Beading by Wendy Ellsworth

Leading up to the big Elephant’s Eye event (this Thursday night!) at the Freight House in Doylestown, we’ll be highlight some of the enormously talented artists of Bucks County.  The Elephant’s Eye Studio Tour will bring students from under-served school districts out to meet these extraordinary artists.  Get your butts over to the celebration on Thursday, February 17th to celebrate with drinks, appetizers, and the talented artists from around Bucks County. Today, we're looking into the creative art from Ellsworth Studio of Quakertown.

Wendy Ellsworth is a seed bead artist who works with many different beadweaving techniques to make her intricate beaded designs. Her work ranges from 3-dimensional sculptural “SeaForms” to exciting contemporary jewelry designs using a rainbow palette of tiny glass beads. Woven with needle and thread, each of her beaded creations takes many hours, days, weeks, and sometimes months of intense focus to complete. Her primary interest lies in exploring color and how beads “catch the light” as well as how they can be used to express her appreciation of the beauty of Nature.

She also explores the connection between her art and spirituality in her new book “Beading – The Creative Spirit: Finding Your Sacred Center through the Art of Beadwork” published by SkyLight Paths in Sept. 2009. In it, she gives a personal account of the intimate relationship between spirituality and creativity and connects the different ways in which she has used beading as a meditative, spiritual practice throughout the past 40 years of her artistic career.

A woodturning piece by David Ellsworth

She and her husband, David, moved to Buck's County in 1981 from the mountains of Colorado and have created a compound of creativity with their home and res

pective studios in the dense forest of Haycock Township.

David Ellsworth's intent as an artist is to translate thought into form and to create singular statements that evolve through the integration of the material of wood with the process of turning. As both a maker and a teacher, he is constantly reminded of the importance of remaining a student of one's own work. This philosophy has allowed him to remain receptive to many influences that surround him including objects from other cultures, the infinite variety of the materials he uses, and his own personal and spiritual connection to the vessel form.

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