degero miro claro

I found this image in a search for “wallpaper” on flickr. My wall calendar this year is of wallpapers from the 1910’s from the William Morris collection at the Brooklyn Museum. It was a bit of a departure for me because older wallpaper can be such a traditional and even conservative (read: stoic and un-sensual) visual choice. The samples in the calendar I’ve got are more on the creative and color-themed side though, so they really appeal to my eye. They’re a little traditional and very symmetrical, but some have really modern and striking color choices, some are heading toward deco. On a side-note, that kind of gives me an idea of how limited mass media is, because I think I’ve been under the impression that really funky-type, interesting, expressive stuff wasn’t as common in certain times of history, but really more of it was going on than people ever see commonly.

I like the image above because it has a very beautiful, kind of ornate flower design, it’s in one of my most favorite colors – blue, and the paper is aged. I LOVE when coloring on things ages or fades. What I actually love a lot is when you see use of color in that way, but the image or object it used on is not aged or distressed itself. For example if the coloring on the paper in the image above was exactly the same as it appears, but the paper was new, I would think this would be an awesome choice. You get the combination of clean, intentional designs in the wallpaper, but then these fading colors that look luminous and natural and kind of mimic the flow and ebbing of energy. It’s like, colors that you see naturally or chemically faded (like with bleach or something) have these smooth gradients that look like the visual representation of emotion. I really like that.