Back to the Countryside

This embroidery piece is based on the painting of the well-known modern Chinese painter Ren Bonian (1840-1895 AD), which expresses the painter’s laid-back state of mind with an interesting subject and rich color palette. This piece took the embroiderer two years to finish, during which the artisan enjoyed much pleasure, maybe exactly what the painter felt while working on the painting. In order to transfer the rich colors of the painting on the embroidery, the artisan selected about 20 color combinations of mix-color silk threads (with 13 colors in each combination), and she also masterfully adopted various techniques such as long and short stitches (tao zhen, 套针), seeding stitches (dian zhen, 点针), thickening stitches (shi zhen, 施针), full-and-broken-line stitches (xushi zhen, 虚实针) so that the subtle relations of movements and tranquility as well as the artistic charm of an ink painting have both been represented perfected on the embroidery.