Design Fuel

our regular contribution to the ASID website and newsletter

How do you support your creative side? This feature aspires to fuel ideas, not by supplying designs to copy, but by offering related experiences to free the artist inside the designer.

Design Fuel for Summer 07:
DAMASK REINVENTED The Classics are ever created anew from a contemporary perspective.

Artists continually revisit cultural icons, fitting them to new conditions. Interiors also trace the lines of cultural change through the process of 'contemporizing' classical elements. One classical element currently up for renewal is Damask, the woven textile pattern usually comprised of a symmetrical floral spray in a leafy trellis.

Damask fabric is an international hallmark of luxury. It has covered the walls, furniture and windows of the palaces of the leaders of church and state for five centuries. It exudes formality and strength in the residences and business settings that utilize its luster. Typically woven of silk, cotton or a combination of the two and dyed in saturated colours, it takes a logical central position when colour is important. Damask has never been out of style.

Gainsborough Damask, from London, available through Bilbrough Toronto, has been the official choice of the English royalty since 1980. The generously scaled patterns and voluptuous colours are rendered in weaves of the highest quality. Another established house of damask is Rubelli of Venice, represented in Canada by Telio & Cie and in New York by Bergamo Fabrics. Rubelli is offering, in addition to its century old styles, a very large scale silk damask in the Bises Collection with a 48" pattern that would fully repeat only twice in an average drapery length.

Other textile houses such as Donghia are showing pumped-up damasks ("San Gimignano"), but it is the Zoffany "Nureyev" damask that is making a sensation. It is so oversized that only a portion of a single foral spray appears on the largest sofa. Technically the damask pattern appears because the vertical threads of one colour fill in the background satin weave and the horizontal threads in another colour or fibre predominate in the pattern motif.

Now the colours used in the Zoffany pattern are so strong and the combinations so bold, that the effect has a high impact. Taken with the trend for sizing large, this is a clear reconstruction of a classic into a thoroughly contemporary product. Zoffany fabrics are available through Tessuti Uno in Toronto.

And lastly, for those who feel that you can go overboard with scale, the gorgeous Scalamandre "Gabriel" is a reproduction of an 1830 textile in beautiful shades of brown, ruby red, deep azure, emerald and white silk/cotton. It is the double height of the crown-shaped flower basket and ribbon twined trellis pattern combined with the clarity of the shadings that renders it memorable. At Primavera in Toronto.

Is it possible to refrain from using all of these damasks at every suitable opportunity?