The Maple Building, Kentish Town, London
The trend for converting noble industrial buildings into prime residential developments continues throughout London. Early in 2016 I was delighted to receive a call from a former student of mine, Gemma Gordon Duff, of interior designer/developers Gordon Duff & Linton. She was busy working on the former furniture factory of Maple, Waring & Gillow in Kentish Town, North London; it was to become a number of well appointed apartments, some select penthouses, and it would be complete with concierge service. Gemma had seen my art on LinkedIn, and felt that it could work well within the space,
The visuals produced by the designers showed that the soon-to-be-completed reception space at The Maple Building used bold, simple, shapes and rich materials. My response to this well-crafted space was to use similarly bold and simple geometry to create art that complemented it in my usual style, and with my usual materials (metal leaf), but my first task was to work out the appropriate size for the artwork.
Gemma knew that she wanted three works, each one square in format, "probably about 1 metre by 1 metre" but it still took me a good deal of sketching of the elevations to work out precisely what size pieces would look right on the wall. It may sound odd, but I suppose that's the designer in me rather than the artist - as far as I was concerned it wasn't just the artwork itself that was important, but the proportions of the whole that mattered, including the "negative space" surrounding the framed art. Once the size was established, canvases were ordered (in this case, board - backed to make them extra sturdy for hanging in a public space).
Several sketches with ideas for the three artworks were shown to Gemma, and the final selections were then marked up on canvases before the metal leaf was applied. As usual, once the leaf is in place, I brush it with very fine wire wool, the finest you can normally buy, in fact. Different sections are brushed in different directions, so that the look and feel of the work changes as the viewer moves around it.
We had already decided that simple tray frames would be the most suitable way to display the work, and these were made on-site by the project carpenters, and finished in one of the paint colours that matched the door and window frames, helping to tie the whole look together and making for a really cohesive interior.
I was very happy with the end result and, more importantly, so was the client. Do yoou need artwork for your interiors? If the answer is yes, please get in touch and we can talk about what I can do for you.