Cimorene

Welcome to more of William Morris's beautiful and classic English Arts & Crafts wallpapers - the best wallpaper designs ever, in my view, and the greatest architectural and decorative art aesthetic style. If you like these, you may be interested in my previous two posts of Morris wallpaper icons.

All of these icons are free to use, modify, and share. Credit is appreciated, but not required.














( names )

I love all of these, but Leicester is my favorite (it only has a couple of colorways, which is why it isn't the most represented!). Pink and Rose is a stunning chintz, so some credit goes to Dutch and Indian textile artists and the Mughal dynasty artists who developed that distinctive style of decorative painting on which it is based.

Here's the last of my modern art icons from the artists associated with the Bauhaus. (I don't say I won't make any more modern art icons, but I haven't lined any up.)

You may be interested in the previous Kandinsky icons and previous Itten icons as well.

Free to good homes! Modify & share at will. Credit appreciated.

Proto-fantasy novelist and pre-Raphaelite William Morris is the father of the Arts & Crafts movement (my favorite architectural and decorative style), and his textiles and wallpapers were wildly popular in Victorian homes and today are ubiquitous in yuppie remodels and with set dressers creating interiors of the period (partly because they are probably the best-known designs of the period and are widely available because his company, Morris & Co, is still printing his designs from the original wooden blocks. They were not nearly as widespread as you'd think from tv and movies of recent years though, nor have they ever been affordable enough to be).

Icons are free to good homes. Modify if you wish. Credit appreciated.








*titles at bottom


Obviously they are decades earlier than the Bauhaus paintings I've been making icons of lately, but actually, both Arts & Crafts and Bauhaus were strongly political and philosophical movements. Morris was a socialist, and the driving principle behind his work was the democratization of art - the elimination of classist distinctions between the fine arts and the work of craftsmen, and the availability of beautiful objects for everyone. His ideas on this subject were one of the strongest influences on the Bauhaus, which sought to democratize the arts by teaching fine arts, skilled crafts, and architecture simultaneously; and also to make their designs reasonably affordable to manufacture, focusing much of their work on institutional design.

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You may be interested in Paul Klee icons and Paul Klee icons part 2.

Free to download, use, share, and modify. Credit appreciated.

Paul Klee icons [part 1] was here.

Free to download, modify, and use. Credit appreciated.

The Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky (1866 – 1944) is the most famous artist associated with the Bauhaus, and is considered one of the originators of Western abstract art. Born in Moscow and raised in present-day Ukraine, he was already a law professor when he took up painting at 30. He moved to Germany to study art, returning to Russia in the years around WWI, then teaching at the Bauhaus from 1922-1933 when it was closed by the Nazis and he fled to France.



Free to download, use, modify and share. Credit appreciated but not required.

I was inspired to investigate the fine artists associated with the Bauhaus after thinking about how much I love vintage Bauhaus poster art. I did! And here are some icons of the paintings of Paul Klee (1879-1940), a Swiss-born German artist and draftsman associated with expressionism, cubism, and surrealism, who

taught at the Bauhaus from January 1921 to April 1931.[43] He was a "Form" master in the bookbinding, stained glass, and mural painting workshops and was provided with two studios.[44] In 1922, Kandinsky joined the staff and resumed his friendship with Klee. Later that year the first Bauhaus exhibition and festival was held, for which Klee created several of the advertising materials.[45] Klee welcomed the many conflicting theories and opinions within the Bauhaus: "I also approve of these forces competing one with the other if the result is achievement." [wikipedia]

I just put him first because his works were my favorites of the artists I explored.






My favorite of these paintings is actually "Fish Magic" (#5), but it and his other works like it don't miniaturize well.

Free to use, modify, and share. Credit appreciated but not required.

When I was a teenager I painted a number of wooden chairs that make up the dining set at my parents' house in colorful folk art-inspired patterns. (My sister and mom painted more, and we collaborated on several.) (I dug through my old photos for half an hour, but I can't find any pictures of them. Including the one in the kitchen right now, lol.)

When I moved to Finland waxjism had a round table and chairs, which we later gave to her brother and then her mom, and replaced with a second-hand set she bought from a workmate, both with heavily finished wood and upholstered seats (the latter were really ugly and 80s/90s looking too) which I inadvertently destroyed attempting to reupholster them. We got rid of the last of that set when we moved into this flat and we bought a small square kitchen table with leaves, but because of my attachment to hand-painting chairs we didn't buy any more of those.

I've painted one chair since we moved here, because a few years after that Ikea discontinued their unfinished wood dining chair (the only unfinished chair they currently make belongs to the Ivar line of bookcases and doesn't have enough back pieces for my taste). I would prefer to paint old wooden chairs, but because I would prefer not to walk home carrying them on the bus with me and we haven't had a car since the first year I lived here, we've never quite managed to expand our chair collection beyond that one.

We have a bunch of spare folding chairs that Wax's mom didn't need, one of which literally dissolved into pieces and dumped Wax on the floor when she sat down in it last Christmas Eve to dinner; and we have two upholstered foot cubes and a few wooden footstools. But even then the total # of chairs in the flat was 8 at maximum (before the aforementioned chair dissolution) until we bought 2 more footstools last weekend. So now we could, in theory, have my brother- and sister-in-law and all their children over to eat... with 3 people on folding chairs, 1 on a stepstool and 3 on footstools of some kind. (I mean, that wouldn't happen, probably - if they came over in an emergency some of them would sit on the sofa and in the armchairs - or if we were planning a dinner party they'd have it at their house - but I'm just saying.)

But ultimately, it's just really hard to get around to scoping out used furniture stores for old chairs on the rare occasions we've borrowed a car or go shopping with MIL, because somehow other errands always seem to rise to the top.

Now, however, we've run out of storage space for tools and art supplies and the like, and are in dire need of a sideboard, cabinet, buffet, or dresser of some sort, which absolutely must be old so that it will be made of wood and so that I can paint it, so for once I have real hope that I may acquire more chairs to paint, sort of incidentally along the way.

[fingers crossed emoji]

This is a post about the planning of the fantasy portraits I painted of the triplets for Christmas for my mom and anyone else who might be interested (she's the only sure bet, as it were.)

These are the pictures (embiggenable via clickthrough):



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