Here is another example of custom made T-shirts from my design studio. I used figure-stamps and added drawings of accessories I remember from circus performances.
T-shirt Circus
Stamps carved on Speedball Speedy-Cut, cotton fabric,
Procion fabric dye, Setacolor fabric paint. 1997
Upcycling with paint: the design for this small table, well-proportioned but bland, was created by masking off successive parts of the beech wood table top and painting it in different colours. I wasn’t thinking of a particular motive, but I began to see an image which I best describe through a poem:Â
Deserted place,
trees stretching toward the horizon.
Dust on the sidewalk,
dappled with sunlight.
Curtains drawn to block out heat.
Branches yearning
for the cool of concrete.
This image reminds me of a still and brooding Sunday Afternoon, which I chose as the name for this table.
Sunday Afternoon
Beech wood, acrylic paint, varnish. 1999.
64 x 64 x 74 cm
Some of my earliest fabric designs were created for place mats. They belong on a table, so I decorated them with food themes for different times of the day.
Acrylic paint, acrylic varnish, cotton cloth. 1994.
40×30 cm
Katazome is a technique of decorating fabric where areas of fabric which are not to be dyed or painted are blocked out. There are many different ways of blocking out; a well-known one is batik, where wax keeps dye or fabric paint from bonding with the fabric. Katazome is a Japanese technique, using rice flour paste as a resist or mask. I tried this on coarse cotton, and it did work, even though finer fabric would have given more detailed results. If following the traditional method, I would have used a stencil, but I preferred to do my geometric design freehand.
In my early teens an old neighbour once gave me a pile of wooden cigar boxes. I used them to create what’s called “Guckkasten” in German, a perspective box or peep-show box. They contain small bric-a-brac figures in front of a matching background, arranged like frozen scenes of a play. I still have some of the original cigar boxes, and recently I needed one to make a small stage for the tin figure of Charlie Rivel, the famous Catalan circus clown. His stage-in-a-box got a luxurious curtain, gold glitter, a proper shadow and a matching frame. Curtains up!
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Pewter figures, wood, glass, paper, acrylic paint.
This box is called The Pink Dress.
16×16 cm