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 loves that afternoon light that makes everything glow.

Foutch's work is a tribute to those glowing afternoons and to the landscape she grew up with. She regularly creates landscapes with horizon lines you feel you could just fall into; she dubs her style "Midwestern Zen."

Foutch uses a very particular technique to create her landscapes, rivers and horizon lines. She paints onto canvas her sky, and then uses different pieces of fabric - silk, cotton, tulle, upholstery fabric - to create the land and the water. She stitches in her grass and trees with her Singer sewing machine. She says it's all about how the light hits each of the materials.

For some pieces, for instance when depicting a field of grass, Foutch will layer acrylic paint, oil pastels and water color pencils before she adds her stitch work, to give a sense of depth. The stitched grass forms the foreground, while the other layers blur into the distance.

In her rivers, Foutch uses the stitches to create disturbances in the surface of the water. And she plays with the paints and the fabric, soaking the cloth and moving it around so that the colors on the canvas undulate the way water undulates.

Before coming to landscapes, Foutch made her living creating dolls. She crafted angels and fairies and goddesses. But after fifteen years, her hands started to ache, and she knew she had to do something different. She realized that many of her dolls were dressed in what was essentially a landscape, and so she took those same ideas and put them on a canvas. A new career was born.

Foutch says she's continually inspired by the beauty of the natural world, and if her art is successful, it's conveying that delight and awe to the viewer.

 works out of a studio in the Casket Arts Carriage House in Northeast Minneapolis. You can find her work at 

Arts and Culture

State of the Arts Blog

Marianne Combs

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Deborah Foutch's work is a tribute to glowing afternoons and the landscape she grew up with.

Midwestern Zen: the art of Deborah Foutch

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