i briefly featured the work of NYC based New Friends, aka Alexandra Segreti and Kelly Rakowski, last year - but i thought they deserved their own post because their work is just soooooo good. they were also featured in the UO blog last month and i just loved seeing a little tour of their studio.
New Friends design and produce weavings, textiles and housewares. They weave unique objects that combine the rich history of textiles and contemporary visual culture. The fibers used in their vivid, oddball collections range from locally sourced, plant dyed wools to man-made metallic threads.
Tata-Naka is designed by Georgian-born identical twins, Tamara and Natasha Surguladze. They arrived in London in 1996 to study design at Central St Martin’s and in 2000 Barneys NYC dedicated a wall to their awe-inspiring graduation collection. The Tata-Naka statement pieces regularly starred in the legendary series ‘’Sex in the City’’ and were worn by Carrie Bradshaw on the cover of the official book.
you can see the entire collection here. images c/o courtesy of Tata Naka. Henri Matisse clippings c/o Wikipaintings.
today i’m inspired by the work of legendary abstract expressionist Helen Frankenthaler. her huge colourful paintings look like gigantic watercolours, but are in fact painted with oils & acrylics. Helen would work directly on unprepared canvas, and dilute the oil paint with turpentine (later she switched to acrylic paint), causing it to soak into the canvas – a technique called “soak stain” that was later adopted by other abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollock. her work was not highly gestural and painterly, instead she preferred to create pieces that looked as if they were “born in a minute”.
A really good picture looks as if it’s happened at once. It’s an immediate image. For my own work, when a picture looks labored and overworked, and you can read in it – well, she did this and then she did that, and then she did that – there is something in it that has not got to do with beautiful art to me. … I think very often it takes ten of those over-labored efforts to produce one really beautiful wrist motion that is synchronized with your head and heart, and you have it, and therefore it looks as if it were born in a minute.
What concerns me when I work, is not whether the picture is a landscape, or whether it’s pastoral, or whether somebody will see a sunset in it. What concerns me is – did I make a beautiful picture?
Helen was born and raised in New York, and was celebrated in the NYC art scene since her debut in the 50s. she produced work until her death in 2011 (you can read her obituary at the New York Times), and apart from her painting she also created lithographs, etchings, screen prints and woodcuts. you can see her work at many institutions across the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MOMA, the Guggenheim and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
i am fascinated by the work of artist Pepa Prieto, who was born in southern Spain, went to boarding school in England and now lives and works in New York. she has quite a varied body of work stemming from 2005 to now, but something i find consistently beautiful are those brush strokes that seem to coil their way through her pieces.
The paintings are small fragments of my universes, virtual landscapes, jungles of vegetation, ritual objects, memory embodied in physical objects, emotional constructions, human rituals, patterns and colors from memory- things seen from the inside out.
browsing the vibrant work of London based illustrator Lynnie Zulu is the perfect antidote to a Monday. growing up in Scotland, drawing was a form of escapism from an early age and much of her work draws from her family’s Tanzanian heritage. also the cursor on her website is a watermelon… it doesn’t get much more cheerful than that. you can buy some of her prints at Ohh Deer and Deer Brains, and original work at Art Wednesday.
Kristina Krogh is a Danish graphic designer and artist who combines different materials and their surfaces to create fascinating designs that you can buy as prints. you can see more & purchase at her online shop.
I think the strong mix of these exclusive and cheap textual materials such as marble, ply, wood, cork and paper is an interesting an unexpected combination that I love. My inspiration comes from the things and objects that surrounds me; a beautiful old parquet, a perfect color combination on a building, a stone floor in a church, a bike ride through Copenhagen – among many other things.
i discovered the wonderful work of Brighton based illustrator Eleanor Taylor while catching up with all the goodness over at Design Work Life. the first image of Hawaiian queen Ka’ahumanu really captured my imagination, a piece that Eleanor was commissioned to do for Julia Rothman’s upcoming book The Who, The What and The When: 65 Artists Illustrate the Secret Accomplices of History.
I illustrated Queen Ka’ahumanu, the favourite wife of King Kamehameha I and the most powerful woman of her time in Hawaii. Upon her husband’s death she donned a feather cape and called herself Queen Regent. When the missionaries came in 1820 she ended up destroying all the ancient gods and temples leading to the ultimate downfall in a kingdom she helped create.
i am quite transfixed by the trippy weavings of Finnish designer & artist Kustaa Saksi, who manufactured the collection, called Hypnopompic, using the Jacquard weaving technique. the weavings are made of mohair, alpaca wool, cotton and metallic acrylic thread.
Hypnopompic refers to a state of sensory confusion leading out of sleep, when the state of awakening gets mixed with the dream world into a surreal reality. It is an exceptional state of consciousness, in which one may experience the presence of, or see creatures and animals, such as spiders, monkeys and insects. Hypnopompic state has also been affiliated with visual delusions caused by migraine. These graphic patterns, designs and textures are thought to have contributed to the traditions of ornamentation, mosaic and textile.
