Paula Renee Wilk died xxxx. She was born in Garfield, New Jersey, the daughter of Helen (Boyko) and Paul Wilk of Saddle Brook, New Jersey. Formerly of Nyack, New York, she was a Danbury resident for the past 15 years.
She is survived by her two daughters, Dawn Handschuh of Newtown and Kim Handschuh of Southbury, Connecticut, and her cousins, Margherite Faiello and Lorraine Gentile of New Jersey.
Paula’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, New Jersey.
In the late 1970s, she was one of 30 promising young artists accepted into a federally funded artist-in-residence program in Hackensack, New Jersey. During that year-long experience, she met two tapestry artists whose work so impressed Paula that she stopped making banners, bought a loom and started weaving tapestries.
As a multi-media 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 over 100 dimensional trees and flowers that sold to private and public collections throughout the United States and abroad.
Paula 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, Tennessee and Longwood Center for the Visual Arts in Farmville, Virginia.
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 U.S. 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, Connecticut.
All told, Paula created over 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, California and AT&T in New York and Princeton, New Jersey.
More recently, Paula 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.
She earned an associate’s degree from SUNY Empire State College.
The time and date for calling hours will be announced.at Honan Funeral Home in Newtown. A private funeral and burial will follow. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the ASPCA.

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