Lily Schlien - printmaker and mixed media artist

Artist Statement:

Lily Schlien has spent three decades designing, manufacturing and retailing quilts and pillows in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Mexico City. The putting together of colors and shapes and how those combinations would present a completely different “personality” or mood never ceased to amaze her…she always thought of them as stories or “cuentos” as one phase of the business was named.

Now she has put that medium aside and for the last few years has been working with colored papers…cutting and assembling “stories.” These cut paper collages are also integrated with printed images. One of her hopes as she does these assemblages is to share the joy that color can offer and encourage others to look more closely for and at a color or color relationships…color heals and enlightens. Following the “path with a heart” has always been important to her as she strives to reflect the beauty she sees around her. Lily’s imagery comes from her immediate surroundings and from certain image-ideas that have been with her for decades: the wonder of growing things, the importance and beauty of corn and food crops, birds, feathers, moon cycles. Working with the handmade paper colored sheets allows her to shout “yes”…”exactly.” Working with the linoleum sheets gives her both the physical pleasure of carving and the chance to “feel” the lines that define the structure of an object.

Lily is trying to reflect not only what she sees but how she responds to nature. Even if it is only fragments or details of the whole. “ Sometimes it seems to me that our world is moving so fast, is so complex that it is only the fragments that we can hold on to and it is only the natural world that will heal us.”

Lily has a degree in art education and has taught in public schools in New Jersey and Mexico City. She moved to Santa Fe in 1978 where she still makes her home.