Another kind of textile: Marc Bankowsky

all photos from M. Bankowsky

There's nothing quite like fabric in the material world, but that doesn't mean it is inimitable. In fact, I collect or at least mentally record the instances I find other media that express the drapes and folds of textiles, so I'll start showing you some I've found. 

I've admired this screen for several years, but  I've just learned that the designer, Marc Bankowsky, had spent many years of his creative career weaving and making impressive textile installations . A true textilian,  he participated for several years at the Biennale internationale de la tapisserie Laussane and has exhibited his textile sculptures at the Musée d'art moderne of Paris and the Centre Pompidou. 

 Bankowsky's work has been directed towards the decorative arts since the 1990s. He also sculpts and makes very appealingly fanciful furniture of bronze. You can find a full range of his work in bronze, plaster and polyester resin on his site.

Textiles clearly remain important for the artist.

 This hinged screen has something of the drape and drama of Staff swags from the 30-40s as do 

the series of  pieces that follow. 

console

pedestals

frame

Color by Monet

photo Le style et la matière

At Giverny, Monet's house and gardens.

The text is below...

photo Le style et la matière

photo Le style et la matière

photo Le style et la matière

photo Le style et la matière

photo Le style et la matière

photo Le style et la matière

photo Le style et la matière

"La couleur est mon obsession quotidienne, ma joie et mon tourment."

Color is my daily obsession, my joy and torment.

When the undertaker draped Monet’s coffin with a black shroud in sign of mourning, statesman ,Georges Clemenceau, intervened saying,

 Pas de noir pour Monet, le noir n’est pas une couleur !

Not black for Monet, black is not a color !

He then went to the window, unfastened the old flowered chintz curtain with colors of perwinkles, forget-me-nots, and hydrangeas to spread it instead over the coffin of his close friend.

(as related by Alexandre Duval-Stalla in Claude Monet, Georges Clemenceau: Une histoire, deux caractères)

More on fabrics at St Tyl: The other side of fabrics: brocade vs. lampas

The other side of fabrics: brocade vs. lampas

Esther by John Everett Millais

"The painting depicts Esther, the Jewish wife of the Persian king Ahasuerus, as she prepares to enter the presence of her husband. As she is uninvited, she risks death, but does so to inform him of a plot against the Jews.
Millais borrowed the Yellow Jacket, a gown given to General Gordon by the Chinese emperor after his defeat of the Taiping rebellion. In order to create a culturally unspecific effect, he turned it inside out, producing the abstract patterns visible in the painting."

Wikipedia explains this intriguing detail. The source of information is
Millais, J.G.,The Life and Letters of John Everett Millais

photo Gésbi-St Tyl

A wealth of silk on the back of some Tassinari & Chatel  fabrics.

Esther's gown is brocaded, which accounts for the great expanse of yellow ground. Tiny shuttles have been worked over certain zones on the loom to form the decoration. Like embroidery, the threads appear only where there is pattern, but as this is a brocade, they are woven in.

The lampas fabrics in my photo have supplementary decorative wefts that are mostly floating on the reverse side of the cloth where they are not worked into the pattern of flowers on the front -  the reason for an entire hairy cushion of silk across the back of the fabric.

This is possible when the fabric will not have heavy use, such as with certain curtains or in a museum or other historic reconstruction. Otherwise, a lampas weave uses a binding warp which extends from selvedge to selvedge to better anchor the weft threads to the back. If the fabric had been for upholstery, the decorative wefts would have been firmly bound to the ground, making a heavier, more compact cloth.