Rasterization and Blurred Imagery

Explore the intriguing effect of painting and embroidering in horizontal lines, creating a captivating rasterized image. With a 5 mm distance between each stitch, Linda Männel achieves a blurred yet harmonious composition that draws viewers into her artwork.

1. Briefly describe the work you do.

The basis of my pictures are ink paintings on canvas, showing mostly landscapes in delicate shades of gray, which I apply with a brush. When the painted picture is finished, I embroider lines of colored yarn over it at 5 mm distances. These lines color the picture and give it a second, more abstract layer. Depending on the lighting and daylight, the original picture sometimes shines through more, sometimes less and the eye merges the two layers so that you often can't tell that the color is added by the yarn and not painted.

2. What or who inspires your work and how has that influenced both your work and your identity as an artist?

I get inspired quite spontaneously, usually at times when I am least likely to think about art. It can be a view of the clouds, a conversation with an impressive personality, leafing through an architecture magazine, fragments of a dream or the color combination of a dress. Vague ideas that I then work out through drawings and sketches and that become more and more concrete over time. These then serve as a template for the selection of yarn, which I then procure and partly dye myself. The rest of the work process is a fairly unromantic, daily process. As I work on large pictures for up to four months, it is a game of patience, but it can also be quite meditative.

3. As you reflect on your artistic journey, could you describe the evolution of your identity as an artist and how it has exceeded your initial expectations?

I studied free painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg and during my time at the academy I worked almost exclusively in black ink on paper. There were countless attempts to paint in color, but somehow it never appealed to me. After graduating, I had a lot of unfinished ink paintings and started to embroider over them on a whim. I was fascinated by the subtle colors, reminiscent of colorized black and white photos, and I began to perfect the technique, which was the kind of coloring my paintings had been missing! I realized that I had never seen this artistic effect in any other artist's work an began to create my unique selling point from it. As my works take a long time to produce, I usually plan for years in advance when it comes to exhibitions or commissions. At the beginning of my career, I would never have thought that being an artist would involve so much planning, organization an office work.

4. How do you view the significance of your contribution to contemporary art in a world that is increasingly shaped by technology?

I think in the flood of digital art that can be consumed anywhere, but cannot be touched, grasped, exists a longing for something material, tangible. My pictures are tempting to touch through the embroidered surface, though it is not desired. The observers see themselves pulling aside the curtain of embroidery and unraveling the secret of the technique. No exhibition passes without me not discovering the traces of this secret exploration. It is amazing at every exhibition how fascinated the viewers are of the effort involved in the pictures. This suave layering gives my work a spatial and temporal depth, rendering diverse images that arise only as the viewer changes its vantage point and light. The viewer becomes an actor of my work as he is invited to dig up personal experiences as if the memories hid beneath the textile.

5. How do you see the future of your art and the art world evolving in the coming years?

I hope that I will have the opportunity to work as I do at the moment for many years to come. My order books are full and I can see there is a lot of interest in my work, which I can hardly keep up with. Interest in textile art in general has risen sharply in recent years and I have the feeling that this will increase. The public is more and more accepting the connection between handicrafts and fine art, which was still strictly separate when I was a student. I very much welcome this, as there are so many great techniques that would otherwise have disappeared into oblivion. They are a beneficial antithesis to digital technologically produced art.

6. Get inspired!

INSTAGRAM: @lindamnnl
WEBSITE: linda-maennel.de