Paula Renee Wilk, a Danbury resident for the past 15 years and formerly of Nyack, N.Y., died December 28 in Masonicare at Newtown. She was born in Garfield, N.J., the daughter of Helen (Boyko) and Paul Wilk. 

Two daughters, Dawn Handschuh of Newtown and Kim Handschuh of Southbury, survive Ms Wilk, as do two cousins.

She earned an associate’s degree from SUNY Empire State College.

Ms Wilk's lifelong passions were art, music and nature. She began to express herself artistically by making colorful felt banners that hung in her church, Christ the King Lutheran Church, in Paramus, N.J.

In the late 1970s, she was one of 30 promising young artists accepted into a federally funded artist-in-residence program in Hackensack, N.J. During that yearlong experience, she met two tapestry artists whose work so impressed her that she bought a loom and started weaving tapestries.

As a multimedia artist, she combined her dual interests in painting and weaving by cutting up her paintings and weaving them back together on her loom, infusing them with vibrant colors. Her dimensional tree and flower series shone with shimmery, iridescent blues and greens, saturated corals and bold magentas. She created more than 100 dimensional trees and flowers that sold to private and public collections throughout the United States and abroad.

Ms Wilk continued to pursue painting, photography, and weaving, and her art evolved as her fascination with cross-fertilizing different mediums grew. She exhibited in New York City galleries, at the Hudson River Museum, Trenton City Museum, Hopper House Foundation in Nyack, Bergen Museum of Art, and Long Beach Island Foundation for the Arts. Traveling exhibitions included Courthouse Galleries of the Portsmouth Museums in Virginia, Cultural Arts Center at Glen Allen, Appalachian Center for Crafts, Smithville, Tenn., and Longwood Center for the Visual Arts in Farmville, Va.

She was commissioned to create numerous tapestries and woven paintings for public, corporate, and private collections worldwide. A highlight of her career was the creation of an appliqued tapestry with hand-dyed silk in the mid-1980s for the chapel at the US Military Academy at West Point. In the late 1990s, her work was hung in the Presidential Suite of the Tobu Hotel in Kinshicho, Japan, and in the lobby of GE Capital in Stamford.

All told, Ms Wilk created more than 1,800 works, some of which are in the collections of the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India, Chicago’s Sheraton Hotel, Stouffers Resort in Palm Springs, Calif., and AT&T in New York and Princeton, N.J.

More recently, she continued to exhibit locally at the While Silo Winery in Sherman, PS Gallery on the Green in Litchfield, the Barn Gallery in New Fairfield, and Art & Frame in Danbury. For 15 years she donated art to the Boehringer-Ingelheim annual hospice fundraiser.

Calling hours  will be Sunday, January 3, at Honan Funeral Home, 58 Main Street, Newotwn, from 111 am to 1 pm. The service and Interment at Newtown Village Cemetery will be private.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the ASPCA at www.aspca.org.