Ellie Kreneck

I began life in New York City. During the upheavals of life during WWII, my family shifted around from place to place, but finally ended up in Texas. I earned my BFA from the University of Texas in Austin, married a fellow art student, and eventually settled in Lubbock, where my husband, Lynwood, taught printmaking at Texas Tech University for 40 years. We raised 3 children: Kevin, a syndicated editorial artist, Karol, a public school art teacher, and Keri, a lawyer. I was an adjunct teacher at Texas Tech in Art History for many years. Because my husband taught at the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina for 12 summers in the seventies and eighties, I was able to takes courses in surface design and quilting. Thanks to the skills I learned at Penland, I did a brisk business in craft fairs – also in museum and art center shops - with hand painted art wearables. During the Clinton years I was invited to send a soft sculpture to the White House for the Christmas ornament project. In 2007, I was juried into Studio Art Quilt Associates as a professional member. This life changing event happened when I was 71. Since then, my art quilts have been included in national shows, several books on art quilting, and many group events. I have participated in the Houston International Quilt Festival for the last three years and have even enjoyed my first solo show at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio in 2011. Lynwood and I have had a couple of two person shows together and are looking forward to another in November 2012.

West Texas, with its vast raw rugged landscape and awe-inspiring skies, invoke a mystic response in me. I see it populated by saints and assorted Biblical figures, clothed in their "uniforms," driving pick-ups and outboard motor boats – and generally making their presence felt. In the skies there are ghost squadrons of rabbits, bison, and wolves – spirits of animals long dead. On the ground, animals pursue their earthly livings as they always have. My job is to record all this activity as fast as possible. The landscape of West Texas is always in my heart – and therefore in my work.

Because Lubbock is isolated, I really have to depend on mail order. Dharma has been a dependable, friendly and informative source of art supplies, such as resists (Sennelier black, gold and silver – and Presist), metal tip applicators, squeeze bottles for those resists, fabric, Synthrapol, ludigol, wonder markers, sodium alginate - and recently, vinyl sulphon liquid reactive dyes.