Fashion Designer
Zandra Rhodes is a British but internationally known fashion
designer who was born in Kent, instantly recognisable with her bright pink
hair. Her designs are theatrical and
extrovert. In fact, her first designs were so outrageous for British
manufacturers, she pioneered the use of her own printed textiles. Her original
printed textiles form the basis of her work. Her Textile Design Bible includes
all her designs for printing. I particularly like her references to nature, her
travels and mark making designs. What I found interesting is that she uses
these print designs several times and often comes back to them in different
collections. She keeps all her printing screens and it would be fairly easy to
keep a record of marks and designs I have used for mono printing. I am particularly enjoying the printing components of the course and like the idea of building my own 'bible' of marks.
She incorporates embroidery and beading, and pays particular
attention to hems, including hand rolled for chiffons and baby overlocked for
jersey. The attention to detail makes her designs stand out amongst others. The finish of her pieces makes them especially beautiful.
She is not only known for her fashion and printed textiles,
but also for her accessories, including shoes, jewellery and handbags. Zandra
has been commissioned to design costumes and sets for operas and spent much
time setting up the Fashion & Textile Museum in London.
Fortunately as Zandra believes strongly in digitising her
work it is available to browse and study online and it is very easy to lose
yourself in her work - http://vads.ac.uk/collections/ZR.php
There are some very interesting tutorials with Zandra
available online for free - http://www.zandrarhodes.ucreative.ac.uk/p/tutorials.html It's fairly unusual for an artist/designer to be so willing to share all of their work in this way.
Deirdre Hawken (1945 – Present)
Hat Maker
Deirdre Hawken was born in Reading and is an internationally
recognised designer and maker of headpieces. She trained in theatre design at
Central/St Martins and is also described as a mixed media artist often inspired
by food related subjects.
Her art hats are instantly recognisable and I always think
they look as though they have just been picked from the garden, and are always
fresh and bright. The berries on patisserie head piece look as though you could
pick them off and eat them. The thing
that strikes me most about Deirdre’s work is the attention to detail, similar to
the work of Zandra Rhodes. Also, the pieces are very humorous but remain
beautiful pieces of work. She often
works with dyed silk organza and taffeta, and mainly uses hand stitch and
traditional millinery techniques. I like
the way in which she crumples organza to achieve leaf effects and the lovely
tonal changes achieved with hand dying.
Deirdre also works with fashion head pieces and I
particularly like the work that incorporates feathers. These still have a very
natural and organic feel to them, although on close observation I feel that
each feather is carefully planned and placed.
The other interesting thing I found out was that Deirdre won
a QEST (Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust) scholarship in 1999 when she was 54
years old, showing that age is not a barrier to art!
Sonia Delaunay (1885 – 1979)
Artist
I visited the Sonia Delaunay Exhibition at Tate Modern last
year and found it exciting to see an artists’ work from their very early pieces
through to some of the last work produced. She is described as a ‘key member of
the Parisian avant-garde’ and the ‘European doyenne of abstract art’. Her work
spanned many areas and similar to Zandra Rhodes she worked with textiles, accessories
and set designs; and poets and magazines. I particularly attended the
exhibition to view her textile work but found that I became far more involved
in looking at her other art work.
Most of her work involved strong geometric shapes and
colour, including circles, rings and spirals. One of my favourite pieces was Le
Bal Bullier (1913) an abstract painting of dancers which gives the impression
of the dancers twirling around – spiralling – you can almost feel the movement
and hear the music.
Of her textiles I mostly liked the printed spiral fabrics
and found her use of colour inspiring, one pattern but many variations. As
Sonia’s sketchbooks and other colour studies were on show it was easy to see
how her thoughts and processes of design were worked out. The following images are a design for Metz & Co (1934) for silk, some of which was used to make shawls.
There were several accessories available to view and I was
drawn to the beautifully embroidered shoes; court shoes made in c.1926. They
had a strong geometric ‘1920s’ design and the colours were still surprisingly
deep in tone.
Unusually Sonia swopped between using textiles to inspire
paintings and paintings to inspire textile design:
"About 1911
I had the idea of making for my son, who had just been born, a blanket composed
of bits of fabric like those I had seen in the houses of Ukrainian peasants.
When it was finished, the arrangement of the pieces of material seemed to me to
evoke cubist conceptions and we then tried to apply the same process to other
objects and paintings."
Sonia Delaunay
Sonia Delaunay was an unusual artist in that not only was she accepted as a female artist of some repute for her era but she was also accepted as both an abstract painter and a textile artist at that time.
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