The Artist Designer (Page 4)

The Artist-Designer category celebrates the visionaries whose work has profoundly influenced the decorative arts, shaping movements, materials, and aesthetics across history. From William Morris’ intricate textile patterns to Eileen Gray’s modernist furniture, these artists seamlessly blend artistic expression with functional design. This section explores their creative processes, landmark works, and lasting impact on disciplines such as furniture, ceramics, textiles, glass, and metalwork. Whether pioneering Art Nouveau, Bauhaus, or contemporary digital design, these artists redefine the boundaries between art, craft, and industry, leaving an enduring legacy in the decorative and applied arts world.

Hilda surprised by a goat behind her by Duane Bryers

One of my favourite pinup artists was Minnesota born Duane Bryers, creator of the famous Hilda, a pleasingly, popular and plump pinup girl. Bryers’ background was as interesting as his illustrations. Born in northern Michigan, he excelled at acrobatics as a child. His family moved to Virginia, Minnesota, at 12 and he soon had the neighbourhood gang putting on the “Jingling Brothers circus, complete with burlap-sack sidewalls.Read More →

Warm, soft, luxuriant reds, mauves, saffron’s pinks, greens, and blues emanate in vaporous waves from each canvas of Jules Olitski’s paintings. He is well-known for his unwavering dedication to saturating his canvases with colour that is distinguished by the spray, the medium, and his use of an inclined foreshortened angle of vision, which rediscovers and extends a method of creating space pioneered by Claude Monet in the 1880s. Through the use of color, Olitski creates illusions of obliqueness.Read More →

Robert Bonfils Chair

Born in Paris, Robert Bonfils was a French graphic artist, painter, and designer. He studied at the École Germain-Pilon in 1903 and at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1906.

He worked for Henri Hamm, a furniture designer. His work included paintings, bookbindings, ceramics for Sèvres, Bianchini-Frerier silk, wallpaper and interior design layouts. He designed the tea room at the Au Printemps department store in Paris. With depictions of the seasons, he decorated the wall.Read More →