Inspiration
Colour and its interactions are a never-ending challenge and curiosity for me. I have absorbed much from holidays to countries where the architecture, landscape, tiles, and fabrics exude colour, richness and mystery. Travelling in India, Spain and Syria and visiting some of the great mosques in Delhi, Cordoba, Damascus and Istanbul, inspired my interest in Islamic Art and its concept that art does not add something alien to the objects that it shapes, it merely brings out their essential qualities. There are also the sublime monuments to symmetry in the Alhambra in Granada, Spain, and the Taj Mahal. Islamic art seeks to portray the essence and meaning of things, rather than just their physical form. It appears to mean inward beauty, beauty of the soul or of the heart that necessarily emanates outwards, transforming every human activity into an art. Islamic art regards crafts and decorative arts as having full art status.
The work of Gustav Klimt and Paul Klee has also fuelled my appetite for colour and its interactions. Klimt's use of exquisitely patterned backgrounds, jewelled, elaborate female portraits, and rich and exotic mosaic like backgrounds to his landscapes, informs both my textile and mosaic work. Paul Klee's prolific output of work again inspires for his use of colour and pattern. How he overlays transparent watercolour with further layers, and how a scene can appear to be looked at through a window of strips of coloured glass. His line drawing appears to me like a thread exploring shape and pattern.
Colour and its interactions are a never-ending challenge and curiosity for me. I have absorbed much from holidays to countries where the architecture, landscape, tiles, and fabrics exude colour, richness and mystery. Travelling in India, Spain and Syria and visiting some of the great mosques in Delhi, Cordoba, Damascus and Istanbul, inspired my interest in Islamic Art and its concept that art does not add something alien to the objects that it shapes, it merely brings out their essential qualities. There are also the sublime monuments to symmetry in the Alhambra in Granada, Spain, and the Taj Mahal. Islamic art seeks to portray the essence and meaning of things, rather than just their physical form. It appears to mean inward beauty, beauty of the soul or of the heart that necessarily emanates outwards, transforming every human activity into an art. Islamic art regards crafts and decorative arts as having full art status.
The work of Gustav Klimt and Paul Klee has also fuelled my appetite for colour and its interactions. Klimt's use of exquisitely patterned backgrounds, jewelled, elaborate female portraits, and rich and exotic mosaic like backgrounds to his landscapes, informs both my textile and mosaic work. Paul Klee's prolific output of work again inspires for his use of colour and pattern. How he overlays transparent watercolour with further layers, and how a scene can appear to be looked at through a window of strips of coloured glass. His line drawing appears to me like a thread exploring shape and pattern.
