Ugly Orange Portrait

I joined a new art group, called Thread Society. Apparently a lot of members are really fascinated by different colors, textures and qualities of thread. I pretty much joined because a friend told me they were doing self-portraits, which is one of my favorite things to do...and also because the rules only required you to use 4" of thread to qualify. I'm not really into the quilty aspect of fiber art, but I CAN manage to sew 4" with thread.

I actually don't like this piece, but am posting it anyway. It started out with a recent photo of me (if you want to see the photo, it is in the back of Cate Prato's book "Mixed Media Self Portraits." [In photos I don't look nearly as crazy as my self portraits do, so I guess I am just crazy on the inside.])

I played with the photo in photoshop, tested out a bunch of filters, then brought pieces of different treatments into one document in a kind of Mondrian-inspired layout, which I printed on t-shirt gummy transfer stuff (after flipping all the images.) It was nice. But I don't want to make nice art. So I made it un-nice. It needed color, so I randomly punched it up with my favorite watersoluble oil pastels...that's an oxymoron...they are more like creamy gel crayons that melt when you add water. I look really scrunchy-faced and angry in the piece, which maybe I sometimes am. Anyway, art isn't all about being beautiful or presenting yourself as beautiful, and it doesn't always come out good, or the way you had envisioned it. Or maybe am I red and scrunchy-faced because I am mad about growing older?