New Work - "Mask / face / head"

I was working on the piece in the last post and decided there needed to be some kind of mask / face / head somewhere. I started creating one on a separate, smaller hoop and about a month later I was finished and ready to add it. However the face / head that I ended up with was just too big. So, I decided to use it as the 'center point' of an entirely different work. I stitched it to some larger fabric pieces but it looked a bit naked all by itself, so I added some collage elements around it. I started with a few small scraps of black fabric and eventually added pieces of velvet, lace, trimmings, and other odds and ends including stitched over shapes, not unlike the star shapes I have been doing in previous work. My inspiration was African and Indian clothing and fabric I have seen adorned with various different items. I wanted to keep everything black on black as I have been doing, and of course a photograph does not capture this well.

The face / mask / head was made with metallic floss - both 'pointillized' and also stitched over with smoky monofilament floss, and white cotton floss. 

New work

After taking a considerable amount of time on the last one, I decided to do a series of smaller pieces. Then I decided to specifically do a series of head/face/mask related images. I had seen a beautiful and strong tattoo on the back of someone and I wanted to reproduce my memory of it. I'm sure the tattoo that I saw looks very different from this however.
I experimented with the background by stitching 'smokey' monofilament thread over multicolored metallic thread. Of course the effect isn't shown very faithfully in this flash-photograph reproduction.

Eyes

Some of the people who sell incense on the sidewalks of New York City also have religious paraphernalia. I recall seeing an image like this once, or close to it. All I remember were many eyes upon 'its' head and body.
Not sure if this is a God, or Demigod, it could be some kind of deity perhaps.
The 'meaning' that immediately comes to my mind to all those eyes is that of the 'all seeing, all knowing God', a God of wisdom. But I'm sure that the image of my memory probably had much deeper and more specific intents for the symbolic eyes.
As for this image, it's just my re-incarnation of another incarnation that I saw, or thought I did, or wanted to see, with my own two eyes, or out of the corner of my eye, or in my minds eye.