Mr Saunders' Dream of Spring

Jonathan Saunders SS11

I once traveled all the way to Paris and stood queuing in the rain to see a Mark Rothko retrospective. Rothko’s iconic paintings of luminous, soft-edged rectangles saturated with colour glowed from the walls in deep dark reds, oranges, yellows, maroons, browns, blacks, and greys.

I once studied briefly under Jonathan Saunders at London Printworks Trust in Brixton where I screen printed finely flowered camouflaged jump jets onto cream canvas. Saunder's gorgeously feminine dresses make me think of drifts of snowdrops and narcissus in spring meadows.

 
...A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line...

from William Wordsworth, Daffodils

Mark Rothko, Yellow and Gold

In Primavera, or Allegory of Spring, an elaborate pastoral scene by Italian Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli, fabulously dressed figures feature with a blindfolded putto in an orange grove.  In a floral-patterned dress and crowned in blossom Flora scatters petals collected in the folds of her gown. Her companion, the nymph Chloris, draped in diaphanous white, is being seized by winged Zephyrus, the biting wind of March. Clustered on the left are the three graces wrapped in palest chiffon,  Hermes draped in rust-red wearing gladiator boots and Venus in a bustier brocaded, barely blue empire line dress.

 








Accessorise Saunders' tangerine printed dress with
Ocabini's mandarin chiffon cashmere scarf

Primavera Plane

In the Begining

7 November 2010

Tracks of particles produced in a smashup 

of lead-ions in the Large Hadron Collider.

Background light filling the Universe holds a history that stretches back before Big Bang; the evidence is in the glow of Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. New analysis of relic radiation from Big Bang suggests the universe got its start eons earlier and has cycled through a myriad of episodes of birth and death, with Big Bang merely the most recent in a series of starting guns.

Someone once explained the cosmos as sort of like soap bubbles floating in the air. Each time two bubble universes collide, rather than pop-you're-gone, it's crash-bang-splinter and a new universe begins from the bits blown off by the bump. 

Jonathan Saunders scarf, Resort 2010

November's mini big bang created in the Large Hadron Collider was incredibly hot and dense. Sub-atomic fireballs with temperatures of over ten trillion degrees, a million times hotter than the centre of the Sun, melted into a hot dense soup. In Ancient Rome the humble scarf was used not to stay snug, but as a sweat cloth to keep cool, worn in hot weather around the neck or tied to a belt.

Jonathan Saunders' graphic aesthetic for his Resort 2010 collection started as watercolors on graph paper and exploded into a neon-shot grid of layered lead-ion, collision-like printed streaks.

Shine the Light Fantastic

A star cluster bursts into life in the Milky Way.

Ocabini chiffon cashmere scarves in Silver Shimmer, Emerald and Mandarin.

 

 

Photo credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration.