Beren,
I have no interest in becoming a guardian angel to you but will dwell a moment upon this tile. You've thrown out the baby with the bathwater here. Your focus has been upon the starkness of your image and making a distinction between your addition to the quilt and the efforts of others. If you present yourself with the view of your tile in conjunction with your neighboring tiles, you may be able to see what I infer. Your addition stands out like a passport photo in a dossier on the desk of a KGB agent. It looks as if there is a similar portrait posted within every post office between here and Dallas Texas. You could've allowed that yellow thread to run right across the woman's face and given more meaning to your contribution. You might have considered giving us the chance to use our own powers of deduction to determine what she even looked like before you made it appear as if it was nothing more than a snapshot from the little booth outside of K-Mart where for 50 cents, you can get four wallet sized photos. This is more than an effort to show your ability to transfer digital photography from your computer to the internet, but rather, a hope for you to develop a technique that speaks of further accomplishment, the fact that you are invited and incited to create works of your own, that will serve to bring out the talent in your own hands. I, myself, fell into the trap of wanting to be accepted by my fellow artist, in the same way as you have done here, but I soon realized that my own efforts would have to surpass that of a copyist, if I were to hope to gain their respect as an artist and not as merely someone who was capable of transfering an image from my computer to the internet. Art is more than the ability to move an image from one place to another, it is a calling to creativity, to a place where the arrangement of over 13,000 pixels will come to rest in a uniqueness of their own and to assemble themselves in a one of a kind creation. You will never know what talent that you have, until you press those talents into service and let them speak for you, in the composition of those pixels. If you attain to other callings, your abilities are seen but those abilities, now serve to short you as an artist and most of all, hamper your efforts as a creative soul. In this tile, you have made us aware of someone whom we will never come to meet but still, you've given us a but a small glimpse of yourself and it is you, that we care to see, not the subject of your photograph. I will not declare in boldness, that you are wrong, but can only offer the commentary that you are saying more about yourself than you need to say or than should be said, in presenting this simple and stark photograph as the consumate effort of your tile. Please berens, grace us with the fruits of your hand and this will allow you to grow and to reach further with your offerings. As I may have mentioned before, I think that you have all that it would take to impress us with your artistic ability but as long as you fail to express that ability, you will continue to short yourself and to handicap your own efforts. Again, I believe that you have every good quality and qualification as an artist but I would hope that you can see how much greater,that people would respond to these efforts if they were channeled towards the expression of creativity rather than the transmitting of an image, from one place to another. Good wishes to you Berens, and welcome to ICE.org. You will find no better art, nor people, elsewhere............. A Friend