Type: Embroidered painting
Technique: Mixed embroidery
Year: 2010
Edition: Unique
Size: Large
Dimension: 202 x 101 cm | 79.5 x 39.8 in
Number of stitches: over 3.5 mio
Thread length: over 42 km | over 26.1 mi
Thread colours: 58
Development: over 1200 person hours
Price: on request
About the artwork
A naked runner holding a dandelion clock in his lifted hand is a parable of human cravings, yearnings, and phantasms. These, though seemingly irrational in the eyes of the beholder, set us in motion and give a sense to our existence.
The central and integral part an idée fixe plays in an individual’s life is exquisitely expressed through perspective and composition. The bird’s eye view of the runner’s outstretched body is all-pervading; his idée fixe leaves no place for anything else.
He touches the soft grass carpet under his feet with the tips of his toes only. He seems to be all but lifting off the ground on the wings of his craving. Through visually different embroidery techniques for the dandelion (impressionist colour blending) and the runner (in focus, sharp and high contrast embroidery), the perspective effect is even more apparent.
About the artist
The poetics of Boštjan Plesničar art tends to be intuitive rather than analytic. He often uses magical realism to give everyday subjects new and surprising twists of perspective. His figural motifs are executed passionately. They are often set in a primordial world governed by natural forces still unspoilt by humans. He recognizes things that are beautiful in their imperfection and depicts them with childlike tenderness and awe. As an artist, Plesničar resists the flood of shallow stereotypes present in mass-media imagery – a self-imposed castaway state that also comes with some bitter adult humour.
Born in 1968 in Ljubljana. He graduated and completed his master’s degree at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana.
Features
Extra big formats
The main problem of big format embroideries are material contractions that make it difficult to correctly position all the details of a motif. To overcome such deformations and other problems, over decades of creating big embroideries, we have developed technical and software solutions that enable us to deliver perfect embroideries of any dimensions and number of stitches.
Extraordinary number of stitches
In a classic embroidery, the number of stitches is somewhere between 20,000 and 200,000, and is limited by stretching and contracting of materials. By overcoming this limitations, we are able to make embroideries with millions of stitches which enables us to produce photorealistic embroideries and recreate any painting of any artistic style.
Innovation of layering
We layer multiple colours of threads and so create rich embroidery and colour texture that is impossible to create with classic one-layer embroidery technique. By layering, we develop colour transitions and shadowing, by which we create multiple-colour surfaces, similar to pointillism painting.
Smooth transitions and shading
By intertwining threads of endless colours and creating colour transitions, we can shape soft shadows, make one surface transition into another and mix colours into an endless multitude of hues. This way, we can also recreate motives from photographs and sophisticated art paintings which wouldn’t be possible with classic embroidery technique, using vector surfaces.
Sophisticated colour calibration
Usually in embroidery, 10 or 20, maybe 30 colours of threads are used. We use around 1,000 colour hues and if a colour still doesn’t match the desired one, we create it by layering and colour transitions. We have digitally scanned colours of all threads by using a spectrograph, so we can colour match any colour from an original material or from CMYK, RGB or Pantone colour schemes.