Sunday Inspiration | Lucienne Day

I've always has a real soft spot for art that was produced in the 1950s, particularly the textile and surface pattern designs of the era. More specifically the Astro 50s look which was the inspiration behind my 2016 range of Christmas cards. With that in mind, this weeks instalment of the Sunday Inspirations blog will be focusing on a woman who is probably one of 20th century Britain's most influential designers and whose work, for me at least, really embodies the cheerful energy and optimism of Britain in the years after the Second World War. That woman is Désirée Lucienne Lisbeth Dulcie Day OBE RDI FCSD or better known as Lucienne Day.

Born in Coulsdon, Surrey, England, and raised in nearby Croydon, Day was half-Belgian; the daughter of an English mother (Dulcie Conradi) and a Belgian father (Felix Conradi). At the age of 17, Lucienne enrolled at Croydon School of Art, where she developed her interest in printed textiles. She went on to specialise in this field at the Royal College of Art, where she studied from 1937-40. During her second year she was sent on a two-month placement to the firm Sanderson, where she worked in the company's large wallpaper studio.

During the early period of her career, Day's textiles were characterised by energetic rhythms and a spidery, almost doodle-like graphic style. Although apparently spontaneous, her designs display a considerable amount technical skill, particularly with their colourways and repeats. As well as pure abstracts, she often created stylised organic patterns incorporating motifs such as skeletal leaves, spindly stems, feathery seed heads and butterflies. Her early textile designs were inspired by her love of modern art, particularly the abstract paintings of Swiss-German artist Paul Klee, which when compared to Day's works, it's quite clear to see the inspiration.

Calyx | Produced in a variety of different colourways, Calyx was considered the breakthrough design for Day's career

Calyx | Probably my favourite colourway that Calyz was produced in. The contrast between the yellow and the grey is stunning

Calyx | Even though there are many colourways, each one is expertly composed, with all colours working impeccably well together

One of her most well known textile designs, Calyx (pictured above), was originally shown at the Festival of Britain in 1951, and is considered her breakthrough design. Day collaborated with Heal’s (the British furniture and furnishing store chain) to create Calyx; a stylised floral design mixing muted and earthy colours, that represented a radical new aesthetic in pattern design. Lucienne said later in an interview that Heals’ then fabrics director, Tom Worthington, was unsure of the pattern, and “would produce it for me but only pay me half the fee of 20 guineas because he was certain he wouldn’t sell a yard”. She went on to produce around 70 patterns for the brand over 20 years, and Calyx still remains in production today.

 Later in the decade, responding to new artistic trends such as abstract expressionism and the architectural fashion for floor-to-ceiling picture windows, Lucienne’s designs for Heal’s became more overtly painterly and much larger in scale. 

Although abstraction was the dominant idiom in her work, Day also perpetuated the English tradition of patterns based on plant forms, often incorporating stylised motifs derived from nature, such as leaves, flowers, twigs and seedpods. After dabbling in painterly, textural abstraction during the early 1960s, she experimented with more hard-edged, multi-layered geometric designs composed of primarily of squares, circles, diamonds and stripes during the mid to late 1960s. Stylised florals and arboreal designs remained recurrent motifs until the mid 1970s.

Perpetua | For British Celanese, 1953

Herb Anthony | For Heal's, 1956

With a career spanning over six decades, Day had worked with countless big-name brands including the likes of Liberty, John Lewis, Cole & Son and Rosenthal, designing fabrics, wallpapers, carpets, homeware and ceramics. To each, she brought her unique flair for colour, line, form and composition, creating a recognisable style that feels fresh decades later. In an interview with It's Nice That, her daughter Paula stated that her work is ‘timeless’ in much the same way as that of William Morris' has become a veritable classic.

"I wanted the work I was doing to be seen by people and to be used by people. They had been starved of interesting things for their homes in the war years, either textiles or furniture."

It just so happens to be Lucienne Day's centenary this year, of which John Lewis are celebrating with a new collection of her prints. For me though, I wanted to look at the work of a prolific surface patter designer because it's an area that I want to consider as a new application for my own work.
While I enjoy screen printing for paper prints, I'd quite like to get into turning lettering work into more pattern-based prints for textiles and t-shirts. I have this vision in my mind of what it would be like to have my lettering used as a repeat pattern on the fabric of a smart shirt (this thought came about after seeing a gorgeous dress my friend Naomi has). The question now is, how do I go about this?

Well, it's been done before, I know that much. One of my career inspirations is Martina Flor; she's got a wide range of applications for her work including metal pins and bags, but she's recently been experimenting with repeat patterns...
 

Dreamer | Courtesy of Martina Flor's Instagram

Caps | Courtesy of Martina Flor's Instagram

While both pattern experiments are gorgeous, I feel like I'd much rather have the "Caps" design as a print on a piece of fabric or item of clothing, whereas the "Dreamer" would be too busy (I've got this design on a small pin badge and it's gorgeous on its own), but much better suited to something like wallpaper or a screen print. I feel that the recent work I've been doing with Spencerian scripts could fit quite well with a pattern style similar to that of the "Caps" piece, with intertwining letterforms and flourishes creating sub patterns similar to the details of Lucienne Day's works.

There's plenty of scope here for experimentation on my part, which means the next couple of weeks are going to be filled with sketching and test printing. Like I need an excuse to spend time at PrintHaus anyway!

Sunday Inspiration | Mike Perry

I enjoyed what I studied during my undergraduate degree, but I felt like I'd left with no idea where I was or who I was as an artist. It drove me mad for months. When someone asks why I chose to study lettering for my MA, I tell them about the initial struggle I had when I was surrounded by students that knew exactly what they wanted to do, those that wanted to take their practice to new places or those that wanted to shift it into a completely different area.

Filled with doubt about my future, I headed home at the end of an induction session at the Parkside campus of Birmingham City University. Sitting in front of my then limited collection of books, I spotted something I fell in love with when I was studying at college: Hand Job: a Catalogue of Type by Mike Perry. A collection of various artists and designers from the Western Hemisphere (mostly from the U.S) that either dabbled with, or specialised in hand drawn lettering. As I started flicking through the pages (of what I now refer to as my Bible) and grinning to myself, I realised that typography was always something that I should have pursued right from the very beginning. The next day, I took the book on to campus and thrust it in front of my tutor Clive and said "that's what I want to be". The rest is, as they say, history.
The book itself only features snippets of Perry's work on the beautifully illustrated covers, as well as in the accompanying preface and contents pages. So for this week's installment of Sunday Inspiration, I'd like to introduce you to the work of artist, illustrator, serial doodler and my hero Mike Perry.

Mike Perry | Portrait by Matt Rubin for The Great Discontent, 2015

Born in Kansas in July 1981, Michael Christopher Perry is an artist, designer and print maker based in Brooklyn, New York. He's worked with a number of institutions, the likes of editorial and commercial clients such as Apple, The New York Times, Dwell, Microsoft, Urban Outfitters, Nike and most recently the opening credits to the American sitcom Broad City.

“I want to show people that the world is a beautiful, powerful place where you can be yourself and make whatever you want.”
 

Perry's work revolves around the philosophical concept of existentialism; the connection between an individual and the universe, and how we are all interconnected. Much of his work, if not all of it, focuses on his own personal metaphysics and the relationship between his imagination and reality. For me, this is most notably portrayed in his more sculptural work, some of which feature ladders that seem to disappear into the ground, or pass through the floor, into an adjacent wall. Interestingly they also only ever seem to go “up” (which I like to think is a notion of positivity), depicting this transition from one realm into the next.

I've always admired his work, but it's difficult to describe; there's a simplicity and seeming naivety to his letter-based work that I love. A kind of cosmic "otherworldly" feel to it which, while being light-years away from the stuff I produce, is every bit as skilful.
You can really feel the passion he has for his work when you look at it. The incredible use of highly saturated colours through everything he does is what really appealed to me way back when I discovered his work. I remember looking over his work and at first thinking "that's so simple" and "how has he managed that?!" and then looking into it and seeing that there's far more to it than my jealousy for his commercial success.

When it comes to typography as a whole, we recognise that it mirrors qualities from history and the physical world (for example the Humanist type classification is influenced by the calligraphic scripts of the Italian Humanist writers) and that understanding is consistently similar from one person to the next. So with that in mind, we could say that the qualities we see in Perry's lettering illustrations reflect the inner workings of his imagination and possibly represents dimensions outside of the one we perceive.

A feast for the eyes | Perry's current homepage

Perry's type triggers the imagination, evokes a sense of playfulness and links to all of the senses. Personally, some of the attributes I recognise are from the real world, like how loud the words might sounds or what it would feel like to hold it in your hands.  I'm not sure if this is subliminal or not because I'm trying to disseminate the work, but if you look at the screenshot of his current homepage (above) it's like a multisensory, imagination grenade with all the warmth and joy that welcomes you to his site!

Below are a selection of small lettering projects from over the last couple of years. I think snippets such as these are great representations of the naivety and playfulness I've mentioned. I also believe that they reinforce the idea of a multisensory approach, the "touch and feel" that is most apparent throughout Perry's 2D work. The initial vibrancy and freedom that drew me to his work all those years ago still fills me with nostalgia and joy.

I've wanted to talk properly about Perry for a long time as he's probably the biggest influence on my career path. I did a research project on him and the notion of existentialism back when I did my MA, but I think I completely missed the point when I was writing it. In a way, I'm hoping that this post has picked up from that essay and built on it with hindsight, more informed information and a more rounded opinion.

Finally, I'd like to apologise that this is over a week late, but it's taken a while to write and edit this piece. Trying to set myself a benchmark each week is proving slightly difficult! 

Sunday Inspiration | Astrolabe

Considering I said to myself last year I was going to be more proactive with this blog, I've pretty much fallen flat when it comes to thinking of content to write about. However cathartic it may be, I don't want to write just for the sake of writing, but whilst I was out and about earlier today I thought it might be useful to start a weekly feature about inspirational work and objects.
Each Sunday, I'm going to put together a post that focuses on something I've come across that I find interesting and thought provoking in the hope of working elements into my own practice, as well as introducing people to something potentially new.

This morning I came across a post on Twitter from the British Museum featuring an object from their collection (though sadly they aren't on display) and I immediately fell in love with it. As a child I was always fascinated with horology and the intricacy of clockwork. So for the first instalment of the Sunday Inspirations blog, I'd like to introduce you to the Astrolabe.

Front view of the one of Georg Hartmann's astrolabes from the British Museum's collection. Dated 1532.

Rear view focusing on the rete and rule.
Photographs courtesy of the British Museum.

An astrolabe (Greek for star-taker) is a very elaborate inclinometer, historically used by astronomers and navigators, to measure the inclined position in the sky of a celestial body, either during the day or at night. It can be used to identify stars or planets, to determine local latitude given local time and vice versa, to survey, or to triangulate. This is done by drawing the sky on the face of the astrolabe and marking it so positions in the sky are easy to find. They are typically made up of a disk, called the mater (mother), which is deep enough to hold one or more flat plates called tympans. A tympan is made for a specific latitude and is engraved with a stereographic projection of circles denoting azimuth (the horizontal angle or direction of a compass bearing) and altitude and representing the portion of the celestial sphere above the local horizon. The rim of the mater is typically graduated into hours of time, degrees of arc, or both. Above the mater and tympan, the rete (which represents the sky and functions as a star chart), a framework bearing a projection of the ecliptic plane and several pointers indicating the positions of the brightest stars, is free to rotate.
To use an astrolabe, you adjust the moveable components to a specific date and time. Once set, much of the sky, both visible and invisible, is represented on the face of the instrument. This allows a great many astronomical problems to be solved in a very visual way.

Interestingly, the first mechanical astronomical clocks were influenced by the astrolabe; in many ways they could be seen as clockwork astrolabes designed to produce a continual display of the current position of the sun, stars, and planets. Many astronomical clocks, such as the absolutely gorgeous clock at Prague, use an astrolabe-style display, adopting a stereographic projection of the ecliptic plane.

I want to focus specifically on the work of the German maker Georg Hartmann (1489-1564) and his stunning brass astrolabes from the mid-1500s, some of which reside at the British Museum.
The ones pictured above were designed by Hartmann in 1532. This specific object is a Planispheric astrolabe, meaning it shows the stars at a particular time and place. It is set to a latitude of 50 degrees so can be used successfully throughout the British Isles and similar latitudes.
As I mentioned earlier, astrolabes are made up of several disks. In this case, there are three plates marked on both sides with circles for the tropics and the equator, and almucantars (a circle on the celestial sphere parallel to the horizon) for every three degrees. The azimuths are labelled for every ten degrees. They further bear markings for the unequal hour curves, numbered in Roman numerals clockwise I to XII (additive form for 4, i.e., IIII), and the astrological houses in the manner of Regiomontanus, numbered in Arabic numerals 1 to 12 anticlockwise.

You can just about see the inscriptions on the reverse in the photograph above, but they are beautiful. It's hard to picture the scale of them, but just to try and give you a little perspective, the astrolabe I'm writing about is 140mm in diameter, so that would make the numerals roughly 4-5pt if you compare it to standard type sizes.

I realise there's quite a lot to take in here, so I apologise for the sheer volume of stuff but I find them incredibly interesting! When I was at the V&A in December, I came across some illustrations that were based on cartography from the Middle Ages by the artist Kristjana Williams, so on the back of that, I'd like to try and base some personal work on the text styles from the astrolabes and linking it to Williams' work to maybe create something related to the star charts...