Artist Textiles: Picasso to Warhol

This exhibition showed many excellent artists' textile design in early to middle 20th century. 

It has several sections: 

Curtain up; Britain, The 1940s: 'Brave New World'; 

America, The 19040s: 'Surreal Things';

1940s- 1950s: Horrockses Fashions- 'Fit for a queen'; 

Britain, The 1950s: 'Palette and Loom'; 

The Designs of Hammer Prints: 'This is Tomorrow'; 

America, the 1950s: 'modern Masters';

America, the 1960s: 'Picasso Unseen' (Mezzanine)

The 1960s: 'Pioneers of Pop';

America, The 19502- 1960s: 'Illustration into Textiles';

Britain, the 1950s: 'Painting into Textiles';

Number, Please?- Salvador Dali 1947

This silk screen printing scarf was made by Dali, which has strong perspective, colour contrast. The fine and smooth quality of silk gives these patterns nice details that the whole piece has good tactility. 

Compared to his painting, I like this one more. His paintings always have kind of thick, heavy, earth colour, making me feel anxious, sad, lonely and desperate. I like imaginary world, but his has too much negative energy for me. I will prevent myself sink into those emotions as well as my work. So this clear and fresh colour really works on me.

This is how it looks in the animation.

Ballerina

It said that Salvador Dali's scarf designs for Wesley Simpson, 'Number, please?' And 'Ballerina' were inspired by his unfinished Disney 'surrealist animation' called Destino. This animation was finished by another artist at last.

Gerald Wilde
John Heathcoat & Co., London, 1944 

Picasso,  1950

Andy Warhol

Zandra Rhodes

All the works I selected above are because I love the freedom in their line and vivid colour. I would like to try similar effect in my work, since I unconsciously would make my work too harmony that I want to try some vivid and passionate style. And one of the reason that I decide to make aquascape in ceramics is because the colour of them normally are quite fixed. Green plants are nice, but I feel a little bit monotonous in that case.

Recently I had an idea about tube, fire circle, circus that works blow gave me more inspiration about it.

I really want to use the tubes in 3D workshop for sucking dust away, but they may want to recycle them. Those tubes are translucent with good quality and colourful lines around. 

Funny Fish

I was cleaning the glass and I found that every time this specie of fish gets frightened, it will hide into the shell. I didn't mean to scare it, but this let me really feel another way of designing, by learning their habits.

Some people asked me to do it before, but I couldn't really get it. But like this, if I design a specific structure for a specific habit, then when the habit happens, it can be quite a fun.

Exploration Architecture: Designing With Nature

Basically this exhibition is about how to get inspiration from nature and solve hard problems in our life. I was purely attracted by the shape and structure of the objects in this exhibition, but it is more about science, machinery or architecture than aesthetics.

This project is designed for overheating problem of data centre, composed by many super computers, I guess. The structure of the project was inspired by vein or our lung. I could't fully understand the principle, as it is out of my knowledge. But I'd like to talk about them from my angle.

I used to get obsessed to this kind of complex shape that it is hard to tell where is the beginning or end, which has a mysterious beauty. But once I saw a lot of similar works, I started to feel boring. It seemed a pure object like this cannot satisfy me any more. And this is where I want to improve my work. I want my work can have more layers, flavours, or give people more sense of feeling, than just "oh it looks nice", or even ".....oh.", and that's it.

I pretty like the piece above that my shrimp may like these little spaces. Any from aesthetic angle, it looks cool.

Glaze tests 1

For this glaze test, 1-4 are low temperature earthenware glazes that I got their recipes from a book. As to 5 and 6, I bought them from Scarva and they are high temperature stoneware glazes.

These glazes initially were for those pieces I have already made out but only biscuit fired. Later, I will temporarily turn back to body stain tests. Cause I want to get agate- like texture in my work. And perhaps at last, I will mix these two way of colouring together, which depends on my need.

Before glaze firing

Terracotta,  clay from Uni shop,  Royal Porcelain

1,   1+2.                      5.                         5,   1

2,   1+3.                      6.                         6,   2

3,   1+4.                      5+6.                 5+6,   3

4,   2+3.                      6+5.                 6+5,   4

                                                    2+4.    

                                                    3+4.                                 

 1) Terracotta

Left: 1, 2, 3, 4

Right:1+2, 1+3, 1+4, 2+3, 2+4, 3+4

1
I like the blue part of colour in this glaze that the green part feels dirty. Overall, it gives me a subtile feeling, not too bad but..

1

2
I quite like this glaze, the matt colour, smooth feeling of tactility as well as little dots in it. Its' name is Creamy Blue, but actually it's yellow. The colour has nice contrast with the clay itself.

2

3
I also like this one. This is a kind of natural, comfortable matt green. It's still smooth, but I can feel the little  uneven details on the surface. Also It goes well with the clay base.

3

4
I accidentally over added water at the last second, so it turned out not so satisfying.  It feels pretty weird and mysterious on the red clay, but I may need it if that is what my design needs.

4

1+2
This one reminds me spring snow on green mountain. It's like Chinese or Japanese painting or  tie dye.  I may use this one to glaze one of my work first, cause it is the most harmonious one.

1+2

1+3
The blue went darker after mixing.

1+3

1+4
This one has some similarity to the previous one, but is has one more light blue layer.

1+4

2+3
It seemed I didn't apply enough 2 on the clay that the result was not so obvious. But from what I can see, they together are not so bad.

2+3
It is a good surprise that their boundary turned into brown, when 3 was not thick enough. 

2+4
4 melted in to a gloss form in this case. I'd like to do more test about this and see what's really going on.

2+4

3+4
iron, swamp, blue sky and lake, landscape.
Strange attraction to me.

3+4

2) Clay from Uni shop - left 1

Royal Porcelain - middle and right

Clay from Uni shop

5
This glaze should be matt, warm orange with yellow and white, but somehow it is completely white.  I am not sure whether it needs much higher temperature since the temperature I fired is in its required range.

6
No problem with this.
It needs 10s to be sank in the glaze.

5+6
I like the way that the purple melted even more and turned into various blue, which brought a more lush effect.

5+6

6+5

6+5

 Royal Porcelain 

5
When came to this clay, this glaze flowed down crazily. The pieces above and these were fired together in the same layer, same kiln, same time.

6

5+6
This one also melted further than the 5+6 above.  But I like this colour more because of the white base underneath.

5+6

6+5

6+5

1
Though the glazes from 1-4 are for lower temperature, but I still tried them on porcelain. Some of them turned out quite good, however this one is not what I prefer normally. 

1

2
The real colour of this one should be lighter than the picture and looks better. Compared to the one on terracotta,  this one is glossy and has multi details and colour changes on it.

2

3
This one also melted quite crazy.
green colour has algae texture. I don't like the way that white base showed up.

3

4
This one became much better than the first 4, I must say. I really like this pure, glossy blue.

4