Willem Schenk - Greek cross?

Willem died in 1999 but his many tapestries live on and continue to enrich the lives of many admirers.
Willem initially painted. He was accepted as a working member of Pulchri Studio in the 1950s on the basis of a number of oil paintings. The themes of these canvases do not deviate much from his later work. He often scratched the wet paint with the back of his brush. His wife Ria (also an artist) once remarked about this: “It looks like you are stretching threads”. This remark resulted in Willem, also inspired by medieval tapestries, exchanging the brush for needle and thread and the canvas for old rags.
He preferred to compose, to “lay” first painted and then cut out simple shapes of canvases on Monday mornings, the day he did not teach drawing, on the floor in the living room. After that he used all his free evenings for the time-consuming process of “fixing”. He was proud of this craft part that was carried out by him so carefully and with so much love and he enjoyed the peace and satisfaction that this work (the “pricking”) always gave him.