Art: Caroline Larsen makes paintings look like tapestries in astonishing series Burning Up

Date
13 August 2013

It’d take a serious perfectionist several hundred tubes of oil paint to achieve the seemingly impossible effect of making a painting look like a cross-stitch, and yet Canada-based artist Caroline Larsen somehow manages to do exactly that. Her project Burning Up is a series of paintings of cars on fire which are bizarrely realistic in spite of the larger-than-life vivid colours and thick daubs of paint.

Most incredibly, though, the lines and layers of paint seems to weave over one another in a richly textured web of two surfaces blending, recreating the same effect as waves of heat rising from a roasting surface. It’s only when you look up close at the surface of the canvas that you realise that the images aren’t composed of a selection of threads arduously woven through a strip of fabric, but rather oil paint spread on so thick it looks like it might have been applied with a piping bag usually used to ice cupcakes, rather than a paintbrush.

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Caroline Larsen: Just Drive

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Caroline Larsen: Truck Fire

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Caroline Larsen: Auto Fire

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Caroline Larsen: Car Park Fire

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Caroline Larsen: Engulfed

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Caroline Larsen: Tanker Fire

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Caroline Larsen: Sound the Alarm

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About the Author

Maisie Skidmore

Maisie joined It’s Nice That fresh out of university in the summer of 2013 as an intern before joining full time as an Assistant Editor. Maisie left It’s Nice That in July 2015.

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