textile – Cleveland State Art

Louise Despont (Hannah T)

Louise Despont is an artist who works and lives out of New York, where she was born in 1983; and Bali, Indonesia. She possesses a bohemian flair that bleeds into her artwork. Ms. Despont chooses to create very large drawings on seperate sheets pulled from antique accounting ledgers, draftsman paper, and other gridded papers. With the help of her assistant, Nicole Wong, Ms. Despont uses colored pencils, graphite, and a hefty collection of architect/artist stencils to make her ideas a reality.

She creates her intricate artwork with elements pulled from her infinite amount of inspiration images—old photographs, Buddhist medical charts, various textiles, patterns, beehives, architectural schematics, soundwaves, etc.
Many different elements may be chosen and woven into these designs, which are themselves very expressive and geometric, but also fluid and earthy.

More often than not, Ms. Despont finds herself working on her living room floor than at an artist’s table. She fully invests herself into every drawing, and into her work projects as a whole. According to Ms. Despont herself, her work is 90% research and 10% action. Oftentimes, she spends months just collecting images and making portfolios of every photo she finds. Because her pieces are so large, they have to be fitted into even larger frames; and because so much goes into their creation overall, it takes some time to get each drawing into a gallery, and at times she can do only one show a year.

But she never lets that stop her from brainstorming or innovating.
Oftentimes, the antique accounting ledger paper she draws abstract shapes, florals, or designs on contain old checks and balances from their past owners. By letting these numbers and words show through without bothering to change them or white them out, Ms. Despont makes the figures part of her work, which in itself looks antique.

Ms. Despont has also stated that while her work appears very calm and naturalistic, she actually calculates every mark she makes. By using stencils, she creates designs that are so beautifully designed, one would never think they were made with a stencil at all. Ms. Despont’s base of operations is in the comfort of her home, and she often finds herself streched out on her bedroom floor with her huge, sectioned layouts.

And she has said that she really prefers to work this way. “I find that being able to work at home—that I wake up in the morning, I have breakfast, and I start working—it’s a very smooth transition to a quieter, more centered place.”
Also, because Ms. Despont creates all of her drawings using relatively inexpensive materials, she does not have to wait until she has large amounts of money or has recieved donations to create the pictures, which she just likes to “just let happen.”

Louise Despont, colored pencil and graphite on antique ledger book pages, 18x23 inches — Heliconia Mask

All of her drawings started with simple marks that turned into something more.
“Those marks contain the seed of the drawing,” she commented in Louise Despont Draws Deep. This is something that is true of virtually any drawing, or any work of art.
And in Louise Despont’s case, it is the foundation of her media.

William Morris

William Morris was born March 24, 1834 and he lived until October 3, 1896. Morris had studied Architecture in school, but he had always had the aspirations to be an artist and a painter. He went to the school of Oxford, and there he met a fellow painter, Edward Burne-Jones. This friendship led him to meet the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. After coming into contact with this group, he met a woman named Jane Burden. She was a favorite model of the Pre-Raphaelite. He married her in 1859, and soon after, he hired Philip Webb to build them a house. Webb built the house and achieved exactly what Morris was looking for. (Gothic Medieval themes) William Morris then spent around two years furnishing the inside. He did this mostly alone, but he did have a little help from the artists he had met along the way. They were so successful in the designing of the house that they decided to go into business together. Thus, in April 1861 Morris and his friends decided to start their own company. Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. was the name and they produced all kinds of furnishings like: stained glass, furniture, embroidery, and wallpaper was added later since Morris could not find any that he liked enough to put in his own house. Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. had a large impact on the design and décor of churches and houses well into the 20^th century.

William Morris is mainly known for his designs on wallpapers and fabrics. He applied the concepts and values of fine art to commercial products which has influenced designs even now. Morris said that the “diligent study of Nature” was very important because nature was the best example of the perfect design that God had created. He based many of his works off of this idea. He also did not like the art of the age he was in, at the time there was a decline in social and artistic standards. He was always encouraging his fellow artists to be inspired by the past during the Gothic and Middle ages. Morris thought that at those times, artists created and expressed their creativity to glorify God and did the best to their ability. Most of his works are very “flowery” and nature inspired because of these beliefs. Most of his classic designs are still available to be made into wallpaper or textiles. William Morris’ goal was to draw the natural forms he saw outdoors and bring those shapes inside homes.

One of Morris’ favorite pieces was the Trellis (1862) which was pattern based overlaid with flowers. He saw this at the Red House (where he lived). Philip Webb, his contractor, added the insects and birds, seen on this artwork, at a later time. Morris liked this piece so much; he actually used it as wallpaper to decorate his own room. He also got into printing on books. He founded the Kelmscott Press in 1891. William used the style of medieval times for the title pages, borders, and typefaces. It was recorded Morris saying, “I began printing books with the hope of producing some which would have a definite claim to beauty, while at the same time they should be easy to read and should not dazzle the eye……I found I had to consider chiefly the following things: the paper, the form of the type, the relative spacing of the letters, the words, and the lines; and lastly the position of the printed matter on the page.”

Christopher Dresser

Christopher Dresser was one of the first independent industrial designers. He was born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1834 and died in 1904, which put him at around 70 years of age. To say he was talented is a bit of an understatement since he did a little of everything, from wallpaper to textiles, glass to metal ware. He was born into a nonconformist family with a tax collector, or excise officer, as a father. So he moved around a lot till he was a teenager, when he got accepted into the Government School of Design, which was supposed to improve British design for industry by combining art and science. During his studies there, Dresser met many important design reformers of the day: Henry Cole, Richard Redgrave and his mentor, Owen Jones.

This image is of cranes that, along with be very beautiful birds, are apparently the Japanese symbol of longevity. They are flying over stylized waves, all of which is just white images on a dark blue background. Dresser had taken Japanese inspiration to make this, with the composition being roughly the same as a Japanese blue and white ceramic flowerpot.

By the early 1860s, Dresser was working for the Minton factory as a designer and his early work for them was often inspired by Persian artwork, like the vase in the picture above that he made. The shape of this vase takes its inspiration from Persian, with is long narrow top and bulb shaped bottom. It follows his idea of “the ornament must tend to emphasize the beautiful quality of the object and not destroy the form.” He also admired the intricate interlacing patterns associated with Persian ornament.

Dresser illustrated this chair in 1873 as “in the manner of an Egyptian chair.” It certainly looks like a chair from Egypt in my opinion if you take off the armrests. It was stressed while the chair was made that a chair soundly designed allowed the person sitting in it to be more confident — unlike many other examples. Although Dresser accepted the position that some parts of the chair were not perfect, he did approve of it from a stylistic and historical perspective.

It is apparently a toast/letter rack, though if you knew that at first glance I congratulate you. It is a very nice piece of metal work none the less. It does show how Dresser wanted to make easily manufactured, functional, and novel designs. It was an affordable product in the growing consumer market, and at the same time it was well designed. Cheap to make and fast to sell has always been the best way to make money in any market.

This silver-plated tea set was designed in the late 1870s. Dresser had just returned from Japan, which was where he got the inspiration of all the pieces fitting inside of each other. That would obviously save space in the kitchen. While the design is from Japan, the bamboo on the handles idea was actually from Asia, which keeps you from burning your hands on the metal.

A simple biscuit box and lid made beautiful by pattern alone. Actually inspired by nature for this one, Dresser got the idea from frost on a window pane. It represents his idea of “power, energy, force, and vigor” in one pattern. It was originally for stained glass but the common earthenware material combined with the silver-plated mounts appealed to him.

An example of his wallpaper designs; this is one that repeats a fan-shaped flower pattern in gold and red, with a little bit of green to accent the red. It is actually a very nice color scheme in my opinion. Like many of Dresser’s artwork, this one was inspired by Japanese art though he knows this type of art is only for a flat design. He elaborates in Principles of Decorative Design, “The ornamentist when enriching a fabric deals only with a surface, and has no thought of placing pictures thereon; he has simply to enrich or beautify that which without his art would be plain and unornamental.”

Mr. Dresser began designing “art glass” for industrial manufacture around 1880. Reacting against the fashion for cut glass, Dresser and some other designers called for reform in glass production. This glass vase shows how he loved the artistic medium of glass and its fluid qualities. The ornamental features of the vase are found in its coloring and ribbed spiraling pattern, which had to be added to the glass or it would have come out smoother like typical glass. Air bubbles, streaks of color, and other irregularities were intentional, as they emphasized the organic nature of glass.

First off, this is a very awesome bowl. The shape and color are so strange that it will catch anyone’s eye no matter where you put it. Anyway, the bowl reflects various sources that Mr. Dresser relied on. It was made after his trip to Japan in 1876-1877. Japanese prints strongly influenced European decorative arts in the second half of the nineteenth century and, though he didn’t copy the Japanese prototypes, Dresser did use key design elements that suggest Japanese aesthetics. Like the powerful curve of Katsushika Hokusai’s famous woodblock print The Great Wave at Kanagawa is echoed in the shape of this bowl.

This tureen and ladle have a simple sort of elegance, which shows how much Japanese metalwork influences Dresser’s approach to design. He put a lot of attention into the nature of the materials he used, like here the strong horizontal of the banding echoes the flat lid and straight ivory handles. The beauty in this piece really is in how simple it is, as Dresser says, “the beautiful must be truthful in expression, and graceful, delicate, and refined in contour, manifesting no coarseness, vulgarity, or obtrusiveness … the beautiful manifests no want, no shortcomings.”

Toward the end of his life, Christopher Dresser primarily designed for wallpaper and textile manufacturers. He died in Mulhouse, while on a business trip to France with his son, Louis, in 1904. After his death, two of his daughters took over his design studio but were unable to maintain it.

by Samantha Davis