All posts by Rosie Lesso

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,…

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…

Marion Mahony Griffin and Walter Burley Griffin, aka the Griffins, were an exceptional design team, with radical ideas that spanned continents and cultures. Both architects, they established their joint business in California in the early 20th century before relocating to Australia, making their mark with environmentally aware urban design. Both were united by mutual respect…

One of the most formidable design pairings of the mid-20th century, Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi founded the radical, controversial American architectural studio Venturi Scott Brown and Associates, also known as VSBA. Working in tandem from 1969 to 2012, they pioneered a postmodern approach to design, believing architecture and urban design should reference the…

Italian duo Anna Castelli Fierrieri and Giulio Castelli are the faces behind iconic furniture brand Kartell, which brought cheeky fun to the mid-20th century market with vibrant, shiny plastic furniture. They were a formidable design team, she the designer, he the biochemist, fusing his cutting-edge plastic production with her radical modernist design. Such was the…

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…

Spanish painter Juan Gris in best known as a pioneer of early 20th century art, spearheading a bright, playful strand of Cubism in France. But for a brief spell, his career took another path, travelling down the route of theatre design for Ballets Russes director Sergei Diaghilev. Under Diaghilev’s guidance Gris produced a series of…

Salvador Dali, the great master of ludicrous, Surrealist nonsense was a huge admirer of dance. Dali began designing sets and costumes for the Ballets Russes in the late 1930s, around 10 years after the death of its original founder, Sergei Diaghilev, so sadly the pair never officially worked together. But Diaghilev’s formidable shadow still loomed…

Andre Derain was the the great Fauvist painter who liberated colour, setting it free across his canvases with great swipes, streaks and slashes of unmixed paint. But there is another, less well-known side to Derain; from the 1920s to the 1950s he also turned his talents to the ballet, envisioning impossibly sumptuous sets and costumes…