The fabrics with the Wizard of Oz motifs were part of a series, and include the lower panel with the four characters, the yellow brick road and poppy fabrics, and the fabric in the four yellow corner triangles. Toto appears in one of those yellow triangles! At the apex of each of these triangles is a yellow happy face button, a nod to the Dalai Lama's sense of humor and to his many books on the topic of happiness, including, "The Essence of Happiness."
The style of the borders, which include an Asian-inspired brocade, was designed to evoke the sense of a traditional Tibetan Buddhist thangka. A thangka is sacred art, a painting on fabric used as a teaching aid. It can depict a lama, the Buddha, a mandala or another divine image or diety. Typically the central image is bordered in a brocade.
Interwoven through the three stories about the quest for home - Dorothy's, mine, and the Tibetan people's - are the stages of the Hero's Journey.
The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty "yes" to your adventure.- Joseph Campbell, The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life & Work
In his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, mythologist Joseph Campbell notes that the hero's journey is a pilgrimage of three stages. The protagonist embarks on an adventure away from the safety of the ordinary experience. The second part of the adventure continues through challenges and crisis in the non-ordinary experience, and finally the transformed protagonist returns to the ordinary world armed with a treasure such as a secret or other knowledge, a healing of the heart, an elixer for self or others, or another sacred/divine gift.
My own heroine's adventure started with a set of catastrophic professional, financial and health circumstances in 2001. After the unexpected loss of my lease on my studio, and a sudden responsibility for the debts of an ex-husband, I left the East Coast on a hopeful business trip to California. There, a grand larceny theft of ten major pieces of my artwork destined for a gallery exhibit recalibrated the course of my life.
Some of these pieces show the beginnings of my "Textile Impressionism" technique. Four of the ten pieces in the theft are shown below.
"The Dawn of Remembrance: Egyptian Mysteries Unveiled" was inspired by the book "The Orion Mystery: Unlocking the Secrets of the Pyramids" by Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert. The sphinx on the back of the tabard was created in a simplified version of Textile Impressionism.
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