A special mix of pigments gives silver paint its metallic shine. Find out more about this eye-catching colour, first used back in the 1400s.
The Bauhaus school in Dessau, Germany, ran from 1919-1933, during which time the students, known as Bauhauslers, held festivals or parties several times a year. Each party would have its own theme, such as Kite, Lantern or Beard, Nose, Hearts, with extensive planning including invitations, decorations and costumes. The most famous of all the festivals was the Metallic Festival or Metallische Fest held on February 9, 1929. At the Metal Party, Bauhauslers were invited to dress as bottle openers, egg whisks or bells, making costumes using anything they could find that was silver in colour, including tin foil, frying pans and spoons. There was a chute guests could slide down to enter a room filled with silver balls and the windows of the building were covered in tin foil, making the 1929 event resemble a scene from a science fiction film.
The “golden age of science fiction” of 1938 to 1946 should perhaps have been called the silver age of science fiction, because the colour silver would dominate the genre for years to come. Silver became a short-hand for futurism and the space age – for example in the silver metallic space suits of the first space crew, the Mercury 7.
Designers love scenic wallpaper for its ability to transform a room. Unlike regular wallpaper, which often has a repeating pattern, scenic wallpaper fills an entire wall with a single, mural-like image. Usually depicting an outdoor tableau, the wallpaper brings nature inside and lends old-world appeal to a space. Just flip through any recent design magazine and you’ll probably see a well-appointed room with walls covered in large-scale images of flowering vines or swaying trees.
Woodchip & Magnolia’s Zephyr wallpaper mural (about $255 for up to about 108 square feet). (Woodchip & Magnolia)
“People embrace things that feel handmade and have a link to the past,” says Susan Harter, who makes hand-painted scenic wallpaper in her Port Townsend, Wash., studio. “At a time when we’re being bombarded with technology, it’s nice to be in a haven of one’s own making. It’s like entering a peaceful mini-Eden.”
Until recently, if you wanted the look, you had to splurge on custom wallcoverings from luxury brands such as Zuber et Cie, Gracie Studio, de Gournay and Fromental. Those handmade paper or silk panels can cost thousands of dollars, and that’s without installation.
For a home in McLean, Va., Shazalynn Cavin-Winfrey covered the dining room walls with a mural from Gracie Studio. (John Bessler)
But scenic wallpaper has become far more accessible. Thanks to digital-printing technology that allows retailers to duplicate the look inexpensively, you no longer have to blow your entire decorating budget on a few pricey panels of chinoiserie.
High-definition printers aren’t exactly new to the luxury wallpaper business; the London-based brand Iksel has been producing high-end digital collections based on hand-painted works since 2004. And Harter’s company, Susan Harter Muralpapers, has been using the technology for several years to turn her hand-painted murals into custom canvas wallcoverings.
William Morris was born on March 24, 1834, (1834–1896) in Walthamstow, England. He was the third child of William Morris Sr. and Emma Shelton Morris. He enjoyed an idyllic childhood in the countryside, playing with his siblings, reading books, writing, and showing an early interest in nature and storytelling. His love of the natural world would have a growing influence on his later work.
At an early age he was attracted to all the trappings of the medieval period. At 4 he began reading Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels, which he finished by the time he was 9. His father gave him a pony and a miniature suit of armor and, dressed as a tiny knight, he went off on long quests into the nearby forest.
Later Morris attended Marlborough and Exeter colleges, where he met painter Edward Burne-Jones and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, forming a group known as the Brotherhood, or the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. They shared a love of poetry, the Middle Ages, and Gothic architecture, and they read the works of philosopher John Ruskin. They also developed an interest in the Gothic Revival architectural style. Their Group was inspired by Ruskin’s writings.
The Industrial Revolution that began in Britain had turned the country into something unrecognizable to the young men. Ruskin wrote about society’s ills in books such as “The Seven Lamps of Architecture” and “The Stones of Venice.” The group discussed Ruskin’s themes about the impacts of industrialization: how machines dehumanize, how industrialization ruins the environment, and how mass production creates shoddy, unnatural objects.
The group believed that the artistry and honesty in handcrafted materials were missing in British machine-made goods. They longed for an earlier time.
Visits to the continent spent touring cathedrals and museums solidified Morris’ love of medieval art. Rossetti persuaded him to give up architecture for painting, and they joined a band of friends decorating the walls of the Oxford Union with scenes from the Arthurian legend based on “Le Morte d’Arthur” by 15th century English writer Sir Thomas Malory. Morris also wrote much poetry during this time.
After receiving his degree in 1856, Morris took a job in the Oxford office of G.E. Street, a Gothic Revivalist architect. That year he financed the first 12 monthly issues of The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, where a number of his poems were printed. Two years later, many of these poems were reprinted in his first published work “The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems.”
Also known as a writer and poet, translator, social activist, printer and dyer, Morris originally trained as an architect and had early ambitions to become a painter.Morris commissioned Philip Webb, an architect he had met in Street’s office, to build a home for him and his wife. The building’s design was a co-operative effort, with Morris focusing on the interiors and the exterior being designed by Webb, for whom the House represented his first commission as an independent architect. Named after the red bricks and red tiles from which it was constructed, Red House rejected architectural norms by being L-shaped. Influenced by various forms of contemporary Neo-Gothic architecture, the House was nevertheless unique, with Morris describing it as “very mediaeval in spirit”. Situated within an orchard, the house and garden were intricately linked in their design. It took a year to construct.
In fact William Morris often said that when looking into his wallpaper designs they should appear to be 3 inches deep. This illusion of depth was created by his clever use of floral and fauna. He would layer these images to make it seem as if there was space beyond. So by using William Morris wallpaper you may even make a room feel a bit bigger .
The house, a grand yet simple structure, exemplified the Arts and Crafts philosophy inside and out, with craftsman-like workmanship and traditional, unornamented design. Then, together with some of his Pre-Raphaelite friends he furnished and decorated the new abode. It was such an enjoyable experience that they decided to set up their own company in London supplying a range of domestic furnishings — embroidery, tableware, furniture, stained glass and tiles (initially called Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co — later simply Morris & Co). It was also because of his inability to find wallpapers that he liked enough for his own home that Morris turned his hand to designing his own, and these were added to the company catalogue.
In the first of two exclusive video interviews with Christo, the artist explains how the giant London Mastaba installation on the Serpentine lake is the culmination of over 60 years of working with stacked barrels.
The temporary London project, which is 20 metres high and consists of 7,506 barrels, was unveiled last month. But the artwork has its genesis in experiments made by Christo, 83, and his late partner Jeanne-Claude in the fifties and sixties.
“I was born in Bulgaria and I escaped from the communist country to the west on 10 January 1957,” Christo explains in the movie, which Dezeen filmed in London. “I met Jeanne-Claude in November 1958 and we together fell in love.”
“We lived in Paris in between 58 and 64,” he continues. “I was so poor, I had no studio and I was living in one room. I started working with little cans, tin cans of industrial paint. From the cans of the smaller size, I moved to the smaller sized barrels. I rented a garage outside of Paris when I started working with real barrels.”
In 1962 he blocked a Paris street with stacked barrels in a reference to the Berlin Wall that was erected the previous year.
“I was worried the third world war would start,” Christo says. “The Soviets took over Budapest during the revolution [in 1956] but I escaped and there was a big turmoil. I remember I was very scared that they would run over West Germany and come back to Paris and I proposed to do my artistic Iron Curtain in the smallest street, in the Rue Visconti, of the left bank of Paris.”
Imperial graduate Nicole Stjernsward has invented Kaiku, a system that turns plants into powdered paint pigments using vaporisation technology.
Avocados, pomegranates, beetroots, lemons and onions are just some of the fruits and vegetables that can be placed into Kaiku and turned into the raw material for paints, inks and dyes.
Skins and peels are boiled in water to produce a dye, which is transferred to a reservoir in the Kaiku system. Along with hot, pressurised air, this dye is forced through an atomising nozzle into a glass vacuum cleaner.
The fine mist produced is hot enough that it vaporises almost instantly, and the dry particles are pulled through the chamber and into the collection reservoir.
Stjernsward designed Kaiku to offer a natural alternative to using artificial pigments that can often be toxic.
“By transitioning to natural based pigments, it will be easier for us to recycle products and make them more circular,” Stjernsward, who studied at Imperial College London, told Dezeen.
“Since many synthetic pigments today are toxic or made of ambiguous materials, colour is typically considered a ‘contamination’ in the Circular Economy principles,” she added. “I hope to change this paradigm.”
These methods have fallen out of fashion with industrialisation and the introduction of cheaper pigments derived from petrochemicals. But the effect on people and the environment can be disastrous.
Paints can release petrochemicals into the air long after they have dried, causing respiratory problems and harming the ozone layer. Industrial effluent containing synthetic dyes leaches into the water system, poisoning aquatic life and posing a major health hazard to humans.
The late Zaha Hadid has been recognized as perhaps one of the greatest female architects of our time, if not one of the greatest architects of our time in general. The Iraqi architect’s work broke down barriers within the architectural design as she consistently created fluid, and fragmentary geometric designs. While Hadid, who passed away on March 31st, 2016, was known best for her innovative building designs, the world renowned architect also created a number of stunning pieces of furniture and even dabbled with 3D printing technologies.
In 2009, Tokyo’s Waseda University built a fedora-sporting flautist robot powered by cranked air. But this is only the most recent attempt at a mechanical, flute-playing musician. In the 9th century, the Banū Mūsā brothers in Baghdad wrote a treatise describing their “instrument which plays by itself.
Cover of ‘Allah’s Automata’ (image courtesy Hatje Cantz) (click to enlarge)
Their innovative machine is described in Allah’s Automata: Artifacts of the Arabic-Islamic Renaissance (800-1200),recently published by Hatje Cantz. The book accompanies an exhibition of the same name, currently on view at the ZKM (Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe) in Germany, that includes a reconstruction of their instrument. While automata had their golden age in Europe from the 16th to 19th centuries — which saw the creation of such devices as the clock of Diana in her chariot that rolled across a table and shot an arrow — in the Islamic world their peak was from the 9th to 13th centuries. The most famous, also reconstructed for Allah’s Automata, is the 12th-century elephant water clock. The shapes of its various hydraulic elements could be interpreted as symbols of the international trade that facilitated its creation by Ismail al-Jazari, including an Indian elephant, Chinese dragons, and an Egyptian phoenix riding above a Muslim scholar who writes the time.
TOKYO.- An exhibition devoted to designer Issey Miyake is on view until June 13, 2016 at the National Art Center, Tokyo. The Center has considered design to be an important exhibition theme since it opened in 2007 and is devoted to presenting a wide range of artistic expressions and proposing new perspectives. This exhibition, Miyake Issey Exhibition: The Work of Miyake Issey, promises to be an unprecedented event, focusing on the entirety of Miyake’s 45-year career, from 1970 to the present.
Miyake has consistently presented new methodologies and possibilities for making clothes, while always focusing on the future. It all began in 1960 when Miyake, a student at Tama Art University, sent a letter to the World Design Conference, which was being held for the first time in Japan that year. The letter took issue with the fact that clothing design was not included in the event. At that point, Miyake’s notion that clothing is not merely “fashion” ― i.e., something that changes with the times ― but a form of design that is closely connected to our lives on a much more universal level was already apparent. Miyake has always explored the relationship between a piece of cloth and the body, and the space that is created as a result, unrestricted by any existing framework. In addition, along with his team of designers, he persistently undertakes research and development to create clothing that combines both innovation and comfort.
This exhibition sheds light on Miyake’s ideas about making things and his approach to design by examining his entire career, from his earliest work to his latest projects, and his explorations of greater creative possibilities in the future. This exhibition provides viewers with an opportunity to expand the boundaries of their thought and stimulate their creativity, allowing everyone, young and old alike, to experience the joy of creation.
Dubai, UAE; April 28, 2015: The Dubai Culture & Arts Authority (Dubai Culture), in collaboration with RTA, is redefining the UAE’s artistic landscape by working with local and international artists to wrap the Dubai Metro carriages with works of art.
The spectacular artworks of prominent artists, Abdulqader Al Rais, Rachid Koraichi and Safwan Dahoul have now debuted as Dubai Metro carriage wraps, following the unveiling of the first Dubai Metro carriage wrapped with a spellbinding photograph by HH Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai and Chairman of the Dubai Executive Council.
These methods have fallen out of fashion with industrialisation and the introduction of cheaper pigments derived from petrochemicals. But the effect on people and the environment can be disastrous.
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