Japanese ukiyo-e art has a long and incredibly varied history, and a closely knit relationship with fabric. In this instalment of our series on ukiyo-e art, let’s start at the very beginning with the movement’s founder, and delve into the ways fabric informed his practice as a painter and printmaker. Ukiyo-e is often traced back…
All posts by Rosie Lesso
Earthy, intense shades of green like that of Moss Linen fill Maurice Denis’s intimate art, investing it with a quietly hypnotising magic. Denis was a leader in the avant-garde artist circle Les Nabis alongside Edouard Vuillard, Paul Serusier and Pierre Bonnard; together they pioneered an avant-garde approach to painting that moved away from naturalism towards…
Japanese ‘ukiyo-e’ paintings and prints are one of the world’s richest treasures, illustrating the complex diversity of Japanese life with a bold and instantly recognisable language. A popular strand of Japanese culture from around 1670 to 1912, ukiyo-e, or ‘pictures of the floating world’, illustrate the development of Japan’s bustling city centres as they became…
Austrian Art Nouveau painter Gustav Klimt is world-renowned for his sinuously flowing fabrics that adorned women and intertwined lovers in richly ornate blankets and gowns. But perhaps less well-known is the love affair he had with fashion designer Emilie Floge, and the impact their creative interchange had on the shape of his art. Floge’s loose,…
There is a quiet, understated elegance to the award-winning architecture of Billie Tsien and Tod Williams, which seems to blend effortlessly in with its surrounding space. In contrast with the macho, monolithic architecture that populates so many of our cities their world is more cerebral and considered, a contemplation of how real people and real…
The warmth of GLACIER GRAY Linen shimmered through Agnes Martin’s paintings like light reflecting on water, encouraging us to enter a deep, meditative state of mind. A leading American Minimalist, Martin made her name in 1960s New York for her spare, refined canvases featuring delicate grids and stripes of pale, ghostly colour on epically scaled…
Soaring shades of sky blue like ALLURE Linen dominated Paul Cezanne’s late paintings, filling them with the crisp vitality of the Mediterranean coast. By now settled in his home town of Provence, the art Cezanne made in the last decade of his life are now considered his greatest contribution to the history of art, cementing…
Dutch master Johannes Vermeer was fascinated by fabric, and it informed the nature of his art on multiple levels. This significant connection to fabric began early in Vermeer’s childhood, through family connections to textiles, and it stayed with him for life. He spent his entire career exploring the way its draped, shimmering surface could add…
Husband-and-wife team Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch are the charismatic, larger-than-life founders of Roman and Williams, an American interiors and architecture firm making waves throughout the contemporary design world. Founded in 2002, their company took the names ‘Roman and Williams’ from their maternal grandfathers, a move that would set the stage for their design ethos,…
Contemporary Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugito draws us deep into his world of meditative calm, where softly diffused gray light like that of GRAY CASHMERE Linen expands across vast areas of empty space. Sugito made his name in the 1990s as a leader in the Tokyo-pop movement alongside Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara, but his brand…
Fabric has played a vitally significant role in the lives of countless artists, acting as a source of inspiration, comfort and self-expression. In this new series, we will look at the world’s finest artists who built an intimate relationship with fabric – one brought about by family history, travel or personal interest – that would…
The great Dutch-American Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning made paintings as acts of performance, smearing, slapping and swiping great slabs and wedges of paint onto his thickly impastoed surfaces, before scraping them back and starting again. Indulgent, creamy streaks of off-white like that of Parchment Linen were a defining feature, suggesting the flickering movement of…
American painter Robert Ryman made many of his quiet, introspective paintings on biscuit toned backdrops, coloured with the same warm, comforting neutral of NEW SAFARI Linen. He interrupted these backgrounds with jarringly fresh shades of arctic white, sometimes skidding like an accident across the picture plane, other times neatly ordered into fenced off squares. A…
British-American painter Cecily Brown weaves Purple Sage Linen’s deep lavender shade into her expressionist canvases, letting it form shadowy rivulets of uneasy, hedonistic darkness. Brown made her name in New York in the late 1990s, painting tangled bodies lavishing in paradisiacal gardens with fleshy passages of paint in rich, indulgent jewel tones. Process, she explains…
French painter Albert Gleizes had a particular knack for painting radiant, golden tones alike to CURRY Linen, investing his paintings with a humane and deeply comforting warmth. A leader in the school of French Cubism alongside Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, Gleizes pioneered new ways of seeing the world, painting with multiple perspectives and fragmented…
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