One of Britain’s most exciting and adventurous textile and wallpaper designers working today, Ellen Merchant places traditional print processes and high-quality materials at the heart of her creative practice. Inspired by the Arts and Crafts emphasis on hand-made design over mass-produced goods, her work embraces traditional, hand-block printing techniques and features intricate, ornate, botanical designs…
All posts by Rosie Lesso
Leading Amsterdam design studio Buro Bélen have been steadily building their reputation as innovators in interior and textile design since 2012, and their work can now be found in major museum collections around the world. Their approach is simple yet admirable: to create useful products based on ethical production with a richly tactile, sensorial, and…
Contemporary, German-born textile artist Joana Schneider’s art takes many forms, from haunting, mask-like faces and rhythmic abstractions to excerpts of text. But running through her multifarious subject matter is a common theme; the techniques and materials associated with the fishermen and netmakers of the harbour areas in The Hague, an area she has come to…
The French intimist painter Edouard Vuillard made a career out of observing the quietest and most intimate moments of his life, which he painted with soft, warm hues like Mocha Mousse, a subtle beige tinged with hints of dusty rose. Sometimes he highlighted these hues with vivid accents of bright colour, creating a dazzling visual…
Contemporary British artist Lucy Sparrow makes vast, immersive installations featuring hand-made felt objects that range from grocery store goods to full-scale replica works of art. Known colloquially as ‘the felt lady’, Sparrow has earned a widespread, global following in the past 10 years, because her exquisitely-crafted soft sculptures are as much a celebration of artisanal…
While her name is synonymous with daring, abstract flower paintings, the great American 20th century painter Georgia O’Keeffe spent the later years of her life painting the dry, barren and wide-open landscape of New Mexico, a place she came to call home after escaping from the bustling metropolis of New York. The pale, parched pink…
During the artist’s so-called Berkeley years, from 1953-1966, American painter Richard Diebenkorn captured the fresh, invigorating air of California with his own inimitable brand of intuitive brushstrokes and playfully vibrant colour schemes. Throughout these years the oceanic blue of Blue Bonnet Linen was a recurring feature in his art, whether depicting ocean views seen from…
Renowned Australian Aboriginal artist Emily Kam Kngwarray (1910-1996) was one of the 20th century’s most remarkable artists, and a current large-scale retrospective at London’s Tate Modern pays homage to the depth and breadth of her legacy. She worked with predominantly with batik, and later acrylic painting on canvas, producing fantastically intricate and brilliantly colourful marks…
In the eerily quiet world of Andrew Wyeth, warm, rustic shades of brown like Chocolate Linen play a pivotal role, colouring broken tree stumps, shadowy interiors, or mounds of dry, crumbling earth. His barren, haunting paintings captured the raw and honest simplicity of his home town in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and his summer home in…
Bold, vibrant colours are a defining feature in the art of British abstract painter Sir Howard Hodgkin (1932-2017), a powerful means of conveying his innermost memories and emotions. “Don’t paint the thing itself,” he wrote, “paint the effect it produces.” He often brought dazzling shades of red like Firecracker Red into his paintings, laid liberally…
Born and raised in Scotland, I grew up surrounded by tartan, a pattern associated as much with kitsch Scots traditions and nationalist tartanry as punk rebellion and goth subculture. Despite this complicated duality, there’s no denying that tartan is interwoven with the history of Scotland and Scottish identity. Yet it is also a worldwide phenomenon…
Since launching her eponymous fashion label in 2009, French designer Olympia Le-Tan has earned a cult following for her whimsical, playful and artisanal approach to making accessories. From the outset she has been producing stylised ‘storybook bags,’ hand-woven clutch bags in the same size and shape as limited-edition books, featuring ‘covers’ with references to pop…
Fashion in the late Middle Ages was an essential tool for marking one’s social status, with the more opulent and impractical denoting those of higher rank and nobility. Art of the era can tell us much about the types of clothing people wore, and what those garments said about their position within society. Notably, art,…
Fashion during the High and Late European Renaissance was a true lesson in opulence, with exaggerated silhouettes that accentuated the human form, along with indulgent, luxurious fabrics adorned with sequins, embroidery and precious stones. Italy led the way during the early 16th century, shaping and influencing much of what was worn throughout Europe, leading to…
The great flourishing of arts and culture that took place during the European Renaissance inevitably made its way into the realms of fashion and textiles, shaping and informing the way people across Europe would dress for centuries to come. But with few surviving artefacts of clothing from this era, art has much to tell us…
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