“ Wallpaper literally dresses interior spaces as expressively as clothes clad the body. Both integuments function as extremely public forms of communication that speak of their owners’ cultural sensibilities, private fantasies, erudition, economic and social status, and psychological state.”
‘Off the Wall – Wonderful Wall Coverings of the Twentieth Century’ – Lena Lencek and Gideon Bosker Page 10. completely agree with this statement and believe it shows how important our surroundings are, When we go for a walk to relax our minds, we don’t go around a bland industrial estate, but we go to nature, so why would we ever let our homes reflect anything else but beauty? Since prehistoric times the human being has surrounding himself with annotations of their life, through drawings, these have been found on walls decorating what was their homes. Although Wallpaper history does not go as far back as textiles and paintings these are in their own way wall coverings, which wallpaper is just a more developed form of.
The early wallpapers that were produced in Europe, also decorated books, boxes and furniture, and were produced on single sheets called rag paper. If the wallpaper design were going to be a repeat or a large-scale design, they would have to just paste or tack the smaller sheets together on the wall first. The wallpaper designer would print an outline in black using a wood block, which would be highly expensive and then stencil over a colour, using a shammy leather or sponge. Which was slightly cheaper, but often the colour would slightly go over the line, which designers these days sometimes make a quirky statement in their designs by purposely placing the colour off set. The textile industry was still a more productive luxury of the time, so wallpaper engineers came up with an idea to compete with the aesthetic values and textures created by the textile pieces, this was to use a product called wood grass which came in different colours depending on the season it was picked from, this would create a textured surface to print upon. Although still highly expensive and you’d have to buy a whole batch in one go, as the colour would vary.
High quality painted papers began to appear on the ceilings of manor houses and churches where they would mimic wallpaper by using more costly materials such as carved wood or even murals in the 16th Century and by the 17th Century they came up with the easier idea of joining the sheets together first, before printing over the new large sheet. Wallpapers made a big move to the rooms of the middle class from the salons of the aristocracy in the mid-eighteenth century, this be due to the introduction of engraved wood blocks that permitted the printing of rolls of paper using colour. This therefore let the manufacturing costs decline however so did the high status of the mass produced paper coverings. By the 19th Century wallpaper began to reveal big ideas though the many designs and ideas that could be achieved through painted paper, block printed papers, flock papers and roller printed papers, this was when ‘ the great Arts and Crafts, secession, and art nouveau artists and designers of Europe began to see in wallpaper a tremendous resource for popularizing their elite design ideas.’ – ‘Off the Wall – page 11’
Picking a start point from 3 key themes from traditional wall coverings to research I started by documenting my research in a file, I looked at Hortus Botanicus, Toile du Jouy and Trompe l’oeil. I found through my research that I was extremely interested in how they produced wallpaper, because it was one of those things I never understood, how the same image was repeated and how it could be made 3-D, so this was very beneficial. I was excited that I could look into Hortus Botanicus, but thought a lot of people might also feel the same. As I am a typical fan of William Morris, not only for his floral designs of overlapping flat 2D images, yet keeping a complicated twist, but also for his opinions and morals that he projected into the Arts and Crafts movement. I wanted to somehow incorporate his style with his ethics. However I didn’t want to just represent another page of florals, so looked into my other passion of illustration and line, I found an artist who uses line to represent nature ‘ Claire Scully’ I was drawn to how her simple drawings of bark captured the elegance of nature without showing colour or tone. Another artist was ‘Florence Manlik’ who develops complicated line drawings that are fascinating; I knew I’d have to practice for months before even being able to recreate anything as high standard as her work. But tried to let it inspire and influence my thoughts and ideas.
After doing some primary research I decided to explore figurative drawing, to push my boundaries as far as I can, as this is my 2nd to last project of the year, and I need to know how far I can push myself so I can achieve the most but also have enough time and effort to produce work that I’m happy is to my full potential. So seeing as I’ve never really drawn plants or gone down that route, and that i'm quite a hopeless drawer when it comes to people. What better design ideas to strive towards, because if I don’t challenge myself I won’t be able to make experimental mistakes. I started by drawing first hand several pages of peoples, experimenting with styles and media. I also looked at how Rob Ryan incorporates people dancing on nature, and thought this would be a perfect way to link them. People with nature.
After looking at a few more artists, designers, illustrators and photographers I found Genevieve Dione’s work to be exactly what I wanted to produce, line drawings of nature ‘mushrooms in her case’ with people using the nature as a platform to exist. However I also stumbled across an image from ‘Antz’ the film, and how they look up at what we’d say where a few weeds and rubbish, but to them its mountains and beautiful landscape. This is when the idea to play with scale came about. If I can produce drawings that make the client feel small and belittled by their feature wall or all over wall covering, then It could bring a whole new idea to the way we feel and act in our rooms. Instead of being in control of our walls they’re in control of us, making us feel small and humble to nature, because after all if humanity died I doubt the plants would mind, but if we lost plants then the earth would be no more.
In order to produce this kind of aspect I had to go back out and collect more research of plants, this time taking photos and drawing them from underneath looking up into them, this proved a lot harder than I thought it would be, trying to alter my mind to make the scale and lighting different from what it was. After having a group critique I decided to look into screen-printing, but I also needed to think about what kind of people to look at and in what medium to show them, so I went to a train station and took hundreds of photographs. An image of a businessman holding a clipboard took my attention immediately and I thought how it could look really quite cute and quirky to have this gentleman ‘surveying ‘ the monstrosity of a small houseplant. At the same time I was thinking about how Louise Body uses silhouettes of plants as an image, and thought how this could look really interesting as a background to my final piece, a bit like how William Morris uses layers in his compositions. After screen printing I thought about how my work would be displayed in a room, and decided that it would look far more effective in a stately home or just a room with a high ceiling. This got me to thinking about how in the beginning of wallpaper they would use rag paper and tack it to there walls, I also thought about how flock is also seen as a luxurious style which brings elegance. I think it would be quite interesting to look down this route, as in creating a style of wallpaper to represent the early wallpapers, by using large bold images and flock, but adding a modern twist by turning the ideas of scale completely on its head.
I attended a couple of workshops on gesso and foil and flock, and visited the Discovery center, this helped me decided that foil really wouldn’t help my ideas, I also decided to have a go using gesso, but after I realised that the smell was rabbit, I could hardly stomach being in the same room, but after about a week and the fact I had quite a cold so had no sense of smell managed to get the courage to attempt a piece, I’m quite disappointed that such a minor thing as the smell set me back, because I found the final pieces that could be achieved from gesso, very texturally exciting.
Conclusion
Overall I found the workshops extremely useful and the trip to the Whitworth gallery really helped me understand the processes, maths and labour that have gone into wall covering design.
“ When we approach the task of creating our intimate environment, we fall back on ready-made solutions that do not entirely banish individuality as much as channel it into a limited spectrum of ‘flavours’. ” ‘Off the wall’I accept that the customer would want to express their individuality but might not have a very artistic eye for design, or maybe is just not very bothered with the effort of exploring wall design, so just get out as many magazines and catalogues of style of the time. So what I hope comes across with my ideas is that the client has the style or idea already produced for them, but they create their own twist, by adding their own characters to the plants, whether they are action figures and dolls for their children. Or even recognisable family and friends from their own lives.
Through my research I found that I wouldn’t be able to use my designs with out putting a lot more time and effort into the qualities and sustainability off the material, as the Early Twentieth century writer Edith Wharton proclaimed that wallpapers aesthetically bankrupt for ‘effacing the architectural lines of a room’, but mainly ‘ objectionable on sanitary grounds.’ So I’d have to consider the outcome by taking into account the constraints of cost, marketplace and practitioner of production by look into every aspect of how my design would fit and last on the client’s wall. As I am not using any technologically advanced papers.
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