Spotlight on... Naomi Vona, vintage photo artist

Aren't these beautiful? They were a Christmas present to Declan and me from his sister, and I absolutely love them.

They are collages created on original old black and white photos, and are the work of Dublin-based Italian artist Naomi Vona.

Spotlight on... Artbooty, Brixton

London Design Festival looms and details of interesting events are popping into my inbox.

If you've never been, the main thing to know is that, aside from the main events (the likes of Design Junction, Tent and 100% Design) it's pretty much an excuse for the design-inclined to show off and have visually stimulating parties for the best part of a week in September. What's not to love?

One such event, Artbooty, part of Brixton Art Trail as well as the London Design Festival (LDF) and hosted by local design shop, BRIXI, is on my doorstep in south London – and if you're in the capital for the festival, it promises to be worth the trip to these parts.

The event – an art sale with booze, installations and performances and food – runs for one afternoon/evening and you should take cash for beer (and, quite possibly, spontaneous art purchases). Here are some of the highlights in pictures.

Nigerian-born folk painter and architect, Abe Odedina, was a BP Portrait Award nominee in 2013 with his painting The Adoration of Frida, a self-portrait and tribute to the Mexican artist. He works in London and Salvador, Brazil.

Obedina has been inspired by "the expressive figurative paintings found in the streets in cities like Lagos, Salvador, or Port-au-Prince adorning the sides of lorries, the walls of temples, beer parlours, love motels or advertising the services of barbers, vulcanisers, healers and other specialists'.

Over the years I've been going to BRIXI to browse the always-intriguing and beautiful and frequently joyfully unusual selection of wares on sale, Obedina's paintings have often hung huge from the walls and totally sucked me in. They're pretty special. www.abeodedina.com

Also...

These humorous pieces – named (clockwise from main image) Atkins Day (a diet themed sculpture); GGrrrrrrr and I Lost My Head – are by ceramics restorer and artist, Amy Douglas. As well as offering her artworks for sale Douglas, I believe, will be touting cabaret from a golden horsebox on the night.

Douglas also does 80s themed linocuts (this one will only make sense if you know the lyrics to Wham Rap). Check her out at www.theartofsalmagundi.co.uk

There's also some of this.

Stephen Wright is so much more than a mosaic artist, as you'll know if you read this previous post on his quite astonishing home/museum, the House of Dreams. For the Artbooty, Wright will be taking the quirky creatures he creates on a road trip.

Other artists will be: recycler, Jo Gibbs (see her lacy tiles, above); Soozy Lipsey; textile artist, Brian Merry; surrealist printmaker, Lizzie Learman plus her printing press for demos; sculptor and inventor Stephen Stockbridge, who's offering confessions; Jamie Palmer (AKA Pen & Gravy, whose work, pictured below, is for sale on Etsy and is written about in this previous post).

Which artist's work do you most like? Do share your comments below.


ARTBOOTY takes place on Tuesday 22 September 2015, 4-11.30pm, Brixton East 1871, Barrington Road, Brixton, SW9 7JF. See more about what's going on in the area at www.brixtondesigntrail.com or check out the city-wide events at London Design Festival www.londondesignfestival.com. Read about the Artbooty organiser in this previous post.

Object of the Day: Dutch StoryTiles part II

I was excited, last year, to discover StoryTiles, a collection of hand-made tiles, some based on traditional Dutch 16th century designs given a modern twist, others just about the modern twist.

The tiles are designed and made by Marga Van Oers, who has just launched a new collection of tiles in collaboration with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. As you'll see, she's taken one of the artist's most familiar works and given it her trademark dose of surrealism...


The series is called ‘The Sunflower Expedition’. 

On the Swing 

On the Lookout 

Taking the Lead

The miniature ceramic works of art start at around £18 each for a 10cm x 10cm tile and each comes with a little wall-hanger on the back. 

The complete tableau of all the tiles, pictured below, is around £ (all prices are originally in Euros – you can ship them from Holland or try Brixi, owned by the very stylish Emy Gray, if you happen to be in south London). 

You can see more Storytiles in this previous post.

The other half of the Van Gogh Museum collaboration is Van Oers' 'Van Gogh’s Garden' series, pictured above and below.

I've recently developed a great warmth for Van Gogh as, most days, I cycle past the house in south London where he lived (see the snap, below).

There's also a very lovely modern street nearby dedicated to him, featuring raised beds with quotes from the great man about flowers and walking and, of course, a good few sunflowers. It's a pedestrianised street and every day this summer, without fail, I've encountered some configuration of loved-up elderly couples taking in the warm evening air, large youths playing basketball, but being careful not to trip over the tiny youth out for a toddling walk with a parent, dog-walkers or just neighbours, hanging about. There's even a miniature free library, where you can leave a book and pick up a new one from a brightly painted glass-fronted box on a wall. It's quite magical – proper street communities in London are few and far between.

Moving on from the great painter, there are also more new season designs outside this range from StoryTiles. Feast your eyes on just a couple, below.

Floating 

Happily Ever After 

Hide and Seek 

Catch me if You Can

It's dark out now as I type, but when it's not I'll share a photo of the StoryTile I bought for my boyfriend's birthday in situ. It's nice.

Meanwhile, check out the StoryTiles website, I'd direct you to the Brixi website too but (as its owner would I'm sure be the first to admit) it's not that useful. You'd do better following the shop on Instagram @brixi7

Slow Wallpaper

An exhibition devoted to wallpaper designs is my kind of exhibition. 

W is for Wallpaper, at the Ruthin Craft Centre this September, is rather special for two reasons – most importantly, because of its focus on traditional hand screen and lino printing techniques, which many of the papers exhibited used. And secondly because it takes place in North Wales, one of my favourite places ever. I feel the excuse for a long weekend coming...

Meanwhile, a few highlights from the show. Above, Custhom design and fabricate some of the most innovative wallpapers around. I've written about their digital embroidery previously and their contribution to the exhibition is the Igneous paper, a luxurious looking design that resembles marble bursting with solidified gold. Made from carbon powder and hand-foiled, the non-repetitive design is named after the effect of crystalized igneous rocks, which are formed through the cooling and solidification of magma or lava. It's currently also on sale on the Custhom website for £159 a roll.

The exhibition features designs by Timorous Beasties, Sian Elin, Angie Lewin, Deborah Bowness, Kirath Ghundoo, Brigitte Zeiger,
Edward Bawden and William Morris among plenty more. Such as Daniel Heath, whose Heal's-stocked Perivale paper celebrates the art deco architecture of the Hoover Building.

Interesting wallpaper fact: in the early 18th century, a wallpaper tax was introduced that lasted until 1836, after which there was a boom in the popularity of papered walls, which suddenly became far more financially accessible to many.

I've already featured a couple of Eley Kishimoto's bold and bouncy wallpapers here before, but they're too good not to show again (above and two below).

Artist Hugh Dunford Wood painstakingly hand-printing one of his papers. Below, two more of his designs.

The designs are printed using lino blocks engraved by Huge in his studio, which overlooks the sea in Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast.

John Burgerman's innovative and kids' room-perfect colour-it-in-yourself design, 'Burgerdoodles'. 

Award-winning Tracy Kendall's extraordinary Another Colour wallpaper, above and below, is tantalisingly tactile. It looks beautiful – but what about the dusting?

A Claire Florey-Hitchcox woodblock, above. Claire, who graduated just last year and chose to take a step back from new technology, carves her designs onto woodblocks and then prints using her awe-inspiring 18th century Columbian printing press. You can see photos of it on her website.

Mini Moderns' graphic Gulls paper already feels like a classic.

W is for Wallpaper is on at the Ruthin Craft Centre, Denbighshire, North Wales from 26 September–22 November 2015. ruthincraftcentre.org.uk. Admission free. #WisforWallpaper

Out of the flames of Ferguson

Since Christmas, I've been to Sydney and back, started a shiny new job (more of which shortly), grappled with alien spreadsheets to do my new year accounts – fellow self-employeds will feel my pain – and been floored by a hideous seasonal lurgy. 

I've kept posting throughout, but have much newness to share. Soon come. But please bear with me as I have a little catching up to do. And while you're bearing, do enjoy this cockle-warming story I bookmarked on The Daily Good back before Christmas.

Ferguson, Missouri, is sadly now on that list of place-names famous by sad association, since one of its police shot 18-year-old Michael Brown there and riots ensued.

When charges were dropped against said cop in November, rioting erupted once more and one of the areas hit was the nearby South Grand business district which, the Daily Good describes as a "vibrant, diverse pocket of Vietnamese eateries, black beauty shops, an LGBT-friendly tattoo-and-porn parlor, and dozens of other restaurants and boutiques...joined in a funky family vibe". 17 of its shops were vandalised, and in the aftermath a community art project has sprung up around South Grand's boarded up shops.

 

You can read the full story and see more images over at The Daily Good.

If you missed the original post, I also think you'll like this colourful bit of street art near my house in south London, which has entirely peaceful origins.

Oh yes, my new job! I'm very excited to say that I am now a full-time staff writer and editor at the very cool interiors website, Houzz.co.uk. It's pretty much the dream job for a design and DIY nerd like me. In case you don't know the US-founded site (there were Skype job interviews with Palo Alto, which I found deeply glamorous) it's a daily online magazine full of ideas for improving your home, with an emphasis on expert insight into the gritty details of glamorous things like loft conversions and kitchen planning, as well as plenty of pretty interiors porn. You can save and share images, post DIY or design dilemmas in the forum, interact with builders and designers and all sorts of other good stuff. Sort of Pinterest crossed with Sarah Beeny and one of those nice experienced old chaps who work at B&Q. Not the official line, of course, just my personal opinion.

I shan't be abandoning this little blog, of course, and hope you'll stick with me. I aim to continue to post at least once a week, more if you're lucky. So I'll be seeing you soon.

Real homes: the gratuitous display cupboard conundrum

In an ideal world, the fabulous Fornasetti menu plates that I've written about here before would be within financial reach, and the glass-fronted kitchen display cupboard would now be full of them.

Indeed, if I had, over the years, collated a beloved curation of anything with some kind of theme – ceramic or otherwise – then the cupboard would easily have some kind of 'look' going on. But no...

The cupboard – once my grandma's dining room glasses cupboard – is a luxuriously gratuitous space. There isn't really anything that needs to go in it that we can't fit into the regular kitchen storage areas and, simply so that it is not empty, it currently houses lots of random things that would look better in other parts of the house. Except that that wouldn't leave the cupboard eerily bare. So the randomness remains while the hunt for the right decorative collection continues. But I think I may have found something to start it...

...Grayson Perry's limited edition plates, £30 each from the National Portrait Gallery.

Each of the four fine china plates has a gilded edge and features a detail from Perry's wonderfully off-beat self-portrait, Map of Days, which you can see in full below.

In a clip from his excellent Channel 4 series Who Are You? you can watch Perry talking about why the idea of making a traditional self-portrait makes him cringe because, to him, it feels like "going back to the earnest 16-year-old in the art room at school trying to look down the barrel of my own angst".

Two mugs featuring Perry's work are also available, see one of them below, along with other pieces produced by Kit Grover to tie in with Who Are You? along with other homewares and accessories. See the full range here at the NPG.

There are lots of pretty plates about, and the idea of having things "just for best" pains me – if you love it, use it. But I'm breaking my own home philosophy here, and veering towards a slowly-built collection of art that happens to be on plates – lending it a kitchen-y theme. Sturdier plates can still be interesting, but they'll just have a different function. Artist plates are a nice way to begin building an art collection on a budget and Perry could be starting something in the kitchen... My other idea, inspired by a helpful tweet from the Balcony Gardener, is to turn the cupboard into an indoor greenhouse and stuff it with interesting plants. Perhaps I'll do both... watch this space.

If you like unusual plates, check out some other favourite designs I've featured here, including ceramics by: La Kinska, Louise Wilkinson, Melody Rose, vintage Ironstone and Evie Lotts. You might also like the monochrome Day Birger range at Rockett St George, which I also have my eye on.