Tiny Paintings of Istanbul by Hasan Kale

Hasan Kale is a Turkish artist who uses extraordinary canvases for his paintings.You can find most of his masterpieces drawn on taxidermied insects, fruits, shells, seeds and more.Turkish miniature artist Hasan Kale‘s works amaze me. He paints on every small object he finds. A needle, a seed, a butterfly wing or a lump sugar turns into a canvas in his hands. He paints Istanbul panoramas, the city which inspires him, on these small objects. His art is inspired by Mohammed of the Black Pen’s brush technique and Levni’s color harmony.

Claire Moynihan 

Claire Moynihan hand-embroiders intricate British insects and invertebrates on to small spheres of alpaca felt. The individual works are impressive, dimensional and vibrant- the creatures look as if they’ve just alighted there for the moment, ready to take off.Artist Claire Moynihan lives and works in rural Hertfordshire, England where she creates tiny sculptural insects and snails on felt balls using a variety of freeform embroidery techniques. After completing a collection of work Moynihan then organizes the pieces inside traditional entomological boxes which from a distance could almost pass for the real thing.Collected like scientific specimens, her “bug balls” are displayed in large shadow boxes, along with their scientific names.

Cayce Zavaglia

Stitch by stitch and color by color St. Louis based figurative artist Cayce Zavaglia (previously) utilizes her background as a painter to embroider excruciatingly detailed portraits that look almost like photographs. The process, which she refers to as a “renegade approach to embroidery”, begins with a photo-shoot consisting of 100-150 portraits from which she selects the best image and then moves to the canvas where she works with one ply embroidery thread on Belgian linen to create each piece which is often not larger than 8″ x 10″.

Cayce has to say about her work:

“Over the past 16 years, my paintings have focused exclusively on the portraits of friends, family, and fellow artists.  The gaze of the portrait toward the viewer has remained constant, as has my search for a narrative based on both faces and facture.  The presence of actual paint, however, has slowly been disappearing from my paintings.

Initial works on canvas, painted so thickly they often resembled cake frosting, transitioned into works on panel that employed thin layers of medium-laden oil paint.  These works subsequently led to my current series, in which the portraits are sewn with crewel embroidery wool and the use of paint is limited to the background only.  From a distance they continue to read as paintings and only a closer inspection reveals their true construction.

 “Working with an established range of wool colors proved frustrating at first because I was unable to mix the colors by hand.  Consequently, I created a system of sewing the threads in a sequence that would ultimately give the allusion of a certain color or tone. 

The direction in which the threads were sewn had to mimic the way lines are layered in a drawing to give the allusion of depth, volume, and form.  Over time the stitches have become tighter and more complex but ultimately more evocative of flesh and hair and cloth.

more of Cayce’s work on her website and she is represented by Lyons Wier Gallery

 Severija Inčirauskaitė-Kriaunevičienė 

 Lithuatian artist Severija Inčirauskaitė-Kriaunevičienė applies standard floral and decorative patterns found in embroidery magazines to metallic objects like plates, spoons, lamps and even car doors. The juxtaposition of functional objects emblazoned with traditional textile work is certain unexpected and little amusing, an aspect Severija further illustrates with some of her more humorous pieces depicting cigarette butts embroidered at the base of a tin can, or the skewed reflection of a person’s mouth on the edge of a spoon. From an essay on her work by Dr. Jurgita Ludavičienė:

Employing irony, Severija conceptually neutralizes the harmfulness of kitsch’s sweetness and sentimentality. Irony emerges in the process of drawing inspiration from the postwar Lithuanian village, with which artists have lost connection today, or from the destitute Soviet domestic environment, which women were trying to embellish with handicrafts, no matter what kind of absurd forms it would take. The intimacy of indoors freed from all tensions is the essence of coziness, that is crystallized in Severija’s works as cross stitch embroidery on various household utensils not intended for it.

  Severija Inčirauskaitė-Kriaunevičienė