Stages of Dahlia

Stages of Dahlia

A dahlia climbs the wall from seed to bud to full bloom and lets its first petal go at the top, one terracotta on unbleached linen, an Art Nouveau stripe drawn in the English manner of the 1890s with a Viennese Jugend rod between the columns. The ground reads as plain woven linen with the colour caught on the thread and thinning in the hollows, the marks of a hand cut block in the manner of the London studios of the 1890s. Medium in scale, with columns a forearm apart in a half-drop repeat, so bloom meets bud across every divider, the rising stripe of the art nouveau wall.

Fits in

• Hallway
• Dining room
• Drawing room
• Bedroom
• Turn of the century apartment
• Country house
• Boutique hotel

Color palette

One terracotta, the red of Venetian earth, carries the whole pattern, deepening where the colour gathers in the petals and lifting toward a sun faded tone where it thins over the weave. The ground is unbleached linen, warm and grey at once, with the lighter thread crowns and darker crossings that give a woven cloth its two tones. Red earth on natural linen is the oldest pairing in printed cloth, the palette of block printed hangings and of the sekelskifte hall. Under warm light the terracotta glows and the linen goes golden; in north light both cool and the stripe turns quiet.

The ground resembles unbleached linen in a plain weave, thread over thread, with a slow drift in tone across a hand width and the occasional thicker thread running through. The colour behaves as ink on cloth: it sits on the crowns of the threads and thins in the crossings, so every petal carries the weave through it, and the edges soften where the block met the fabric. Inside the forms the ground stays open as fine cut lines, veins and hatching, sharper than the outer contours, and a pale keyline separates petal from petal as a white line block would. The whole evokes hand block printing in one colour on natural linen.