Fred Williams film

Fred Williams Overview from National Gallery of Australia on Vimeo.


Love this film about Australian artist Fred Williams from the NGA.

Rue anniversary issue

 Have a great weekend!

all images from rue

Sanderson

The new Sanderson range called Bloomsbury Canvas, Dalloway & Orlando Collections, is something different, fresh and reminiscent of the 1930s and the Bloomsbury era. The prints are a mix of brights and pastels, my favorite being the sofa fabric on the front cover of the collection's catalogue (above), which you can view online here. Love the styling, and characteristics of the era!

Grace Cossington Smith

Grace Cossintgon Smith is very well known in Australia, but I don't know how much of her is known overseas. I grew up with images of her paintings in my school art text books and cut outs of her paintings in my art diary, not to mention seeing her work regularly on display in the collection at the Art Gallery of NSW (Sydney) and the National Gallery of Australia (Canberra). She didn't begin painting until quite late in her life, and is now considered a pioneer of Post Impressionism in Australia.

"In the late 1940s Grace Cossington Smith regularly painted interiors. Among them were works focusing on the presence of objects – particularly chairs – that appear almost like portraits. As in her subsequent works the artist conveys the meeting of interior and exterior spaces, reflecting light and the natural world through windows and doorways.

By the mid-1950s she began to concentrate primarily on depicting the rooms of her home, Cossington. This was partly due to the fact that the artist’s much-loved sister Diddy had become ill and she wanted to spend more time with her. In the later works Cossington Smith came to fully realise her aim to express colour vibrant with light. As she said, ‘My chief interest I think has always been colour, but not crude flat colour. It must be colour within colour, it has to shine; light must be in it’. (Interview with Hazel de Berg, 1965, National Library of Australia)

In these late paintings Cossington Smith’s ability as a colourist came to the fore in unison with a sure sense of structure, reaffirming her long-held interest in architecture, domestic spaces and illuminated doorways in her early sketchbooks. Luminosity was expressed in her late interiors and still-life paintings in confident, square touches of pure colour. Decades after moving to the family home as a young artist, she was creating works that reveal the confidence of a mature painter at the height of her powers." ~ Grace Cossington Smith, A Retrospective Exhibition, National Gallery of Australia

 Still Life with Jugs

 Drapery - Chair and Window

 Interior

 Figure through Flowers

 Interior with Wardrobe mirror

Landscape at Pentecost

 Interior

 Interior

The Lacquer Room

all images from National Gallery of Australia

Tent London 2011

I know this is a bit late (it was held in late September) , but I wanted to share some of my favourites from Tent London 2011. Five designers stood out for me, even though I found almost all of them interesting in some way or other.

First up: Curiousa & Curiousa for their beautiful hand-blown glass lightshades, especially the clusters of pendants, and the stemmed round shades.

Famille Summerbelle create beautiful paper cut style designs for wallpaper, maps, teatowels and other decorative items.

I loved the hand drawn designs on ceramic plates by Patrick Laing, illustrating the entire process of making ceramics, from digging the clay, processing it, firing, creating the transfer print design, to the final stage of selling in the shops. They are absolutely beautiful.

I was impressed with Mini Moderns, very retro looking designs produced by London design agency Absolutely Zero Degrees.

Last but not least I absolutely love the work of Abigail Borg, a British illustrator and surface pattern designer.