I'll Show You Mine, If You Show Me Yours [Part I]

Wiley Purkey

Well, there's been such a huge response that I'm going to be making this into a series of posts. I'm getting palpitations thinking about all the money I could blow on the books I don't have here. 

Artist Wiley Purkey submitted this great selection. The period in American Art around the 1920s is fascinating to me. Artists reacted in different ways to the mechanization of Industry. Disenchanted by the industrialization of America, the likes of Edward Hopper captured the sense of urban isolation felt by so many. An intensely private man, and a lifelong celibate, he painted this America from the inside. The Regionalists, on the other hand, represented an artistic belief that rural America and back-to-basics labor off the land could replace urbanization and the factory-line. Illustrators Howard Pyle, and his student N.C. Wyeth, espoused a similar (called Brandywine) Romanticism of New England. Burchfield portrayed similarly heightened visions of the American landscape, turning his back on the urban world of his old friend Hopper. Andrew Wyeth was called a 'Regionalist' by his detractors, but he painted a "Pennsylvania [that] seems to groom itself with a cold gray tongue" [source]. This was not quite the Romantic regionalism of his contemporaries. Wyeth's was darker, more private. A rural version of Hopper's urbanity. Impressionists in Winter is, in my opinion, the best of Impressionist art. When the artist's palette is reduced to almost nothing, there's a reliance on composition and value that is almost Japanese at times. Not surprising then to see a copy of Whistler's beautiful Etchings here too.

Book Links: 

The Regionalists, by Nancy Heller

Charles Burchfield

Impressionists in Winter

Andrew Wyeth

James Montgomery Flagg
Maxfield Parrish

Theresa Cheek, of Art's The Answer!

Art's The Answer! is the fantastic blog written by Theresa Cheek, who clearly has a passion for the decorative arts, and for sharing all she comes across. Konemann does a great job of bringing out large format, lavishly photographed, and reasonably priced books on architecture and ornamentation. This is just a tiny selection of Theresa's vast collection on a huge variety of subjects. Be sure to check out her blog. And just peeking in on the far right is a book that's very popular with my West Coast friends, called Ca'toga. It's about the Dali-meets-Baroque-meets-Antiquity estate of Venetian artist Carlo Machiori. I've yet to come across a book dedicated solely to the painted surfaces of Versailles, but I'm sure it's out there. Until then, I love to browse through books such as Splendors of Versailles, for snippets of Oudry's landscapes and Fontenay's flowers and vases. Incredible stuff.

The St. Laurent book is a rare glimpse into the decor stylings of one of the 20th Century's very best designers. Jacques Grange features heavily in the selections, and though the lavishness of the homes becomes makes me feel a bit claustrophobic after a while [I want to run off and live in Wyeth's cabin by the end of the book], it's well worth the investment.

Koneman titles

Ca'toga
The Private World of Yves St. Laurent & Pierre Bergé
Splendors of Versailles

Karen

The 1920s once again putting on a strong show, this time from a European design perspective. Karen of Chicago's Des Travaux sent us this great shot, showing some of the stalwart classics we all know and love, along with some real treasures. Jansen Furniture is a great book about the powerhouse Paris-based design company, who's ebony and ivory geometrical inlay doors are a real treat. I narrowly missed the opportunity to create replicas of those doors once. Jean Dunand is also a master interior designer, and perhaps the greatest lacquer artist of the Art Deco period. I've downloaded any image of his incredible standing screens that I can get my hands on. Paul Poiret is the creator of the most beautiful dresses ever made. Click the link and you'll see what I mean. It's tragic that he was ruined completely by WWI and made bankrupt. As someone who'd backed myself into a rarified corner of decorative painting, I'm all too aware that tough times reveal the precariousness of this business. Elkins, on the other hand, thrived, and by the end of her illustrious career had created a huge number of interiors for the West Coast glitterati. And what I wouldn't give for that copy of Antonio Basoli's stunning designs.

Jansen Furniture

Jean Dunand

Poiret (Rizzoli)

Frances Elkins

Antonio Basoli

Early American Decoration

Chinoiserie (Phaidon)

Art Instruction books that I see on a lot of shelves (including my own):

The Art of Faux (P. Finkelstein)

Handbook of Painted Decoration (Y. Guegan)

Okay, gotta go. Keep sending them in! I'll upload more shots when I have a chance.

Xavier Mader, Piat Sauvage, and Reflected Light

CGI studios have a standard trick used for establishing the reflected light on digitally created images for movies. A large mirrored or matte ball on a stick is placed prominently in the shot. They use this because the ground and sky are not always visible in the finished shot, but CGI artists need to know the color of each so that they can correctly judge the reflected light cast on the digitally created element in the shot.

RGB readings (above) from a matte-finished grey reference globe positioned in the set give accurate colors and lighting positions for CGI artists to base their digital 3D paintings upon. You can see from the six RGB numbers taken from this photo that there is a lot of information to consider regarding light, either reflected or direct.

Still frame of test ball flying through cavern in Lord of the Rings

In the still from WETA Workshop (above) “the ball is lit by a blue light from above, and a weaker orange light from below. During the test video, the lighting changed throughout the course of the fly-through. If you wanted to animate a digital creature flying into those caverns, the forms of the creature would have to respond to the same lights that are lighting the gray ball. Digital lighters can unwrap the data from the gray ball or the mirror ball into a spherical environment map.” [Source]

The good news as far as illusionistically painted architecture is that we don’t concern ourselves with this level of detail. It’s good to understand the reality, but it would take way too long to paint. For the most part, reflected light is rendered in one tone only. In fact, simply leaving the mid-toned background showing along a crescent strip – and not adding any extra painted step - often suffices for the representation of reflected light on architectural ornamentation. Decorative painting is all about developing shorthand, and any step that can be cut out means less time spent (and more money in your pocket).

The standard rule for reflected light is that the lightest dark in the shadows should never be lighter than the darkest light in the lights. It sounds confusing at first, but it makes sense if you think about it. There is a tendency to overdo reflected light. Sometimes the reflected light looks too bright, and the successful modeling of form is compromised. Generally speaking, keep any reflected light relatively dark.

An Allegory, by Piat Sauvage

Piat Sauvage was a master at painting grisaille bas-relief imités, but his use of exaggerated reflected light on the right side of the naked woman in “An Allegory” (above) illustrates my point. The overly emphasized light bouncing back onto the legs and torso [from what source exactly?] ruins the illusion of three-dimensionality, and gives the game away that it is paint, not plaster, that we are looking at.

Section of woodblock printed wallpaper, by Xavier Mader

The section of molding in the wallpaper by Xavier Mader (above) demonstrates my point about reflected light as it is normally rendered in decorative painting. You can see that the area of reflected light is created by simply shifting the darkest shadow away from the lower edge of the ornament, leaving an area of dark mid-tone showing.

Amazing Bird Photos from Taiwan

Audubon and Edward Lear just don't quite cut it when you're researching birds for that Chinoiserie mural you've been asked to paint. Yeah, those guys could paint, but they're just not exotic enough. Here are hundreds of amazing photographs of native Taiwanese birds that are perfect reference material for that De Gournay hand-painted wallpaper you're working on, or just for some trippy blown-out Photoshop fun.

Les Monuments De Paris, Joseph Dufour

Panoramic murals are about as Romantic an idealized vision of nature as you can get. The section above is from a huge room wrap that I painted on canvas for a client in Europe. Except for the glaring errors in perspective (two horizon lines? seriously?), I was really happy with the result, and jumped at the opportunity to produce a new mural based on the classic woodblock printed 'papier peint' Les Monuments De Paris, by Dufour et Cie (1814).

The goal of these wonderful panels was "to stir emotions through the amazement and bewilderment at the "magical" effect of the spectacle of nature, experienced as a maze in which one gets delightfully lost" [Odile Nouvel-Kammerer].

Les Monuments De Paris, detail

Les Monuments was a perfect example of an idealized vision of bucolic nature and artificiality. The buildings of Paris are unrealistically aligned beside each other, next to a perfectly horizontal river (the Seine, without a single bridge?!). You can easily picture the encircling effect created by the installed panels. You the viewer are sitting on an island refuge peopled by relaxing images of a Romanticized rural life, separated from the city in the background by a calmly flowing river.

It's no wonder works like these from the manufactories of Dufour, Zuber and Desfossé were instantly popular. That's to say nothing of the extraordinary workmanship that went into their making.

The process of production is fascinating, each panel employing hundreds of individually carved wooden blocks that were inked and printed with separate colors. It's hard to conceive of the amount of time it must have taken to produce a full set of these intricately carved blocks for all the panels. Historian Kathryn Kane tells us that

"In many cases, the same wood blocks which had been carved at the beginning of the century were still used for the papers produced at mid-century. In light of the huge investment in carving all those blocks, this made much economic sense. However, the French paper-stainers were aware of changing fashions and reflected those changes in their scenic papers. For example, The Monuments of Paris set was re-issued several times, and each time any significant new buildings in Paris were added and any which had been demolished were removed. "

The catalog raisonné in French Scenic Wallpaper 1795-1865 shows one set of panels for Les Monuments, but the set I have included here has marked differences, and not just in the architecture. Figures on horseback, ladies strolling by the riverbank; a lot has changed. It was apparently common to make such detailed adjustments. "The small figures of the people strolling about the city were given new costumes in keeping with current fashions."

Les Monuments De Paris, 26 of the 30 original panels

They were masterfully colored, but interestingly for the artist, employed very few pigments. A spectroscopic analysis of the pigments used in the production determined that;

"All the colour shades observed in [Les Monuments De Paris] were manufactured with the pigments red, iron oxide yellow, iron oxide Prussian blue, Scheele's green, raw sienna, burnt sienna, lead white, carbon black, vermilion (HgS), minium (Pb₃O₄), CaCO₃"

Once completed, the panels had to be shipped. There was no Fedex in 1814. "Each set of papers intended for shipment abroad was very meticulously packaged. Once each roll was completed, it was carefully wrapped, first in paper and then in tin foil. All the rolls of the set were then placed in a water-tight container, usually a barrel, ready to be loaded aboard the ship which would carry them to the United States."

Or wherever they were to be hung. I can imagine the horse-drawn carriage full of barrels of wallpaper crossing the Pyrenees and pulling up at some castle in the Basque country.

Les Monuments De Paris, detail

According to Carolle Thibaut-Pomerantz (a veteran dealer in decorative papier peints), wood-block panels such as these are "an extraordinary feat in printmaking". Well we knew that, but how much do they sell for these days? That's what we really want to know.

At last year's Palm Beach fair, Thibaut-Pomerantz sold a large panel from manufacturer Joseph Dufour's scenic "Monuments of Paris" (1812) for $65,000. In general, she notes, a fragment will go for $3,000 to $5,000, a good-size panel, $12,000 to $50,000; an exceptional, complete scenic can command as much as $200,000. Even at that price, she points out, they are "very affordable in relation to other works of art."

Les Monuments De Paris, detail

Of course, they weren't always so pricey. In fact, they were developed through the first half of the Nineteenth Century as "an affordable alternative to tapestries or to the hand-painted fresco". Indeed, the Victoria and Albert Museum lists an original price of 50 Francs for the paper.

My version is still in the planning and estimation stages, but I really hope this goes through. It's going to be a lot of fun to paint this!

The last word goes to Ms. Kane: "What could be more soothing to the soul than a room in one’s home in which one could contemplate an idealized and perfect landscape?"

Modular Ornament, past and future...

 This gorgeous ceiling was created with en feuille printed papers, made by an unknown Parisian manufacturer around 1780. Une feuille de papier literally means a sheet, or piece of paper, and in this context means that the entire design was created by cutting the design from individual sheets of block-printed paper.

The dark and light grounds, the borders of flowers and fruits, the medallions and even the figure of Diana in her chariot were all cut out separately and pasted on the ceiling to create this wonderful image.

This method of creating custom, one-off installations was the best way at the time for clients and designers to bridge the gap between the bespoke mural and the printed image.

Print Rooms, as they became known, were a highly individual way of decorating walls in the eighteenth century. It seems to have been a trend limited in large part to Ireland and England. The charming and whimsical room at Castletown House in Ireland, above, is the work of the lady of the house; fifteen year old bride, Lady Louisa Connolly. That she took great pleasure in her design is evident in the balanced design of octagons, ovals, circles and squares, all embellished with garlands and bows for a fanciful effect.

These days, photocopies and clip art are substituted for the original mezzotints of old. 

But why stop at cutting up scraps of paper?

Along with my business partner Mark, we saw that there was room for much improvement and advancement of the technique. I firmly believe that the artisans of a few centuries ago would have absolutely loved the digital revolution. The means they used were simply a reflection of the limit of the technology they had available at the time, nothing more.

So we developed the idea of modular designs created entirely on computer, then printed out in large sheets as custom installations. Why bother painting 60 rosettes on a frieze around a room when you can paint a single one, scan it into the computer, then print out rolls and rolls of the stuff? I mean; they're all supposed to be identical anyway, right? 

I started developing my own library of hand-painted shapes. These were little individual sections of ornament, painted in black and white, that I then scanned into the computer and colored and jigsawed together at will on my screen. Anyone interested in those early experiments can check out this blog post on the topic.

Instead of the traditional 'cut-and-paste' technique of the Print Rooms, where the jigsawing of images was done by hand and on-site, we did all the jigsawing of our artwork directly on the computer screen. When we liked what we saw, we simply printed it out on rolls up to five feet wide, and pasted it onto the wall.

The experiment was working! 

We decided to take it all a step further; to create artwork entirely on the computer, without any other tool whatsoever. Scanning hundreds of sheets of veneer, we quickly amassed an incredible library of wood textures. Then, using computer software we drew out our designs in the same way any artisan would lay out a design for marquetry: in simple back-and-white line drawings. These drawings were then 'colored' on the computer using our wood texture library, and custom printed onto sheets of Class A fire-retardant wallcovering. 

In the image above, you can see the 'before and after' of the room.

When we got there, every surface was primed white. We started by hand-painting all the raised moldings in traditional faux-bois. This was because our printed sheets of paper would only adhere to flat surfaces. Then we simply pasted our custom printed papers into the panels, and along the stiles and rails to create this stunning look.

This image shows the incredible authenticity of the effect. This is not a photograph: It is a computer rendered design, imitating wood inlay. The wood textures, colors, even the blemishes and worm-holes, are all added in layers to create the effect of marquetry. This piece is then printed out onto any substrate (including plain maple veneer) and applied to your project. Make sense?

We feel as though we are just at the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more we can be doing to push Decorative Arts into the new century. I really hope this might serve as some small inspiration to those artists out there looking for new ways to rejuvenate a (let's face it) pretty antiquated field. 

It's natural, when new technology comes along, to use it to simply re-create the style that came before. But what would happen if we were not limited by staid historic mimicry? What would it even look like if we took this new technology, this digital evolution, and cranked up the ambition to 11? 

Islamic pattern designs

Here's something that I never tire of staring at: Islamic pattern designs from the book Moorish Remains in Spain, by the peripatetic pith-helmet clad Albert F. Calvert. I intend to do an in-depth analysis of the generation of tessellations as seen in the Arts of Arabia and Mohammedan architecture, but only when I can wrap my head around how on earth they did that stuff. I can't help feeling as though there is a key to some small understanding of the Universe hidden away in these images, but it's one that will never be mine. At least, it takes a great deal of study to unravel the geometries involved. I hope this post will help those like me who are avid admirers and amateur students.

Sir Robert Penrose, the English mathematical physicist, armed with only a pencil and notebook, developed a set of 'quasi-periodic' patterns after many years of research. Amazingly, his set consisted of only two shapes (!) that he named "kites" and "darts". The pattern laid down by these shapes is difficult to envision, but as it expands, the proportion of kites to darts approaches the golden ratio, or Phi. These patterns have parallels in the crystalline forms of chemistry, and real-world applications as (for example) non-stick coatings for frying pans.

That Penrose's work has a precedent in Islamic pattern is not a surprise. That his work is pre-dated by over 500 years, is. Physicist Peter J. Lu visited Uzbekistan and found the same pattens in the Bhukara Madrasa. Thank you Sebastian R. Prange for this incredible and fascinating article, quoted in part below:

"The tilework on the Bukhara madrasa is an example of the stylized geometric strap-work—typically based on star or polygon shapes—that is emblematic of traditional Islamic ornamentation. This form of design is known as girih patterns, from the Persian word for “knot.” It is generally believed that such designs were constructed by drafting zigzag outlines with only a straightedge and a compass. But Lu perceived something more: “I saw five-fold and ten-fold stars, which immediately aroused my curiosity about how these tilings had been made.” He wondered how Islamic craftsmen had been able to design such elaborately symmetrical patterns centuries before the advent of modern mathematics."

All images this article are reproduced from the book Moorish Remains in Spain. The New York Times article, announcing the publication of the book in 1905, quoted the author, saying:

"Neither by camera, nor by brush, nor by the pen can one reflect with any fidelity the effects obtained by the Moorish masters of the Middle Ages. In their art is to be found a sense of the mysterious that appeals to one like the glint of moonlight on running water; an intangible spirit of joyousness that one catches from the dancing shadows of leaves upon a sun-swept lawn; and an elusive key to its beauty which is lost in the bewildering maze of traceries, and the inextricable network of design. The form, if not the fantasy, of these fairy-like, fascinating decorations may, however, be reproduced, and this I have endeavored to do."

I've posted an enormous set of illustrations from the volume on my Flickr page, for those interested. There is also a post regarding the book Arabian Antiquities of Spain on this blog, also with many images, that you may wish to take a look at.In the meantime, here are a couple of the (roughly 260) images I posted on Flickr for you.

Children's Illustration Artist Profile: Inga Moore

 'It was so very beautiful that the Mole could only hold up both paws and gasp, "O my! O my! O my!"'

That Inga Moore is an exceptional illustrator is no surprise. What surprised me when I received The Wind in the Willows was how consistently exceptional she is. I cannot begin to imagine the amount of time it took to conceive and create the wonderful illustrations. Clearly a labor of love, they are the most beautiful depictions I have ever seen of the English countryside, and that includes the classic EH Shepard illustrations of the same book.

How perfect are these for a full wall mural?!

Interviewed by The Guardian, Inga spoke of how she came to illustrate this classic:

Was it really a "long-harboured ambition", as it says on the dust jacket? "Not exactly," she says, almost guiltily. "I'd been in the pub with an old boyfriend and he'd suggested it, quite out of the blue. I was rather shocked. I might have thought about it, but only as an impossible dream. Shepard's are the definitive illustrations."

I'm always fascinated by an artist's working methods, and have had the opportunity to attempt to replicate some of my favorites through my work. In the same interview, she speaks of her process.

For each spread she photocopies her original drawings, then works on them with a mixture of pencil, ink, watercolour, crayon, pastel, even oil paint – "anything that works". With intricate textural variations and masses of engrossing detail, she achieves a realism that is unusual today, and those warm, underground kitchens have never been more invitingly portrayed. Landscape painting holds a particular fascination for Moore, and she has reproductions of impressionist paintings pinned up all over the place. "I'm hoping some of the genius will rub off on me."

Someday, I would love the opportunity to paint a mural in the manner of one of Ms. Moore's illustrations. Until then, I have to agree with Mole; O my!

Ms. Moore recently completed artwork for another Children's classic, The Secret Garden, which just as beautifully conceived and executed as her work for Wind In The Willows.

Here are a couple of unpublished illustrations I painted for a prospective book about an island out to sea that turns out to be a sleeping giant. In the meantime I pin some of her illustrations on my wall and to quote her, "hope that some of the genius will rub off on me".