Jesus of Nazareth

Dimensions: 43" x 29"
Materials: #6-cut hand-dyed new wool, in 14 different Red Jack Rugs 8-value packs, on linen
Adapted with permission from a photograph by NBC and hooked by April DeConick, Houston, Texas, 2015.
Featured in: Celebration 26

Every year I challenge myself as an artist, whether it is the scale of the rug I chose to hook, or the use of green in a portrait, or how moonlight is captured differently from sunlight. In 2015, I chose to focus on form or design. I wanted to break down a rug to its bare minimum in terms of form--literally to the square inch. So I turned to the most traditional rug we can hook, the inch mat. How could I break open this simple form so that it would do something inch mats usually don't do? Could I take what is a basic geometric design used for hit-or-miss and create a portrait in square inches?

Using a pixelated map of the original image as my guide, I hooked each inch square by its value (by the lightness or darkness of the color) with no regard for color. Each inch square, in fact, contains at least two different colors of the same value.
- April DeConick, Celebration Hall of Fame 2018
(Note: This rug description was taken as an excerpt from the published Celebration entry.)