Fuscia Zetti Self Portrait

Back in 2000, I was an emotional mess. I had very bad panic disorder, and was trying many methods to rid myself of it—from traditional medical treatments to all kinds of alternative therapies. I decided to spend a lot of time doing art in order to heal. One of the first things I did was an oil self portrait. True, it doesn’t look exactly like me, but I painted the way I felt, which wasn’t pretty. Needless to say, no one but me liked the portrait.

However, it was a starting point. I decided to scan it, alter it a little in photoshop, then digitally embellish it. I called the first variation my Picasso Self Portrait. I later used a variation of it to do one of my first art quilts, and it was used to illustrate an article I wrote for Cloth, Paper, Scissors magazine called Painting Out the Panic.

I decided to add my favorite yellow fabric design behind the Picasso Self Portrait, and use that image for my business card and also for some of my mini quilt Art-O-Mat blocks.

Recently, I had an ATC trade with my Arts in the Cards group. This month, the color prompt was fuscia. I drew a blank on the color fuscia, so I started looking through my stacks of fabrics and papers and unfinished artwork for inspiration. Nothing really struck me, so I decided to revisit an old theme: self portraits. For reasons I don’t fully understand, I keep coming back to my first self portrait. I have painted other self portraits over the past 12 years, but this one speaks to me the most.

I took out the yellow background and added several other fuschia designs—a scan of a page from a journal that I painted with beet juice, a fuscia mandala that I drew during my lunch hour, and a photo of a wet leaf on a sidewalk that I manipulated in photoshop into shades of fuscia. I also changed some color on the face.

Since I have been enamored of the Zetti trend, I added, in photoshop, the black and white harlequin band at the top. After printing the design, it seemed to need something extra, so I added inspirational words printed on Extravorganza, along with some ribbon and seed beads.