Type: Embroidered painting
Technique: Mixed embroidery
Year: 2023 - ongoing
Edition: Limited (30)
Size: Medium
Dimension: 70 x 100 cm | 27.6 x 39.4 in
Number of stitches: over 1.7 mio
Thread length: over 26 km | over 16.2 mi
Thread colours: 83
Development: over 600 person hours
Price: on request
About the artwork
The painting was created in Münich, Germany, in 1888, painted with amazing realism and warmth. The old woman is brightly lit and vibrant in the center of the overly dark background, and as she is also dressed in black clothing, it is her face and two hands holding a coffee cup that stands out even more. Kobilca chose the motif of the common person, an old lady, doing something as common as drinking coffee, but breathed life and emotions into it, while adding a kind and satisfied expression… Ivana Kobilca refused to sell the painting and it is easy to understand why. She prepared the motif with reverence for old age, satisfied with the simple pleasures of life. Our embroidered recreation of the artwork followed the artist’s thoughts and artistic process with respect for the color choice and the attention to detail, where every individual stitch has its place in the texture of the smallest wrinkles and the color blending of the subtle background. The embroidery has an exceptionally large number of different colors of threads, layered one after another, to achieve the best possible results, the best contrasts between parts of the artwork, and the finest color transitions.
About the artist
Ivana Kobilca is one of the most recognized painters (and by far the most famous female painter) in Slovenia. Born in 1861 in Ljubljana, she studied painting in Vienna and worked in the major art hubs of Europe of the time, including Münich, Paris and Berlin. She painted portraits, landscapes, still life and religious motifs mostly in oil and pastels, and her style is resoundingly realism, using simple painting techniques to create lifelike images that are ready to step out of the canvas at any moment. She stayed true to her realistic style even when impressionism was in full swing. Her artistic legacy marked the national pride and history of Slovenia to such a degree that her face was used on the bank notes of Slovenia.
Features
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.