Michelle Kingdom

The Renaissance art and lavish elegance of the Valentino "Adam and Eve" dress gives way today to the no less beautiful, impressionistic embroideries of Michelle Kingdom, a teacher (and mum) in Los Angeles CA. The thickly laid threads pull shape and color into a very painterly style of story telling. They appear rough, sketched out, imprecise and wonderfully alive and sensual.

The LA-based artist grew up in a creative family and earned a BA in Fine Art from UCLA. But until recently, Michelle kept her vibrant, riotously lovely textile creations to herself.Michelle describes seeing her first piece of narrative embroidery in FiberArts magazine in the early 1990s. It struck a chord. “Figurative stories composed entirely out of thread – it felt like a direct link to my inner world, a medium tailor made for my secret thoughts.”

“My embroideries were almost like imaginary friends and I’ve only recently shown them to other people,” she says. For her, “embroidery became a very private form of art that I chose to keep to myself for many years. It was a refuge from outside influences, from judgemental thoughts that often sabotaged my attempts at painting.”

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Vladimir Denshchikov

Vladimir Denshchikov is an artist from Ukraine. He creates these religious icons using linen threads. Millions of knots are made manually by the artist during months of painstaking work. He has been practicing this technique for more than 30 years. It takes from 3 to 9 months to create an icon. Born on July 1, 1952 in Kiev, Vladimir Denshchikov graduated the Kiev Theater University and went on to become and actor. He worked his way up  to director and artistic director of the Simferopol Crimea Maxim Gorky Academic Russian Drama Theater, and since 2007 he has been teaching acting and directing at the Simferopol Institute of Culture. Quite an impressive professional career, but this national artist of the Ukraine is mostly known for his unique hobby – making incredibly detailed religious icons from linen thread, using a technique called “macrame”.

Only the faces and hands of the saints in Denshchikov’s icons are painted on canvas, everything else is made from millions of linen knots. The artist doesn’t use any tools, like needles or crochets to make the knots, all the patterns and details are created directly by hand. The material used for these incredible artworks is created by the artist himself: he takes a piece of pure linen cloth (a fabric associated with Orthodox Faith), soaks it in water and takes it apart one string at a time. He uses linen threads between 0.5 and 2 meters long and works between 3 and 6 months on a single 40×50 cm icon. It might sound like a long time, but let’s not forget one of these things numbers up to nine million tiny knots, each made by hand. (ref:By Spooky )

In 2007, Vladimir Denshchikov suffered a stroke, right before a theatrical premiere, which led to his taking a teaching job at the Simferopol Institute of Culture. While recuperating from this terrible condition, the artist continued working on an icon for the church of Malorechenskoye village, and as he struggled to weave little knots, he felt his partially paralyzed hand moving ever more freely, as if God was guiding it Himself. The artist made a miraculous recovery and continues to create wonderful macrame artworks.

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Jo Hamilton

 Portland artist Jo Hamilton crochets a new twist on an ancient craft with elaborate cityscapes and portraits that unravel crochet as granny craft.By painting in yarn, Scottish-born Hamilton, 41, blends fine art training from the Glasgow School of Art with the craft she learned from her “gran.” She moved to Portland in 1996, and painted in oil and watercolour for almost twenty years, but says, “I hadn’t found my medium.” In 2006, inspiration struck at a non-traditional show of tapestry, sewing and embroidery at the Contemporary Craft Museum (now the Museum of Contemporary Craft). She went home, picked up the crochet hook and began a cityscape of Portland that took years to complete. Next were the portraitsfriends, co-workers and even dogs.

Unlike other textile artists, Hamilton never graphs her work. Instead, she uses a photo for reference and crochets from the inside out, starting with eyes and building outward row-by row. "Nothing is planned ahead, I make it up as I go,” she explains. A fringe of all the yarns used hangs at the bottom of each piece a signature of her work.

Her pieces have been shown around the United States and world, mostly recently at the Bellevue Arts Museum in Washington, where she exhibited a large crocheted male nude. In April, she’ll be showing at Christiane Millinger Oriental Rugs in Portland.

The unusual medium for the familiar art-form provides the unexpected on several levels.  Each portrait has a texture very different from common painterliness – they’re soft, knotty, and bordered by loose ambiguous edges.  Hamilton’s material perhaps also goes further to suggest her relationship with her subjects.  Each portrait takes a considerable amount of time and intimate work by hand.  Further, the crochet process is reminiscent of household trinkets and decorations lending her work a feeling of life and home.

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info sources:  Jo Hamilton

Liz Cooksey

Manchester based textile artist Liz Cooksey makes varied and complex work inspired by the detail of natural forms.She uses a range of hand and machine textile techniques to produce richly decorative embroideries.She uses a range of hand and machine textile techniques to produce her richly decorative floral-inspired embroideries.

                                 

All images rights  reserve © Liz Cooksey