Thurs 21.03.2013

Henry Moore

This morning I returned to the Artist’s Textiles book which I was looking at yesterday. I also did some reading of a book about Henry Moore which I took out last week because I knew that he was an artist who also became a prominent textiles designer. Within the Artist’s Textiles book, the artists who I was most interested in were Henry Moore and John Piper. Henry Moore was interesting to me in terms of his process and also the links which his designs had with his sculptural work. The way in which an abstract figure is depicted and how this is used to create pattern was inspiring and gave me another way of thinking about the abstracted or stylised figures which were prominent in the African art I looked at over the last two weeks. Moore is also interesting in terms of process and I like the which he uses wax crayons and resists to create painted designs. This evokes almost the effect of a batik (which is a fabric process which I have really enjoyed in the past) and creates a sense of layering and building colour.

John Piper

I was surprised by how much I liked the textile designs of John Piper, because previously I had only ever seen his fine art work and these were pieces that I was never particularly drawn to. Piper’s architectural paintings are something I like in terms of colour use and mark making but when these were transformed into designs which used much more flat colour, abstracted forms and repeats they became really appealing to me.  This helped me to learn about how the same subject matter (e.g. architecture) can be interpreted/utilise in very different ways to various effects.