One Painting, Four New Interpretations

A tile noticed while traveling. A piece of jewelry passed down through a family. A small object discovered in a little shop and carried home. Often it is the details we see, the color, the border, the pattern, that stay in our memory long after.

That idea became the starting point for our newest collection.

The story actually began years ago with one of my father’s paintings. The closer I looked at this particular work, it somehow took me on a journey back to the Portuguese coast, where I visited little tile shops many years ago.

I began looking more closely at its patterns and borders, isolating small details and reimagining them through the tile work and ornament I have always been drawn to in my travels through Portugal and Italy.

I kept returning to small sections of the painting, a border, a manuscript detail, a repeating form, and began to see each one differently once it was taken out of the larger work. Some were doubled or mirrored. Others were enlarged or simplified.

What interested me was how far a detail could move from the original painting and still carry something of it with it. Slowly, one painting began to open into four completely different designs.

That process became A Study in Ornament.

For me, ornament has never simply been decoration. It is one of the ways people have brought beauty into everyday life for centuries, through tiles, textiles, ceramics, jewelry and the objects we choose to live with.

These scarves are a celebration of that idea, of looking closely, noticing the details and finding something new in something that was already there.

One painting. Four new interpretations.