There is always snow above - painting and embroidery for art explosion contest

There is always snow above
Acrylic and embroidery on paper
29 x 42 cm

Moving is what I want, there is so much energy coiled up in my body. I want to throw my arms away. I want to whip the air with my legs. I am thousand-meter-high and can see the world. I can see all your lives before me like an endless chain. I open my eyes only to have mist around my head. My hands are invisible. I am no longer believed.
And the hawk soared up into the sky.
Rigveda IV 27,1





The Process
Again, I started the painting with left-overs, left-over paint from my last work. I usually utilize the excess paint - which is on the palette after finishing a bigger painting - as a base coat for a new fun and random starting point. Sometimes I simply smear the palette on a heavy paper, other times I use a big palette-knife to distribute the paint more intentionally. So, I always have some papers with a random colour distribution ready to use.
Because of the theme nature I have chosen one of my prepared papers with a green colour scheme. I started by letting the colour take the lead. For me the flecks of paint presented a dark forest with mist-shrouded mountains in the background and a big tree at the left side to give the setting a frame. (The tree was invisible… it’s the one I embroidered).
I started with choosing a range of brown embroidery floss to stitch the Tree. For its outlines I used the couching stitch. The bark I did in fly stitch to give it a rough and uneven appearance. The sun and its beams are made with running stitches and the tufts of grass are made with a variation of the turkey stitch. The biggest challenge of the embroidery part was not to rip the paper by punching holes to close to one another. Sadly, I learned this not until I ripped a small part… sigh

The next step was to form the landscape out of the flecks of paint which are already on the paper. As I wanted the image to convey feelings of being cold and dissociated I muted all my colours with white and black, to create a ‘dirty’ colour range. With a soft brush, coated in a thick layer of paint, I painted the rough outlines of grassy foreground, dark forest, mountains, and mist.




In this wet layer of paint, I sketched the details of the forest and mountains: the stems of the trees, the foliage – shadows and highlights of the coarse rock. Therefore I used the wrong end of a brush with which I simultaneously scrape colour from the wet first layer away, as I also add the new colour which I put on this wooden brush end.
Usually I start a painting with the sky, but this time I at first wanted to get an impression of the forest at a whole. So, I decided late in the process to add some blue into the sky and clouds and set a counterpoint with small soft pink rays.
The final additions were to fill in some neon yellow for the sun which I picked up for some highlights of the grass and to add more dark paint to the framing tree on the left.

And never to forget my intensive listening to KVB – of Desire




My thanks go to Silvia Szlapka for documenting my process of despair while working on this never-ending embroidery

Dear #needleworkmonday friends: How do you manage to do embroidery without going a berserk? I firstly was so proud of me: wool and paint – hurray – the best of two worlds united!!! But after stitching for hours and seeing only the smallest progress I almost fell into despair. I am no longer sure that embroidering paper was my best idea ever :-D




The painting is my entry for ART EXPLOSION WEEK 41 Theme NATURE hosted by @juliakponsford @vachemorte and @curie Thank you all for your amazing work!





This is an addendum from Monday:
Dear Needleworkers, sadly I woke up with headaches and till now they are not really better. So, this excuse for embroidery (I am talking about my painting) is my meagre #needleworkmonday post. Sorry... sweater construction will proceed next Monday (reallllyyy sorrryyy...... my use of too many letters is an indicator for my shame)