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PATTERN, PRINT and ABSTRACTION

In the art sessions people often work with the materials in an experimental and abstracted way, creating patterns, focusing on mark making, shape, gesture, colour, line, texture.

Here are a broad collection of works and links to artists that explore pattern, print, abstraction and colour, ranging from the world of fine art, fashion and design to Aboriginal Dot paintings and Traditional Ndebele wall paintings, and the decorative arts.

CLICK ON THE IMAGE BELOW (LEFT) TO TAKE YOU TO A PATTERN AND PRINT PINTEREST BOARD THAT ONE OF THE AiH ARTISTS HAS COMPILED.

Old Japanese print with pattern made up of pink and white flowers with green leaves and blue swirling marks that look like water or a river.
Shinbijutsukai Japanese print pattern made up of colourful snails, flowers and lines.
Japanese Design with floral pattern that is made up of energetic but delicate line work.
Japanese design with circular floral motifs that are gree, orange and pale brown against and pale blue and bright blue patterned background.

Images: Japanese Designs (1902), Selected pages from 1901 and 1902 issues of Shin-Bijutsukai, a Japanese design magazine. Source: Internet Archive / Smithsonian Libraries  and The Public Domain Review, Not in Copyright.

Painting by Louisa Chambers titled Creature, irregular folded shape with geometric patterned surface in greens, oranges, browns and yellows situated on a beige and clay rose ground.

Louisa Chambers, Creature, 2015, 22 x 16cm gouache on card. © Louisa Chambers

Painting by Louisa Chambers of tall irregular form with coloured patterned surface situated on a grey and yellow checkerboard patterned ground with a crem and minty green striped background.

Louisa Chambers, Lean 2017,  40 x 30 cm gouache on board. © Louisa Chambers

Painting by Louisa Chambers of coloured abstract forms floating against a dusty pink background.

Louisa Chambers, Fragments  2017,  gouache on paper. © Louisa Chambers

Painting by Louisa Chambers. Bulky form with colourful geometric patterned surface against a patterened deep blue and pale grey blue background.

Louisa Chambers, K and Q  2019,  acrylic on linen 60 x 50cm. © Louisa Chambers

Paintng by Louisa Chambers titled Pleats. Flat couloured stripes or bands with scalloped edges divide up the picture plane. Rose pinks, jade greens, turquoise blue, mauve and ochre colours.

Louisa Chambers, Pleats  2018,  gouache on board. © Louisa Chambers

Albert Racinet's L'Ornement Polychrome, plates with ornamental designs of the Renaissance.
Albert Racinet's L'Ornement Polychrome, plates with Egyptian ornamental designs and patterns.

Images above from Albert Racinet's L'Ornement Polychrome (1869–73), RawPixel, public domain CCO

Abstract colour painting on fabric draped over a line hanging in front of gey panelling.

Artwork by Sophie Mackfall. The Current is Coming Towards Us, with ramoslübbert in Arnis, Germany, Image credited to Christian Lübbert. 

Abstract painting cut to an irregular shape in greys, grey blue and muted pale browns mounted on white wall.

Image courtesy of the artist by Sophie Mackfall.

Abstract painting cut to an irregular shape in primary blues, reds and yellows with grey, green and navy.

Image courtesy of the artist by Sophie Mackfall.

Draped abstract colourful painting, hanging on a line outdoors, photographed in the afternoon light.

Sophie Mackfall,  Materials: Acrylic on canvas, line, pegs. ramoslübbert, Art Night Open, Art Night 2019. Press release extract:

'This shall be for a bond between us explores the intersections of nature, art and community space as a fertile ground for cultural encounter. Encouraged by the bucolic context of Lloyd Park, the works connect with the patterns of nature and the mutability of the materials, reflecting upon a society that values and conserves the land and its ecologies.'

Installation view of abstract paintings that hang from the wall, from lines in the exhibition space and are laid flat on the floor.

Sophie Mackfall, All works under the collective title 'Y Shaped Strokes', images by Adam Grainger.

Blue, Red and Yellow abstract painting draped from a sculptural structure of sticks and strings.

Sophie Mackfall,  Yellow Moving Edge, with Lynne Fulton as part of Thoresby Thursday's, acrylic on canvas.

Images above courtesy of the artist Sophie Mackfall. To find out more about Sophie's work visit her website by clicking here.

" The nine decades of artist Yayoi Kusama’s life have taken her from rural Japan to the New York art scene to contemporary Tokyo, in a career in which she has continuously innovated and re-invented her style. Well-known for her repeating dot patterns, her art encompasses an astonishing variety of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, film, performance and immersive installation. It ranges from works on paper featuring intense semi-abstract imagery, to soft sculpture known as ‘Accumulations’, to her ‘Infinity Net’ paintings, made up of carefully repeated arcs of paint built up into large patterns. Since 1977 Kusama has lived voluntarily in a psychiatric institution, and much of her work has been marked with obsessiveness and a desire to escape from psychological trauma. In an attempt to share her experiences, she creates installations that immerse the viewer in her obsessive vision of endless dots and nets or infinitely mirrored space. At the centre of the art world in the 1960s, she came into contact with artists including Donald Judd, Andy Warhol, Joseph Cornell and Claes Oldenburg, influencing many along the way. She has traded on her identity as an ‘outsider’ in many contexts – as a female artist in a male-dominated society, as a Japanese person in the Western art world, and as a victim of her own neurotic and obsessional symptoms. After achieving fame and notoriety with groundbreaking art happenings and events, she returned to her country of birth and is now Japan’s most prominent contemporary artist."

TATE

" Droplets, waves and mountains… the etchings held prisoner in blocks of stone were the inspiration for the Japanese master bookbinders’ marbled paper. Inkjet printing has transposed these effects to fabric, without ever equalling the delicacy and radiance of the patterns found by Hermès in an old album in the archives of its Lyon textile sector. After years of research, this technique of silk marbling using a compressed, through-coloured starch paste was rediscovered in Kyoto. The Nose family is its custodian."

Directed by Frédéric Laffon

HERMES

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