Petros Vrellia, was born in Greece was initially an electronics engineer. He holds a MEng in Electrical Engineering and an MA in Art Sciences, which is why his works embrace a combination of the two realms, where they challenge traditional thinking and subvert people’s awareness to the existing reality.

His previous work transformed Van Gogh’s Starry Night painting into a manually controlled animation called Starry Night Interactive Animation. His latest work continues to reinvent the classics, using contemporary technology to revive the portraits of Spanish painter El Greco.

“It’s hard not to make physical and metaphorical connections to the mythological entities of Moirai (Fates) that controlled the thread of life of every mortal being, from birth to death; human life defined by a complicated path of threads,” Petros said. In this piece of work, he has replaced brush strokes with cotton threads.

He uses a single one to two kilometres long strand of black cotton thread, an aluminium wheel with 200 anchor pegs, and a computer algorithm to dictate the step-by-step peg locations. There are over 2 billion calculations necessary to output a single image; he has now completed 15 manually hooked portraits. “This is a new and unique type of knitting that could not have been implemented a few decades ago, without computers.” Each thread has been looped back and forth onto the anchor pegs for at least three to four thousand times. The threads are slowly overlapped one atop of each other, creating a sense of depth. As the creation nears completion, the character’s face and expression become increasingly evident, making it a project which expresses both the power of man and technology.