Patchwork Divorce Therapy : Mental health: For an artist, a quilt became a powerful expression of the dissolution of her marriage. The piece has triggered strong reactions.

When Katharine Brainard stitched the central, explanatory block into her quilt, it was clear to her that it was finally finished. Her handiwork. And her marriage.

Tender little red letters embroidered on a patch of black fabric pretty much sum it up:

My husband bought himself a Mercedes.

My husband bought himself a boat.

He spent weekends on the boat “alone.”

“It’s so relaxing,” he said.

One Friday night, I packed milk and cookies and took the kids out to the marina for a bedtime snack with Daddy.

We found Daddy naked with a 23-year-old secretary from Daddy’s office.

“THIS IS MY BOAT,” he yelled. “And what I do on MY BOAT is MINE!!!”

Enough said.

Daddy moved out. Mommy went into therapy. And just before the divorce was made final last December, Mommy spent two frenzied weeks making a quilt, a spectacularly vivid “divorce quilt” that documents her feelings, her fantasies and all the gory details of their year of separation.

“I knew the divorce was coming up and I wanted to be able to handle it,” says Brainard, 34, a spunky, pixieish mother of three and professional quilter who admits she’s always had a “slightly twisted” sense of humor. “This was my way of doing it.”

In one block of the bold, roughly 6-by-8-foot quilt--which was recently sold to a Potomac, Md., couple (happily married) for $5,000--frogs, bats and insects are spewing out of a horrid face with the telling words, “he lies.”

In another of the blocks, a voodoo doll of the ex--portrayed as balding--lays with hatpins stuck in strategic body parts, including a black heart.

“That was a very painful block of him,” explains Brainard, pointing out the skulls and bones and broken red beads that surround the figure. “I had fun doing it. I was laughing.”

For another especially gratifying block--one of two devoted to Kitty, the other woman--the quilt maker slathered paint on a tire of her station wagon and drove over a fuzzy kitty-cat cutout, covering it with tire tracks.

“I felt all this aggression and anger when I found them, especially since she was 10 years younger than me,” explains Brainard. “That didn’t seem too fair.”

She’d had fantasies of seeing her ex-husband and Kitty--who are still together, Brainard says--walking along the sidewalk hand-in-hand. She’d drive by in her hulking vehicle and . . . whoops-a-daisy, lose control of the car and run down the amorous pedestrians.

“I really liked that idea,” she says. The tire tracks were the next best thing. “It just felt so good. People really relate to that block.”

In another of the 15 scenes from a divorce, her husband of 10 years is depicted as a snake in the grass.

Even the “snake” himself, who wishes to remain anonymous, has managed to see through to the humor in the work, and has said he believes the project to be “healing” and “cathartic” for his former wife.

A few spectators, however, have been less than amused by the diary-like patchwork, displayed last month in the window of G Street Fabrics in Rockville, put off by the bitterness of the emotions and the airing of such private matters.

One Catonsville, Md., man, responding to a National Public Radio segment describing the quilt, said he thought such “transference of anger . . . is a hallmark of sadism and suggests the need for a psychiatrist’s couch rather than an art gallery window.”

But mostly, says Brainard, whose more conventional quilts have been exhibited in museums from Washington to Japan, people respond to it with delight. “I get phone calls from women and letters about courage and strength, saying how much they admire me.”

One woman stood before the quilt and cried. “She told me, ‘This is like one woman standing up and telling many women’s truth.’ ”

The quilt’s new owners, Harold and Carole Goldstein of Potomac, Md., two therapists and contemporary art collectors who have been married for more than 28 years, immediately fell in love with the quilt when they saw it at the store.

“I said, ‘I love it. Buy it,’ ” says Carole Goldstein, a clinical social worker, whose psychologist husband purchased the wall hanging for her as a birthday gift.

They were attracted to the quilt for its bold visual appeal, its humor, but also for its value as a constructive expression of powerful feelings.

“We deal with this kind of stuff all the time,” says Harold Goldstein. “It’s more than a divorce quilt. It’s almost a betrayal quilt--betrayal of the American Dream, betrayal of dreams, wishes, hopes and expectations.”

The quilt was originally planned as a study in blacks and blues--”like a painful bruise on the inside,” says the artist--but evolved into a screeching red work of art.

“I think it was the anger coming out,” says Brainard, a native of Marion, Mass., who was expelled from (and later readmitted to) Beloit College in Wisconsin for painting monsters on walls at night.

“It felt so good to get rid of (the anger). When I put the last block in about him on the boat, I felt an enormous sense of relief that it was out.

“It was almost like saying I am a person, I have rights, this is me. This was like a chapter in my life. I’ve always been quiet on the outside, but I haven’t been so quiet on the inside. I don’t want to be quiet anymore. In a small way, it’s a declaration that I’m a person with a story.”