This isn’t just a black and white painting of calm seas — it’s actually not a painting at all. This mixed media mural is composed of half a million fish hooks.
The 7.9m-long piece by Cuban artist Yoan Capote, dubbed Isla, was fabricated by intertwining and nailing over 500,000 fishing hooks onto plywood to create the dark areas — the white bits are oil paint. Even with 30 assistants working in continuously rotating shifts, the piece took over six months to complete. According to the artist’s website, “This series of fish-hooks paintings combine the sensibility of different techniques [and] knowledges in relation with our senses and perception. In the distance it looks like a drawing or etching, more near we can appreciate the brush strokes of the oil painting, and very close we feel the relieve with the sensorial [sic] power and aggressiveness of the objects in its sculpture condition.” [Yoan Capote via Oddity Central via Neatorama]