WHAT A LINE DOES TO FORM

There was a book of Escher in the home I grew up in.

My father was a civil engineer. He designed bridges, and he loved Escher for the same reasons he loved his own work. Symmetry, regularity, everything having its place in space.

That was the thinking in our house. Not just art appreciation, but an appreciation of the beauty that structure and form can bring.

I didn't know I was learning anything. But you can't look at that work as a child without absorbing the idea that a line isn't decoration.

A line does something to a form.

A few weeks ago, Sera and I went to the Escher exhibition in London with our children. I stood next to my daughter in front of the same work my father had shown me in his book and watched her looking at it with that particular kind of concentration children have when something has properly caught their attention.

Nobody sat me down and explained any of this. The meaning just gets passed on. One generation looking at something, and the next one looking with their own eyes and developing their own perspective.

I also grew up wearing kikois

It's the striped cotton cloth you see all over the East African coast, and it is the most useful thing anyone has ever made. You wrap it round you, you dry yourself on it, you sit on it, you carry the shopping in it. It was my go-to edgy wrap skirt of the time.

Nobody ever told me it was design. It was just what was there.
Which is the bit I keep thinking about now, because a kikoi is much the older idea. Long before anyone framed a line and hung it on a wall, people were putting stripes on the things they used every day, because it made them better to live with.

Escher was a book on a shelf. A kikoi was what you grabbed on the way out of the door. And it is the second one, the ordinary one, that has been going on for centuries.

So when I put a stripe on something now, I am not borrowing from a designer. I am adding a small piece to a very long conversation.

BRIDGET REILY

I have been profoundly influenced by Bridget Riley.

One of the better things about my time living in London is that I came across the work of people I admire while I was doing something else entirely.
Hers was on a wall by the river at Southbank, and whenever I happened upon it, I stopped. I couldn't help it.

Bridget wanted to paint colour. Not pictures of things that happened to contain colour, but what colour does to you.

The problem was that every shape she put on a canvas got in the way of truly exploring it. A circle is observed as a circle before it's seen as a colour.
So she took the shapes away.

What she kept was the straight line, which she described as one of the most fundamental forms. It has almost nothing to say for itself, so it lets the colour do the talking.

Then she spent decades finding out what happened when those lines met.
Small studies on graph paper. Colours mixed by hand. Strips of painted paper moved around a table, sequences rearranged, one colour pulled out and another dropped in. Looking at what happened at every boundary where one stripe met the next.

A single painting could take months. The thing I keep coming back to is this.

You can never really see a colour by itself. It's always changed by the colour beside it.

A stripe isn't just a stripe. It's a relationship.

Which is how we got here

We learned that when we started choosing colours for These Good Days.
You can't choose a colour on its own. You have to know where it will sit, how often it repeats, and what it does to whatever comes next.

I see my own working in Bridget Reily's. Colours moved around a table until they tell the story I have for them.

As someone who came of age in the nineties and wore black for years afterwards, this exploration of colour is exhilarating.

Liking a stripe takes no effort at all. Making a good one takes weeks.
A millimetre wider changes the balance. A shade warmer changes the colour beside it.

It turns out the simpler something looks, the more decisions are hiding inside it.

WE NEVER MEANT TO MAKE STRIPED THINGS

This is the slightly ridiculous part

What is in our Founders' Edit

I bet you're noticing stripes everywhere now, right?