A Landscape for Munch

Inspiration: The artist from Norway that I chose is Edvard Munch, whose most famous work is The Scream but who produced many other recognised owrks of art.

Edvard Munch is a Norwegian expresssionist painter whose best know work,The Scream, has become an iconic image. He was influenced by impressionist painters and he focussed on this style, with his work even being compared to that of Van Gogh. He adopted the open brush-strokes of the impressionists in some of his paintings, but developed his own original style using flowing tortuous use of lines. His early work appears quite dark and isolation and loneliness are typical of the emotions he imbues his work with. His concentration on emotional essentials sometimes led to radical simplification of forms and an expressive rather than descriptive use of colour.

For my piece I wanted to reflect the rather bleak subjects of Munch’s work, so I chose an open moorland landscape with a wind-blown tree as the main focus. I purposely kept the design simple but used lines of hand-stitching in the foreground to emphasise the surface ripples of the land, and swirls of machine quilting in the sky to represent the brush-strokes and flowing lines of the painter. The fabric is a commercial space-dyed piece for the land and hand-dyed fabric for the sky and wind-blown tree. The small bushes are hand-stitched wool rovings, to give added texture. I used gold acrylic paint to stamp onto a neutral coloured fabric for the binding, to suggest an ornate frame which often frames artwork.

Detail views:

Examples of Munch’s work