Category Archives: STYLE NEWS

Deep, dark and indulgent, DULSE linen’s blackberry stained hue can invoke both the theatrical grandeur of royalty and the hidden depths of primordial desire. The colour has great significance for British sculptor Anish Kapoor, whose deliciously sensuous sculptures tap in to red’s cultural history, while enlivening a primitive essence within the human body, as writer Stella Paul points out,…

SANGUINE linen shares an earthy, enveloping warmth with the great French Post-Impressionist Paul Cezanne, who infused his paintings with this glorious, sun glazed terracotta. Famously writing “the truth is in nature”, Cezanne obsessively copied the colour and light in the South of France onto canvas, capturing golden sunlight with soft sandy and earthy hues as…

Russian Romantic painter Ivan Aivazovsky was entranced by the wild, untameable energy of the sea, painting it in bruised blue and purple tones punctuated by white moonlight. ABYSS linen recalls the deepest tones in Aivazovsky’s brooding seascapes, a rich indigo that suggests tempestuous, brewing drama. In the face of nature’s sheer, destructive force Aivazovsky saw…

CORAL linen is a colour filled with heat and fire, burning with the raging intensity of a Spanish sunset. For the deeply passionate painter Joan Miro this red held great significance, both as a patriotic symbol for his native Spain and a potent carrier of raw, overflowing emotion that spills out from his canvases and…

COMPLEXION linen is a rich, fleshy tone, backlit with glowing warmth like the blushing skin of a ripe peach. British painter Lucien Freud infused many of his figurative paintings with this warm pink colour, particularly his male subjects, infusing them with a deeply intense, hot flush of life. On his enduring infatuation with pink and…

There is a light, airy delicacy to DAWN linen, suggesting spring blossom or translucent rose petals blushing pink in the sunlight. It was a colour American artist Georgia O’Keeffe returned to over and over, capturing the pastel toned vibrancy of fresh, new flowers and the dry, parched earth of America’s barren deserts with the same distinctive…

The deep, inky tone of ROYAL PURPLE linen has the warm intensity of a dwindling sunset as the light fades into shadow. This time of day was a favourite with painter Paul Signac, who saw deep purple tones in the shadows around him as the golden sun of his native France began to sink downwards…

ROYAL BLUE linen has the brilliant vibrancy of the Mediterranean Sea as it stretches outwards into an infinite horizon of azure blue. French painter Henri Matisse spent the majority of his life in Nice, where this same limitless blue light filtered into his mind’s eye, to be reimagined on canvas as fields of electrifying ultramarine….

VINEYARD GREEN linen is the colour of energy and growth, suggesting fleshy leaves and dense meadows of wild grass cast into an oasis of cool shade. French Impressionist painter Claude Monet saw the rich, vital potential of this colour, returning to it again and again throughout his career to convey the depth and variety of…

STRAW linen’s delicate pale gold has the iridescence of sand bleached by the white summer sun. Impressionist painter Joaquin Sorolla saw in this colour the power to recreate searing hot Spanish sunlight as it flooded windswept beaches, flapping ship sails, straw hats and freshly starched clothing in his seemingly endless cycle of summer. When balanced…

The milk-white hue of TADELAKT linen evokes the smooth, polished surfaces of Barbara Hepworth’s ground-breaking and sensuous marble sculptures. A 20th-century woman who both embodied and propelled modernism in Britain, Hepworth revealed her determination and independence early on by travelling alone to Rome in 1924 at the age of 21, after completing her degree at…

The intensity of EARTH linen’s heady, port red mirrors Mark Rothko’s late maroon paintings, in which he captured the brooding half-light of dusk as it slowly shifts and closes into night. Rothko wrote, “Often, towards nightfall, there’s a feeling of mystery, threat, frustration – all of these at once. I would like my paintings to…

RED OCHRE linen has the enveloping warmth of terracotta, a rustic colour that seems drawn from the ground like Italian tiles or dry earth parched by the sun. Yet for painter Frank Auerbach this shade of red, along with sandy yellow and burnt orange, reflects the mood and surroundings of his home in London, with…

FROTH linen has the breezy freshness of peach skin in the white spring sunlight, recalling the luminous flesh tones in French master Edouard Manet’s paintings. As a Realist painter Manet made the human figure his central focus, whose pale blush tones become visions of purity and light when set against deep, earthy browns and velvety…

SAND linen’s full bodied saffron yellow was a favourite with French painter Maurice de Vlaminck, setting his paintings alight with warm, iridescent flames of colour. Central to Vlaminck’s practice was the relationship between colours, which could express riotous outbursts of emotion, with his distinctive shade of mustard yellow playing a top note above the rest. Reflecting…