Jay Plastronaut: Painted Over Woven

Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat

Making of Chanel tweed
from Fall 2013 Haute
Couture

Last Christmas, I made a multimedia painting for my brother Phil. My inspiration for the piece were a couple things: tweed woven on fabric, Impressionist Stippling and Jackson Pollock. (Source of tweed weaving photo: http://www.elle.co.za/exclusive-making-chanel-tweed-lesage/)

Convergence, 1952 by Jackson Pollock

Initially, the piece started out as sample woven embroideries on a plain fabric. As I remembered various tweeds that Maison Lesage has made, I found that they used a variety of threads, yarns and ribbons.

I decided to use sewing threads as opposed to a combination of the latter. Considering that weaving requires a very copious amount of thread I had to pull the threads a very long distance to get the right amount of yardage. To do this, I stabilized the spools of thread on pins then twisted them together and pulled them across my living room. Once I had them at a proper length, I began twisting them in order to form one singular thread.

As seen by the above photos, each row is comprised of multiple threads. Because each one is made of at least 5 separate threads I used a needle with a large eyelet. As of right now, I don't have a loom or any equipment to weave fabric on it's own. Thus I wove the embroideries on top of a base mock-up fabric.

After I had finished several samples, I looked through my art/crafts supplies and saw that I had glow-in-the-dark paint. I figured, "why the hell not?" and started painting over the threads. After I painted a light first-coat I realized that the clash of colors was a little reminiscent of Jackson Pollack's splattered paintings.

When I thought about paint splattering the work I knew that it would be applied in an organic and thus uncontrolled way. I wanted to create a similar effect but in a controlled manner. The texture of the weave was already 3-dimensional and decided to bring it out by utilizing French Impressionist stippling.

I kept the amount of earth tones and monochromatic colors to a minimal but used them next to the embroideries to create a contrast. When I prepared my palette, I didn't mix any of them to create the secondary colors. To my eye, paint loses it's bold/bright quality when mixed together. The threads were already made of bold colors as it is so I wanted to match it with the paint.

A picture I took of the Chicago
Chanel boutique displaying an outfit
from the Spring 2014 collection.

The top and skirt display the final
product of weaving from Maison Lesage

As we can see below, the process of weaving is all done by hand. The necessity for a deciphering eye that is able to match up certain lines is eminent. Most weaves form a grid-like pattern. However, sometimes this is not the case. The pattern that is woven below by Maison Lesage is based off of the Middle-Easter Keffiyeh scarf and requires very accurate hand-eye coordination.