GOLD CHAINS AND GEMOLOGY “I wanted to say something in tableware about jewelry. Plates are so fixed, and I kept thinking about fluidity. I wanted to capture the feeling of movement in something spare, elegant and thoroughly modern. Then one day, I put on a pair of my friend Rosanne Pugliese’s earrings (she is a jeweler, and our kids used to play baseball together), and voila! it was like I was hit by lightening. That’s always a good time to draw.”
MAISY’S DAISIES “Maisy’s Daisies is my ode to English Japanesque design. My brother and I ate apples and cheese for breakfast each morning in Victorian brown transfer-printed soup plates. We didn’t know the plates were old, but the simple breakfast conveyed great love. Maybe that’s why I became an antique ceramics dealer in my 30s. In those years, I sold lots of dinnerware with the kind of crowded designs that were on the soup plates — the plates looked Japanese, although the motifs were truly English.”
LOUIS “The inspiration here was all things Louis XIV, if you look at portraits of Louis he was vain, but also alluring and sexy. It would take hours to get the curls on his wigs just so, and the curls repeat throughout the period, in furniture and the decorative motifs of the day. Baroque art is both self-assured and dynamic, the two principals I relied in repeating the lace-like motif in LOUIS.”
TEXAS HILL AND TEXQUITE “One of our closest friends has created a heavenly home in the Texas Hill Country. Every time we are there, I am overwhelmed by the immense natural beauty of the place. The herons catch fish on the river, calves trot after their mothers, and lizards dart between bluebonnets. These moments create natural pictures with sand, rocks, sun, flowers, and water. The plates in these patterns portray elements of nature in differing balance to each other.”
SUSANI “Tracey Edwards and Toni Russo at Barney’s asked me to do something using Suzani motifs to accompany their exhibit of Suzani textiles in 2007. Suzanis are tribal textiles made by all the tribal groups located in Central Asia — ie Uzbekhistan, Kazakstan, etc. Each family creates designs that signify important elements of its own history. I stitched elements of my own patterns with my pen, then translated these to the plates.”
CLARISSA’S PICNIC “The inspiration came from wrought- iron gates and doorways made at the turn of the 20th century, because I was thinking about Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, and great English women designers pre 1920. The border creates a beautiful rhythm, like Clarissa Dalloway falling into a thoughtful trance while sewing — such a beautiful image.”
