Brilliant Orange

A storefront on a London street: There's a legendary story of American painter James Whistler testifying in court against British art critic John Ruskin. The artist sued for libel following a review in which Ruskin charged the painter for his casual and thoughtless use of paint in a particular work. (Actually, the word Ruskin used was "splattering.") Asked how long it'd taken him to complete the painting Whistler replied, "two days." The question implying that 200 guineas for such a work was entirely too generous. But it wasn't for his labor that Whistler had asked such a price. Said he, "I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime."

The decision to paint the storefront in brilliant orange may've come to the designer in a lark. But the ability to initiate such a lark, well, that could only result from an artist's long and arduous journey.

Brilliant orange, indeed.

Walls and Bridges

Sometimes the solution is so simple it's too easily overlooked. But isn't that where genius takes its true flight? Exposing the essence that somehow eludes the common collective eye. This may explain why innovation is so often born of fortuitous "accidents."

To wit: Begin with various white walls, apply three miles of basic black masking tape, manipulate with bare hands and utility knife, and add to that an ingenious sense of form and composition. Then, magically, an innovation of wall-covering/planar manipulation is revealed.

Simple, right?

The inspiration for the use of masking tape (the material used here is custom made) came to the artist in a "flash" as inspiration often can (after many long hours of dedicated focus). Following years of experimenting with different mediums masking tape proved to be the transcendent vehicle. In developing the work the tape is shaped by tearing (revealed by the texture on the tape edges) and the removed tape is often reused and reapplied elsewhere. The artist refers to the process as line drawing with the intention of conducting and tuning the energy of the space.

Indeed.

The brilliant Sun K. Kwak from her show Enfolding 280 Hours at the Brooklyn Museum. (To see her process go here.) Her gift is not wall covering so much as its logarithmic potential.

Where wallpaper was; where it ought to be (again).

Wallpaper designed by British architect Owen Jones (1809-1874), the Frank Gehry of the Victorian era.

Jones was an early devotee of Orientalism, the rage of his age. He famously published a fanboy book of drawings on the Alhambra Palace in Granada that brought the virtues of Islamic decoration to Europe and the West.

Jones set his eye to textiles and silks as well. Imagine a stultified Victorian society impaled on walls covered just so. More at V and A images.