This month’s Architectural Digest August 2016 sports Anderson Cooper lounging on the cover in a backdrop of lush tropical vegetation and a glistening pool. But it was what I discovered inside about which I blog today. Paris-based designer Mattia Bonetti and his love of color and wacky style caught my eye. How could it help but do so? His creativity gone wild with little restraint is like Dr. Seuss parties with Willy Wonk and Dali!! Fanciful forms and incredible colors are the signatures of his psychedelic scenes.
Whether you like his designs or are a bit overwhelmed by them, he made a profound quote that I think bears some discussion. Evidently the author of the article, Mitchell Owens thought so too as he isolated it as a leading statement. Bonetti predicts “If people who can afford incredible decors keep commissioning bland minimalist interiors, it’s the end of decoration.” 
I loved that statement. Yet inasmuch as I appreciate the bland minimalists for their value in their own context, I just liked the premise that decoration is what puts things out there. It’s what sets things apart. It is what stirs new creativity, commentary and explosions of art and design decadence.
Decoration – boldly going where no designer has gone before, Bonetti creates many of his pieces from tables to lamps, rugs to headboards and all with a fanciful animation that nearly comes alive. Like it or not, you can’t help but react. It catches the eye and forces response.
Fine scribbles on the wall in a graphite grey contrasting with loud geometrics all with splashes if not washes of color – maybe better said drowning in color in some instances – Bonetti is not afraid. Embracing the extraordinary he mixes and crashes his forms and colors in screaming crescendos that excite and disturb. His tables look as though they could walk – or slither – or in some way motate themselves across the room. 
As a designer we should (my opinion) be designing for the client. To find a client who would want such creative experimentation is rare. Either in cases of wild abandon, second or third homes, freaky fanaticism over art and decoration – they are not the rule, but could be fun if given the license to proceed.
Hula hoops…Iridescent life-savers…fun with circles and stripes of color!!!
I play with color. As evidenced in my portfolio www.patriciandesign.com but never with such unfettered, unleashed audacity. Yet I believe that color is the best way to punctuate a design.
An overall view of Bonetti’s work will unveil these fanciful forms for sure but not always accompanied by the intense colors displayed in this featured article of the Hong Kong apartment. But Dr. Seuss’s design influence is nearly always present in his creations which are inspired and freeing. So let’s unleash decoration today!!!
Studying the design of workplaces comes from focusing on the methods of the business, nature of the business, various practices and work of the business…and then there’s the actual look at the individual’s who make up the work team and how best they perform their work in any given business environment.
It truly is a wonderment for all ages. This architecturally magnificent building designed in 1859 by James Renwick, in the then chic Parisian Second Empire Style, is the elegant backdrop for a most progressive and creative collection of present day modern artists’ works. Diverse examples, of spectacular displays using simple materials, brought to life in forms unexpected – of grand proportion and thrilling magnitude. Although my learned and previewer cousin had introduced me to the exhibit in advance, it captivated and engaged beyond my expectations.
The glitz and bling make such a striking, formal, contemporary statement in this expansive volume that it startles with joyful contrast. The artist, Leo Villareal of whom I had heard in advance, was originally from Albuquerque – where we now call home. A remote desert origination transplanted into the fast pace of the urban centers of the east coast resulting in this shiny experimentation with light, form and wonderfully reflective surfaces. Villareal melds basic high-tech coding to use his own algorithm of the binary system 1s and 0s communicating to the lights when to turn off and turn on – yet sequences that are never exactly repeated .
It’s not just your linear code of characters that is read on a screen – here it is an artistic experience shared by all who look up in this gallery’s exciting exhibit.
Large scaffolding at the end of the room suggests the manual installation that was required to suspend this wondrous drape catching light and glowing with golden aura. 
We were at once drawn into these cozy nurturing cubbies of what appeared to be nature – not forms created by man. Nature. Organic and raw, elegant and graceful winding toward the far reaches of the very high ceilings. Like a sculptor who says that the stone dictates what it wants to be and how he carves it – Dougherty knows that the long willow branches have a true will and bend their own way challenging him to work with them toward that goal of partnership with nature. The beauty is in the end result. People of all ages wandered in and out, peeking through window-like openings pretending to be exploring an enchanted forest of wonder.
Have you ever experienced Tent Rocks? 
Have you ever looked upward and around and through the magnificent forms created by nature eroding the earth’s strata revealing layers of color and creating spires of rocky towers? It is a magic land just south of Cochiti in a very unexpected pocket of nature’s magnificence in our Land of Enchantment. And the spires that artist Tara Donovan created with stacks of index cards – an overwhelming accumulation of millions of index cards suggest grey spires replicating nature’s wonders in the canyons among the spires of the Tent Rocks. 
It’s as though a photographer captured this natural formation in black and white. Donovan’s interpretations are tones of grey as a result of the stacked white index cards with slivers of shadow sucking away light in between each of them. Clustered and staggering in height, the “Untitled” towers are inviting to walk amidst and pass between, winding around them like a tourist or explorer or perhaps inhabitant in ages past and present as they have stood for ages.
How could a human working only by hand – without computer generated machines digitally fabricating such perfection create this finished piece that we are studying with such wonder? How can this fine tedious seemingly impossible count of thousands of threads be executed with such grandeur and grace by one mere mortal? 
The artist Gabriel Dawe transcends our ability to comprehend the exactness of his beautiful accomplishment with extraordinary patience, precision and creative foresight to imagine the end result and bring it to fruition. It is a wondrous, luminous sculpture of rainbow colored threads inspired by the skies of his native Mexico and current home in East Texas. The fine weavings also inspired by his Mexican heritage are interpreted, stretched and exaggerated here reflecting the light and spectrum of color from its base to ceiling. 
of grain and color just for the sake of design. Yay!!
However, while the wind wildly whips our towering 30 foot plus blue spruce tree and all the other new green growth from tentacles of wisteria vines to our precious peach tree and fragile red buds, we ascend to the kitchen and talk about building a fire.
the weekend of Matthew’s graduation from Stuart to little flowers and birds leftover from samples we commissioned for a donor wall at the Albuquerque Community Foundation by artist Meg Butler to chucks of Mexican Talavera and brilliant colors from other pieces and places the palette and random pattern began to take shape.
The characters have large saucer-like eyes belying their Japanese origin. Their story-lines appeal on many levels for all ages.
From over-sized dangling flowers to disco balls sparkling from the rafters, the place is alive with static animation. Well, monitors too airing the vary anime of this initial topic!
From beverage bottles to bears, pink kitties to hair and make-up lotions and potions, games and costumes – yes you too can dress-up like a bowl of Ramen Noodles or an egg yolk named Gudetama.
Thank you Katrink for this amazing experience we shared for your birthday!!!
Like reaching into a hole or looking into space, and not seeing the boundaries well. It s a brain thing. If the brain reads dark, it suggests a depth of space and therefore more than is really apparent. This is often used in ceiling treatments. Having a low ceiling appear higher, when painted dark, due to the illusion of depth.
