17 November 2009 | Albanian mosaic artist Saimir Strati received his fourth Guinness World Record on Friday for a depiction of the late Michael Jackson composed of 230,000 paintbrushes.

Using black and brown paintbrushes mounted on a truck, the mosaic portrays the king of pop with his arms outstretched.

Strati has three other works that have registered in the Guinness World Record Book. By Guinness standards this is an accomplishment of intelligence, but physically they were no small feat, either.

In September 2006, the 41-year-old hammered tens of thousands of nails (in the photograph above) into a wooden board over 24 days to create a portrait of Leonardo da Vinci. It became the world's biggest nail mosaic.

A few months later he would stick 1.5 million toothpicks into a foam board to create the shape of a horse. The three-dimensional mosaic is the largest of its kind, at 2 meters tall by 4 meters long.

The two mosaics were created at Tirana’s International Culture Center, a pyramid-shaped building that once served as a mausoleum to former Albanian communist dictator Enver Hoxha.

In September 2008 Strati went even further, gluing together 229,764 corks of various shapes and colors over a 13-meter by 7-meter plastic banner, in a work called ‘Mediterranean’, which eventually landed him his third world record.

This article is courtesy of Balkan Insight, the online publication of the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, which contains analytical reports, in-depth analyses and investigations and news items from throughout the region covering major challenges of the political, social and economic transition in the Balkans.

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