Joy of Life

Lissy Funk is one of the few artists of the Fiber Arts movement who was formally trained from an early age in the media that she always favored for her work. It was only as a mature artist that she embraced the abstract expressionist aesthetic in the 1960s and from that point she never looked back. Moving beyond the confines of traditional embroidery she enhanced her abstract imagery with distinctive textures and rich surfaces. Her work is never sentimental, but does exude a message of joyous enthusiasm that is unusual for the period. Many artists of the later part of the twentieth century fled from contamination of traditional forms of their media. Of all the Fiber Art techniques, embroidery was possibly the least popular, undoubtedly due in part to its associations with traditional schoolgirl projects, as well as the sentimentality often expressed with this form.