KENYA linen’s rich shade of red ochre seems intrinsically bound to nature, invoking rich, fertile soil and the careworn bark of ancient trees. Kenyan contemporary painter Michael Armitage has embraced this earthy colour to convey his homeland of Kenya, illustrating its wild and untameable beauty with an evocative array of ochre and sienna tinged hues….
All posts by Rosie Lesso
Germany’s Kunstakademie Dusseldorf is widely recognised as one of the most radical art schools in the world. The 1960s and 1970s were a particularly profound period for the academy, when ground-breaking teaching methods gave rise to progressive new forms of performance art, painting and photography. Since then, the school has remained a respected centre for…
Henri Matisse adored blue. It cropped up in almost all his paintings, not as pale, distant backgrounds, but as bold, punchy, and in-your-face colours like Deep Ultramarine Linen. Sometimes he sprinkled the colour like jewels in amongst a sea of reds, other times allowing brilliant shades of blue to entirely dominate the canvas with a…
Russian Symbolist painter Mikhail Vrubel created a magical twilight zone of dwindling daylight hours with grey, purple and blue, capturing the moment when reality blurs into dreams. FOLKSTONE GRAY linen’s subtle violet grey tone was one of his favourite colours, because it allowed him to create subtle areas of mid-toned shadow as the evening quietly…
Founded in 2018, global fashion brand Pangaia make minimalist, relaxed lounge and sportswear with a difference. All their fibres and fabrics are made from naturally derived or recycled sources. They also work with some surprisingly unconventional raw materials, including seaweed, wildflowers, mushrooms, fruits and vegetables, many of which would otherwise end up in waste. Working…
The Bauhaus remains one of the most iconic and influential art and design schools of the modern world, and its legacy lives on today. Founded in Weimar by the great German architect Walter Gropius, the school’s aims were visionary and utopian. Gropius’s goal was no less than an entire unity of the arts, bringing all…
POPPY SEED Linen’s cold, steel grey often made its way into British painter Roger Hilton’s abstract art, suggesting the dark, muffling clouds of an oncoming storm. Hilton was a leading figure in British postwar abstraction, and a member of the St Ives group alongside Ben Nicholson, Peter Lanyon and Wilhelmina Barnes Graham. Like them, his…
Global sportswear brand Patagonia are passionate about the great outdoors, and the role we play within it. On the one hand, their clothes are tough, durable and built to last, designed to withstand the wildest and most remote adventures the planet has to offer. But Patagonia are also deeply aware of the destructive impact clothing…
American artist Cy Twombly made the kind of art that celebrates what it is to be an artist, with wild scribbles, streaks and swipes applied with a raw and primal energy. Twombly made his name during the 1950s as a leading member of the second-wave Abstract Expressionist school, alongside Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler and Robert…
In 1933, an art school like no other was founded near the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina: its name was Black Mountain College. While the experimental and progressive art school only lasted for 24 years, its legacy has survived far longer. Black Mountain modelled a new, open-ended and unstructured way to teach liberal arts,…
Cold, luminescent shades of silvery grey like PERFECTLY PALE ripple through British painter Paul Nash’s surrealist art, creating the ethereal atmosphere of a dream. Nash was one of a generation of English artists who brought European ideas around Cubism and Surrealism into Britain during the 1930s and 1940s, but Nash interpreted European styles of art…
From remnants of antique rugs to recycled denim and swatches of old cashmere, Uruguayan-American designer Gabriela Hearst demonstrates how high-end fashion can be made in the most sustainable and ecologically aware way. Along with her eponymous fashion house, Hearst is also creative director of the established fashion house Chloe, and in both ventures, Hearst wants…
Jenny Saville’s raw and physically direct paintings are all about the true reality of human bodies. Flesh is her primary subject, and she paints it creasing, flopping, squishing and folding over itself in a way that is all too familiar to anyone who has given birth, or experienced the visceral process of raising young children….
Bright, hot pinks like BOUGAINVILLEA burst forth from the abstract art of post-war British artist Patrick Heron, illuminating space with the radiance of summer flowers. A true colourist, Heron dedicated much of his life to the exploration of how one tone could bounce of another, and create sonorous or discordant sensations. His compositions and colour…
Vincent van Gogh was one of the greatest colourists of the 19th century, and his legacy lives on today. While he painted from life, his colours were heightened, elevated versions of reality, bristling with the anticipation and excitement he felt while observing the minutiae of the world around him. BASILE’s pale, fresh and minty green…
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