the author of Walking Near Water: An Artist’s View of White Rock Lake, featuring 150 of her photographs and essays by ten area experts about the lake wildlife, habitat, and the value of urban greenspace.
Workshop: Print, Paint, and Sew the Land – Collaged and Painted Landscape Quilts
Explore creating landscape quilts with monoprint, paint, and layered textile collage!
Sue will guide you through techniques of monoprinting and painting on fabrics to create color and texture for use in your quilts. Because the paints are opaque, you can work on fabrics from light to dark of any color or pattern.
After instruction in fusible collage and landscape construction, she will also demonstrate how to print and paint the entire collaged quilt surface. Sue will provide you with just enough structure and give you room to improvise.
This class combines components from both of Sue’s workshops, Sewing the Land and Monoprint the Quilt to focus on expressing landscape from realistic to abstract. Two landscape quilts will be developed using different approaches, one inspired by a painting style, and another developed from a photo.
(Workshop includes PowerPoint presentations, demonstrations, and handout.)