DOI Heft:
No. 38 (May, 1896)
DOI Artikel:S., E. B.: Some recent designs by Mr. C. F. A. Voysey
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.17296#0225
Some Recent Designs by Mr. Voysey
The knack of producing effective repeating pat-
terns is by no means a common gift; and where it
exists the power of distinct invention of new motives
is not always present with it. Nine-tenths of the
patterns of all periods are more or less ingenious
rearrangements of stock motives, which have
served a similar purpose ten thousand times, and
will go on doing so for thousands more.
Once a designer introduces a new motive, as
Mr. Voysey with his birds for instance, any one
can do the same. But whereas the first designer
drew his inspiration from Nature, and because of-
the pleasure he derived in adapting certain forms
to the unconventional simplicity essential in flat
design, achieved a direct success, it does not follow
that it was the subject which attracted him that is
responsible for the result. A really decorative
artist will make an effective pattern out of the most
commonplace motives. Some borders to a child's
book, Abroad, published several years ago by Messrs.
Marcus Ward, show great ingenuity. In the limited
space Mr. Thomas Crane took the common ob-
jects of the cafe or the restaurant, the tram-tickets,
and a hundred other foreign trifles which are just
sufficiently unlike their English representatives to
attract the attention of visitors, and made of them
most effective and novel decorations. We all
know the jumbled mass of "appropriate" objects,
naturalistically treated, grouped with no regard for
scale in the headings of papers devoted to sports
and the like. In these you find a rose as big as a
fishing basket, a horseshoe the size of a target.
How not to make patterns from everyday motives
is exemplified on every hand, but how to simplify
the forms and arrange them happily in symmetrical
lines and masses is not often met with in current
products.
Yet every nation of the past has tried its hand
at conventional ornament. Chinese, Japanese,
Indian, Persian, Egyptian, Greek, Arabian, Italian,
German, and French art have all left superb
instances of their achievements in pattern. Why,
therefore, should not England to-day do the same
instead of binding itself always to the canons of
dead art, and re-mixing the cosmopolitan motives
from the above and other sources ? Besides, the
originals of the motives conventionalised in the
older schools of pattern are, many of them, un-
known in their natural forms to the man in the
street to-day. Comparatively few people have
seen the lotus in rank natural growth; laurel
crowns are not common features at our athletic
contests ; harpies, griffins, and supernatural forms
that were as real to those who used them as an
210
angel is to the orthodox Christian to-day, now
appear to many people merely fatuous contrivances
that fail to raise a smile much less inspire us with
awe. Others always misunderstand the symbolism
of earlier times. I know an estimable and not
inartistic person, who always connectswreaths of any
sort—laurel, floral, or what not—with funerals and
with funerals alone. If we leave the hackneyed
motives and go to Nature, who ever goes anew to
her may find, as always, plenty of material. Toad-
stools and fungi, for instance, have, one suspects,
never inspired decorators before Mr. Voysey was
attracted by their quaint forms; but for you who
DESIGN FOR WALL-I'APER
FROM THE ORIGINAL DRAWING BY C. F. A. VOYSE
The knack of producing effective repeating pat-
terns is by no means a common gift; and where it
exists the power of distinct invention of new motives
is not always present with it. Nine-tenths of the
patterns of all periods are more or less ingenious
rearrangements of stock motives, which have
served a similar purpose ten thousand times, and
will go on doing so for thousands more.
Once a designer introduces a new motive, as
Mr. Voysey with his birds for instance, any one
can do the same. But whereas the first designer
drew his inspiration from Nature, and because of-
the pleasure he derived in adapting certain forms
to the unconventional simplicity essential in flat
design, achieved a direct success, it does not follow
that it was the subject which attracted him that is
responsible for the result. A really decorative
artist will make an effective pattern out of the most
commonplace motives. Some borders to a child's
book, Abroad, published several years ago by Messrs.
Marcus Ward, show great ingenuity. In the limited
space Mr. Thomas Crane took the common ob-
jects of the cafe or the restaurant, the tram-tickets,
and a hundred other foreign trifles which are just
sufficiently unlike their English representatives to
attract the attention of visitors, and made of them
most effective and novel decorations. We all
know the jumbled mass of "appropriate" objects,
naturalistically treated, grouped with no regard for
scale in the headings of papers devoted to sports
and the like. In these you find a rose as big as a
fishing basket, a horseshoe the size of a target.
How not to make patterns from everyday motives
is exemplified on every hand, but how to simplify
the forms and arrange them happily in symmetrical
lines and masses is not often met with in current
products.
Yet every nation of the past has tried its hand
at conventional ornament. Chinese, Japanese,
Indian, Persian, Egyptian, Greek, Arabian, Italian,
German, and French art have all left superb
instances of their achievements in pattern. Why,
therefore, should not England to-day do the same
instead of binding itself always to the canons of
dead art, and re-mixing the cosmopolitan motives
from the above and other sources ? Besides, the
originals of the motives conventionalised in the
older schools of pattern are, many of them, un-
known in their natural forms to the man in the
street to-day. Comparatively few people have
seen the lotus in rank natural growth; laurel
crowns are not common features at our athletic
contests ; harpies, griffins, and supernatural forms
that were as real to those who used them as an
210
angel is to the orthodox Christian to-day, now
appear to many people merely fatuous contrivances
that fail to raise a smile much less inspire us with
awe. Others always misunderstand the symbolism
of earlier times. I know an estimable and not
inartistic person, who always connectswreaths of any
sort—laurel, floral, or what not—with funerals and
with funerals alone. If we leave the hackneyed
motives and go to Nature, who ever goes anew to
her may find, as always, plenty of material. Toad-
stools and fungi, for instance, have, one suspects,
never inspired decorators before Mr. Voysey was
attracted by their quaint forms; but for you who
DESIGN FOR WALL-I'APER
FROM THE ORIGINAL DRAWING BY C. F. A. VOYSE