Henri Matisse collected colourful textiles all his life. He would dress his models in his collection of folk and designer dresses and decorate his studio with fabrics from Africa and the Middle East. His paintings reflected the bold, bright colours of his collection, an example is shown above. Anne Rodpath painted the interior of her own home and again featured items she had collected herself, such as an Indian rug (below).
Caroline Kirton's creates images of the everyday life of teenagers (as above) using textiles, stitch and print. By using collages of colourful fabrics she plays with the concepts of decoration and function. Peter Clark collects old maps, books, tickets, packaging, postcards etc from car boot sales to use in his collages of clothes (below) and animals, especially dogs.
Julie Arkell also collects collage materials such as old books, buttons, ribbons and scraps of fabrics. She then uses them to create her menagerie of strange little characters and creatures (below), so turning things that were once functional into objects that are purely decorative.
Architect Antoni Gaudi used broken tiles and plates to decorate the outside of his wonderful buildings, many of which can be seen in Barcelona. He would often let the builders working on his buildings create their own mosaic patterns.
Julia McKenzie is a print maker. Her screen prints of broken blue and white china plates are reminiscent of Gaudi's mosaics, an example is below.
Pierre Bonnard would often paint scenes through windows (as above), the whole picture highly patterned and lit by the Mediterranean sun. John Bratby's images were of a far more British and urban scene. The colours are more muted and the whole picture plain is divided up into a grid by the window panes and the net curtain.
Rachel Eardley illustration of a scene out of her back window is just as urban, but the delicate line work emphasises the rows of terrace houses and the tiled roofs.
David Hockney's 'joiner' photo technique has been used here to recreate the scene out of a Miami window. The only curved lines being those of the little balcony.
Edward Hopper reversed the idea by looking into windows, making them look like little theatres, making us wonder about the lives of the people playing out inside.
