Type: Modular wall system
Technique: Mixed embroidery
Year: 2021 - ongoing
Edition: Limited (20)
Size: Large
Dimension: 80 x 120 cm | 31.5 x 47.2 in
Number of stitches: over 950,000
Thread length: over 8 km | over 5 mi
Thread colours: 42
Development: over 200 person hours
Price: on request
Also available in:
- 40 x 60 cm | 15.7 x 23.6 in, limited edition (100)
About the artwork
What if we could paint emotions as colours? The result would certainly be similar to this masterpiece of the Saxophonist, painted by imaginative Leonid Afremov. Here, as if emotions that the musician is sourcing to create wonderful music are exploding out of his instrument, like a beautiful burst of colours, bringing warmth and love to the world. The contrast between cool night air behind the saxophonist and rich, warm colour palette emanating from his saxophone makes us almost hear the music as if we were sitting in a nightclub.
With his unique painting technique of applying thick paint in short wide strokes, Afremov creates a vision of reality unlike any other artist, but makes us feel that this is how reality SHOULD look like – after seeing this image, the real world feels dull and unimaginative in comparison.
Our embroidered art techniques have captured the brush strokes and the vivid colour palette with fantastic effect, adding to the motif a new layer of life with light-reflecting threads that follow Afremov’s strokes perfectly. It is an amazing tribute to the power of embroidery and possibilities of creating any motif within the textile medium, using nothing but colourful threads.
About the artist
As a modern impressionist, Leonid Afremov developed his own instantly recognizable painting style. Born in Belarus, his life as an artist was a struggle, until he moved to Israel in 1990 and from there in 2002, to North America, where he lived until his death and created some of his finest work. He succeeded by embracing a new platform for promoting his art, the internet, after spending many years struggling and even selling his paintings door to door. The internet, though, provided a much wider audience. In many ways, he’s a pioneer of the modern painter’s digital life without the safety net of major art galleries and live exhibitions.
Experimenting with new styles, he mastered the palette knife technique, which became his signature style, with thick vivid layers of paint applied to the canvas in sharp strokes. Among his favourite motifs were jazz musicians that he met and listened to while living in Florida. His unique technique transformed beautiful jazz music into magnificent works of art, full of life and colour.
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.