The History of Painter's Threads
exclusively produced by Tentakulum Manufaktur
How everything got started…
My interest for relations between embroidery and other art forms led me to ever more painters, who paid a lot of interest to textile techniques. Above all the group of artists that called themselves “Die Blauen Reiter” around Kandinsky, Klee, Macke and Marc.
Before I started to study embroidery in England I was pretty much attracted by the impressionist painters with little inclination to look right or left. During my training this changed ever so slowly but completely to a special liking for expressionist painters. The clarity of shapes and the intensive radiance of colours causes a tingling to the fingers of each needle enthusiast.
When I discovered a small booklet called Kunsthandwerkliche Arbeiten(craftworks) by August Macke and found an embroidery design by August Macke himself, I was done for. Some time later I even had the luck to see an embroidery which was sketched and embroidered by August Macke at an exhibition of the Rosgarten Museum in Konstanz. Almost at the same time I discovered a paragraph in an auto-biography by C. Lindenberg, a friend of Macke: He describes a visit with the Macke family soon after the untimely death of August Macke, when all of Mackes family sat together and embroidered designs by August Macke.
The first painting, that I wanted to transfer from painting to embroidery has been a water colour painting called 'Der Kreuzberg bei Bonn' a watercolour painting by August Macke. Bonn being the place where Macke grew up since he was 13 years old, the Kreuzberg being a famous part of the former German Capital. For this project I painted my very first Painter's Thread, Nr. 101 – Macke… It was planned to be worked for the field underneath the small house with the yellow pink blue tones.
|
The thread should not be in regular color sequences, but a multicolored melange of the colors. I experimented with different dyeing methods, available to hand dyers these days, until I discovered a way to do this with the effect I wanted to get. This corresponds with the aim that our small manufacturing company always wanted to achieve: exclusivity and extravagance. It is not really dyeing any more, but a kind of painting threads with an unusual technique.
After the completion of my Macke-project my students at the International School for Textile Arts and other visitors to our workrooms were so inspired by this thread that they wanted to try it out as well.
Thus the thought developed to make a line of this kind of hand painted threads. However at first it had only been planned for use in a series of embroidery kits, which unfortunately did not yet come out of its planning state, transforming paintings into textile works of art.
Design: BIZ 1997 / Embroidery: C. Creutzburg 1997 / Copyright BIZ |
I will never know how the threads made their way into the studios of some embroidery, needlepoint and cross stitch designers and conquered their hearts – but they certainly did. Well, ever since I could not stop that wheel from turning! And me standing there with the joy that this thread found many friends and with the knowledge that this kind of hand painting does not offer any way to do reproduce colours properly...
But well, textile-addicts that we all are, will not let ourselves be discouraged by small things like that, do we…..so I started to produce the colour line, called it Painter's Threads, each color representing a painter (last name like "Macke") or paintress (first name like "Frida") and offering it to anybody interested. Now they are being adored all over the world. In spite or may be just because of every changing dye lots that make each skein absolutely unique.
Many an embroiderer stocks them rather as „collectors items“ than having to part with them for use in an embroidery…. And searches for new dye lots whenever they come upon a source for them. And I am very happy that a tiny idea has become a big movement and causes many people the same pleasure as it still does me.
