Petro Vrellis Recreates Renaissance Paintings Using A Single Thread

The greek new media artist Petros Vrellis created a series of “portraits” based on the work of Spanish renaissance painter and sculptor El Greco without making use of a stain and a  brush. Vrellis utilizes a single piece of thread and a circular loom to follow a computer-generated pattern created from an uploaded image. Vrellis explained that he broke the painting down into pixels, so the darker the image, the more times the thread must cross over a particular element on the loom. To manufacture one artwork of thread, he strains the string from one anchor point to another along the open framework in straight lines about 3,000 to 4,000 times until the portrait is completed. With 1 to 2 kilometers of thread, he calls his project “a new way to knit”.