Casket Arts Community Featured Artist

Linnea was born in Minneapolis on the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1979 and was carried home during a snowstorm. She grew up in the small town of Mound and always drew. Her attraction to visual drama started early: when she was only 34 inches tall, she stood in the kitchen doorway and was shocked as Grandma removed all her teeth at once. This was the first vivid image that impressed itself on her memory and precluded a lifetime of visual thinking.

Later, leaning on the bark of a thin limb midway up her favorite maple tree, Linnea was touched by the tenderest breeze. It was filled with the sensation of perfection and she could feel it contained all the secrets of the alternate nature of the universe. The sensation of unutterable beauty has caused years of daydreaming and unremitting attempts at translating the elusive feelings into shapes communicating complexities bigger than words, a little picture guide to these unidentifiable but poignant emotions.

Linnea studied illustration at Washington University In St Louis and cultivated her current graphic style after taking a woodcut print class, where under the direction of a spontaneously combusting maniac she developed a penchant for triphop in the wee hours of the morning and putting thick outlines around her drawings.

In 2004 the Robots invaded. Eventually Linnea would marry a rocket scientist.

Currently, Linnea spends much time making art in Studio 316 of a converted casket factory in Northeast Minneapolis. Her projects include acrylic and oil paintings, murals, commissions, and collaborations; action painting with rock bands, classical saxophonists, and electronic music DJs; freelance illustration, designing furniture, making pictures for children’s books, and staring at the sky through moving branches.

Her thoughts are still all pictures, and she fills pages of sketchbooks with secret nonsense and meandering doodles, out of which evolve series of characters brimming with internal dialogue. Linnea paints them into pictures to nudge you to believe in her imagined reality where colors are twice as bright, love is infinitely more vivid, and the world is condensed into simple, crystallized pleasures, so just a smile ignites a connection to make any distance small.

Visit Linnea during First Thursdays and Art-a-Whirl in the Casket Arts Building NE, 681 17th Ave. NE, Suite 316, and other times by appointment, 952-239-0110. Check out Linnea's website, www.mydetic.com