March, 2007 Monthly archive
This flower design was an early example of Nina Levett’s flower designs. Levett’s first moveable wallpaper was made in size 36,8×36,8 cm. She painted several flowers in neon pink but she was frustrated by the result of these first paintings. The colours were translucent and the overall effect was poor. Levett could not achieve the colour effect that she wanted. The breakthrough came when the designer was approached by a company who asked her if she could produce wall stickers, as well as moveable wallpapers. In her reply to them she invented a way to cut out flowers by hand from neon pink skateboard grip tape, stuck onto baking paper and applied to varnished wood. Although, in the end, the company did not commission any further work, Nina Levett began to use this technique for moveable wallpapers. The neon pink has actually become her signature colour.
For an entire year after the discovery of this new technique, Nina Levett always designed the same flower on each of the sticky tapes and stuck them onto varnished wood. In 2007 she made about 40 such moveable wallpapers with dots and with flowers. The colour combinations were pink/orange, white/black, white/pink, brown/black, black/white, brown pink.
This painting was one of a collection that Nina Levett did over a period of about one year. During this phase, she cut out identical flowers onto a special grip tape and applied them to a varnished surface. She cut out hundreds of flowers, most of them exactly the same size. This project was very meditative: it relieved the pain she was suffering at the time. She had just separated from my children’s father and was feeling very bad. She likes that, by the amount of hours she spent on these flowers, they really became hers. In 2008 she bought a cutting machine to help to produce the flowers more easily. But, immediately after buying the machine, she lost interest in the flower project and in the end, threw away all of the flower templates. After that Nina started working on different techniques for the moveable wallpapers. More recently Nina Levett has tried to scan in and vectorize the patterns on the paintings for archival purposes.
Nian Levett loved the flowers when she first produced them. Later on, she was shown some of Tord Boontje’s work, and was amazed to see how similar some of her designs were, even though she had been unaware of his work when she was producing my own flowers.
She finds it strange that she has never managed to sell any of the art in this collection. Now that she has sold so many of her later works she wonders why it has been so hard to sell these. In a certain way they are SIGNATURE designs for her because the amount of time she put into them.
Nina Levett creates edgy and provocative tableware and textiles. This blog is about her design process and graphics, ornaments, patterns and inspirations.
