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Pilar Sans Coover has made over 100 needlepoint tapestries since creating her first in the early 1970's. Intricate, engaging, made up of of thousands of stitches, her work is warm, vivid, and highly original. She works with a painter's eye and the imagination of a storyteller. Inspired by her love of folk tales, myth, literature and music, Pilar's tapestries are executed with a playful spontaneity. Critics have compared her work to the paintings of Bosch, Brueghel and Blake.
Exhibited internationally and winner of numerous awards, Pilar has been showing at Po Gallery since 1988.
Artist's Statement
I was born in Tarragona, Spain, and attended primary school there, where girls were obliged to learn the various needle arts, including lace making. I also attended evening and summer art classes. At the University of Barcelona, I studied biology, which accounts in part for the many botanical and biological motifs in my work; and then, for some years thereafter, during the 1960's, I studied classical guitar, and musical themes were also to find a central place in my needle art.
My approach to needle art is to seek to transcend the limitations of traditional needlework by opening every possibility between the thread and the canvas. I feel as free to move my needle as a painter his brush, and, as a painter mixes his paints, I will combine any yarn, thread, or whatever goes through a needle in order to achieve the desired color or texture. The stitches, too, may be any of the traditional ones or new ones that I have created, my central aim in each piece being to combine as much as possible the fluidity and spontaneity of painting with the warmth and textural richness of textile. Color, texture, movement: these are the mainsprings of my art.
I am not interested merely in surface, however. I grew up in a part of the world rich in painting and tapestries devoted to storytelling, and I have never lost my early fascination with narrative art, especially that of mythology and folklore. Almost all my work shares with my favorite art of the past that love of story.
Press
Needlepointedly, The Providence Journal, Bill Van Siclen, Oct 19, 2006