Who: Cookie Warner
Medium: Fabric, thread, acrylic paint
Her story: The overnight success of quilt artist Cookie Warner took years to achieve. An art major in college, she’d always been artistic, but raising six children didn’t give her much time for a serious art career.
Over the years, she dabbled in clay, acrylic paint, watercolor. Nothing grabbed her interest. Recently, experimenting with mixed media – paint, fiber and metal – she discovered a passion for textiles.
Warner fused the joy of painting with the flexibility of fabric, creating quilts that launched her instant success.
Her first three landscape quilts won statewide awards and the support of a Denver art gallery.
“I love painting, but I’m such a perfectionist that I could never get the detail I wanted in painting,” she says. “So using fabric brings it alive. It’s like putting on gobs of paint, only my paint is the fabric pieces.”
She fuses together 9-inch squares of fabric and sheeting, then cuts them into tiny strips with a rotary cutter. Some strips are so tiny she can pick them up only by wetting her fingertip.
She arranges the strips into lifelike landscapes – a pond, an aspen grove, a mountain path – then fuses them with an iron, and overlays it all with stitching.
“‘The Path’ was created from childhood memories, when I used to jump off the bus after school, change into play clothes and run down the hill from my house and into the field and the forest. It was my playground.”
Philosophy: “I want to create things that will envelop people, so they can feel they are a part of my work, like they could go into it and be at the place that is pictured. I want them to stop and say, ‘Oh my God, look at this!”‘
Price range: $3,600 to $4,200
Where to find her work: Through July at the 26th annual “Fabric of Legacies” show at the Lincoln Center, 417 W. Magnolia St., Fort Collins; and at Translations Gallery, 773 Santa Fe Drive, Denver.
– Colleen O’Connor, Denver Post staff writer
