Stages of Poppy

Stages of Poppy

A poppy rises from nodding bud to seed head in one soft blue on warm white, a Gustavian palette carrying an Art Nouveau drawing. The ground resembles smooth handmade paper while each motif reads as a woodcut, solid colour opened by fine cut lines and rows of dots, in the one-blue manner of Japanese aizuri-e. Six stripes for each meter in scale, with slender columns in a half-drop repeat and a fine rod standing between each.

Fits in

• Bedroom
• Guest room
• Drawing room
• Dining room
• Turn of the century apartment
• Country manor

Color palette

One blue on warm white. The blue is soft and greyed, a clear step from the paper, so the drawing carries across a room without ever raising its voice. It is the palette of the Gustavian manor, grey-blue panelling and pale linen against white, with a family likeness to the blue and white of eighteenth-century Swedish faience, and it lets a Jugend drawing feel at home in a room of any age. Where the petals are cut through the blue lightens a step, and from a few metres the rods and stipple soften into pale pewter greys. By lamplight the paper warms and the blue deepens towards slate.

Complementing colors

The ground resembles smooth handmade paper: warm white and soft, with a faint horizontal grain like a sheet pressed between felts. On it every motif reads as a woodcut in one colour. The flats are dense and even yet let the grain show through, and the colour gathers into a slightly deeper edge along each contour, as ink does under the pressure of a block. Inside the forms, veins, stamens and rows of dots stay open as bare paper, crisp but a little irregular, the way a gouge leaves them. The whole evokes a one-colour woodcut, pulled by hand in blue.