Motif: by Silvester Plotajs – Sicoe
Type: Embroidered painting
Technique: Mixed embroidery
Year: 2013 - ongoing
Edition: Limited (30)
Size: Small
Dimension: 32 x 14 cm | 12.6 x 5.5 in
Number of stitches: over 120,000
Thread length: over 1 km | over 0.6 mi
Thread colours: 21
Development: over 60 person hours
Price:
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About the artwork
Painted beehive front panels are autochthonous part of Slovene cultural heritage. First ones were done by Slovene peasants in the 18th century and used to carry solely religious motifs, however, in the 19th century, beekeepers turned toward secular depictions, too. Through the last decade, many Slovene painters revive this, almost forgotten art by recreating old motifs in their own modern styles, part of this being a series of beehive front panel embroideries, done by Ercigoj art in cooperation with numerous Slovene artists.
Doves of peace and love are a common traditional motif. Sicoe, always preferring the positive and colourful approach to painting, and his rendition perfectly connected his unique style with the original motif.
About the artist
»Colour often shows the way; in the painting of Silvester Plotajs – Sicoe, it is a building block of unbounded expressiveness. Intense and varied, employed along the principle of more is more and never too much, it challenges a viewer to explore boundaries between expressiveness of colour and responsiveness of light in every work. The eruption of colours and the intensity of light combine in a rhythm of images that the artist carefully and deliberately arranges in space, despite their apparent ease, humour, playfulness, and even jocularity.« (Sarival Sosić)
Silvester Plotajs – Sicoe was born in 1965 in Ljubljana. He has graduated at the Ljubljana Academy of Fine Arts, where he earned master’s degrees in painting and graphic art. He also took advanced courses at the Minerva Academy in Groningen in The Netherlands. He works as a free-lance artist in Ljubljana.
Features
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.
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