PICTURES OF CLOTH

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30339, 15 January 1964, Page 2

PICTURES OF CLOTH

Talented Liza Willcox In a world which is constantly seeking something new, it would have been difficult for a talented innovator such as Liza Willcox not to have made an impression, writes Susan Vaughan from London. Liza works with needle and thread and pieces of coloured material, putting them together to make pictures. The Victorians called the process applique, but the name is too prosaic to cover Liza’s lively work. She lives in Kenya, but her market is international. Joe Murumbi, the Kenya politician, commissioned her to do a 6ft mural which took three months to design and stitch; a rich Californian in Kenya on safari was another customer; a Harvard professor recently put on a show of her work in Boston. Her life is as colourful as her pictures. She and her husband, Philip, a farmer, started their married life in a horse-drawn caravan, which roamed the Oxfordshire hills. They went to Ghana to help run a farm, again living in a caravan, and twice made long trips through the deserts of Equatorial Africa. It was in fact because the caravan was too small to paint in that she began to make her pictures of cloth. (All Rights Reserved.)