Welcome. Thanks for logging in.

I was born in Great Barrington in the Berkshire Hills of Western Massachusetts and lived in the small hamlet of Van Duesenville which is the dividing area between the town of Great Barrington and the village of Housatonic. In 1952, after graduation from Searles High School in Great Barrington, I went to New York City to attend nursing school. After finishing, I stayed and worked in New York City (except for 6 months working in San Francisco in 1956), married, had two children, and attended Hunter College evenings.

I have wanted to be an artist since I was an adolescent. After school, I would design clothes for lingerie models I cut out of the Sears catalog, coloring them with colored pencils. I love to create and I strive for a result that is pleasing to the eye; a coherent composition that is gratifying to me. I have dabbled in several media including oils, acrylics, water color, and pastels. However, I work primarily with fiber because it is the medium in which I am most comfortable. Recently, I have begun to incorporate water colors, acrylic paint, and oil pastels in my art quilts, and have been working with thread painting. In 1996, five years after my late husband died, I returned to my childhood home and launched a career in arts and crafts. When craft shows became too physically demanding, I developed a web site: www.elsakfiberarts.com. If you log into that site, you will find a gallery of past work and, if you go to “Elsa’s Blog” you will find some interesting articles on processes such as thread painting and different styles of knitting.

The first etsy shop grew out of a workshop sponsored by “Berkshire Creative”, an organization for creative enterprises. I started the second shop for art work because I felt the art would get lost in the crafts, of which there are many.

I have had very little formal education in art—high school classes, a couple of college elective courses and numerous workshops over the years. My many years of observation and self education complement the workshop experience and compensate for my lack of formal art education. It has been a long journey of personal development to become an artist.