Amy Eileen Koester

Artists: Created or Born?

For the first thirty years of my life I was one of those people that said "I wish I could draw (paint, sing, dance) like that. I found that making traditional quilts satisfied my inner drive to create something that wouldn't be undone with the next day's dust. I threw myself into quilting with my whole heart, reading books, taking classes and joining a quilt guild.

One day I read an article in a quilting magazine that changed my life. The article was about a quilter who made her own thimbles using a method called "lost wax casting". I decided to learn how to make thimbles myself.

I went to the local college and signed up for a metalwork class along with a required design class. I fell in love with art; found out that drawing isn't something you are born with and that all artists work extremely hard to master their chosen media.

I escaped from corporate life in 1998, becoming a fulltime studio artist (trumpets sound here). My family moved to Florida in 2001 where I currently maintain my studio. My work centers around "I wonder what would happen if I......." I use everything from metal to fiber to fabric to paint to ephemera in my work; which is inspired by the beauty of the natural world.