Art: Caroline Larsen makes paintings look like tapestries in astonishing series Burning Up

It’d take a serious perfectionist several hundred tubes of oil paint to achieve the seemingly impossible effect of making a painting look like a cross-stitch, and yet Canada-based artist Caroline Larsen somehow manages to do exactly that. Her project Burning Up is a series of paintings of cars on fire which are bizarrely realistic in spite of the larger-than-life vivid colours and thick daubs of paint.

Most incredibly, though, the lines and layers of paint seems to weave over one another in a richly textured web of two surfaces blending, recreating the same effect as waves of heat rising from a roasting surface. It’s only when you look up close at the surface of the canvas that you realise that the images aren’t composed of a selection of threads arduously woven through a strip of fabric, but rather oil paint spread on so thick it looks like it might have been applied with a piping bag usually used to ice cupcakes, rather than a paintbrush.