What is fascinating about art is it can use a variety of mediums and materials, since creativity knows no bounds. Meet Zenyk Palagniuk, a Ukranian artist based in Dallas, USA, who’s enthralling all with nails and stretched thread.
What Palagniuk does is nothing unique, since there are many other stretched thread artists, such as Kumi Yamashita. However, his piece differs from that of Yamashita’s. Unlike Yamashita, who uses one width of the string to create her composition, Palagniuk uses different widths and also wraps the thread around the same nail multiple times.
Palagniuk’s claim to fame is his rendering of thread portrait of the American pop artist, Justin Timberlake. It took him over 200 hours of back-breaking hard labor in completing this thread portrait. He first made a rough sketch on a large white wooden board, hammered around 13,000 nails, taking care of light and shade, and finally wound 24 kilometers (14.9 miles) of black string to create the said portrait.
How Palagniuk achieved the exact likeness of Timberlake was by winding the string around the nails in varying densities to highlight the areas of light and shade. It looked as if he has a pencil shaded these areas by means of the thread. The end result was simply astounding and it immediately caught the attention of people online.
However, this is not Palagniuk’s only work. He has also rendered a beautiful portrait of Caesar, the protagonist in the movie ‘The Planet of the Apes’, in its exact likeness. Despite several other string wire paintings, Palagniuk has not revealed his future plans, but with the Timberlake fame, this young artist is certainly on to bigger things.
Seeing the compositions of Palagniuk and other thread artists, thread art has certainly come a long way from the geometric patterns one used to make with thread in one’s art class in school.
Zen Palagniuk
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