Art Goes Couture at London Fashion Week
Two of my original canvas paintings have been transformed into stunning avant-garde dresses by top designer Adnan Bayaat
Two of my original canvas paintings have been transformed into stunning avant-garde dresses by top designer Adnan Bayaat
Adnan Bayyat, is an haute-couturier and fashion designer and has created for Lady GaGa as well as a significant number blue-chip companies and enjoyed a successive number of appearances on national TV. His avant-garde show at the Grand Connaught Rooms is a perfect opener to London Fashion week 2014.
I met Adnan at the Painswick Festival of Wearable Art in July as we were both asked to be judges; we found a common connection and decided to work together on the two art dresses for LFW. The brief was a simple one: match the tartan fabrics that feature in the main body of the show.
I set to work and painted two large pieces of canvas that would become the dresses. The inclusion of a complicated linear pattern like tartan presented its own issues but thankfully I overcame them with a typical defiance that’s common in my work.
What Adnan has done with the source materials is truly exceptional. The canvas I used was made to be supple and pliable yet able to retain the unique properties of my paints and application methods. Moving into three dimensions was a blast and I could not be any more blown away with the results.
We are both genuinely self-taught professionals – no tuition or training, just a feeling that what we are doing is the right thing. The rest, as they say, is history.
The entire collection is based on the sophistication of the French and English gentry – styles from an almost forgotten era. Elegance, refinement and splendour are all evident. I too love this kind of expression as it helps me to paint in the purest forms – being authentic is at the core of my artistic moral tool box.
I definitely need to get to work on a range of high end couture hand bags next; how cool would these look? One off originals too; so expensive they’d make the Majesteaux Tote PM (Louis Vuitton) look cheap.
Nothing is ever easy. Here are the rough steps I went through to create the two paintings that were turned into the dresses you see in these pictures.
Take four flat pieces of 8oz cotton-duck, medium weave canvas that has been made specially for this project (thankyou so much Thörsen Fabrics) and cut into 200cm x 152cm rectangles. Two for the tartans and two for solid red and yellows.
Prime with a very thin gesso and then do that twice more until even and consistent.
Base coat with a mixture of three back colours for the red tartan (including an aluminium oxide powder-coat, a suspension medium and anti-cracking chemicals) and two blue tones for the blue tartan then wait to cure (10 days).
Mix the 12 colours required to blend into the colours of the tartan fabric featured in the rest of the collection. Add retarders, extenders, latex, flow reducers and resin compounds for viscosity altering and drying control.
Apply top layers, one at a time until the shapes and patterns are created to match the fabric tartan samples. Use spreaders, rope, 6ft long roof joists, wooden spoons, wallpaper smoothers, business cards, spray bottles, syringes and hypodermic needles to coerce the paint into the shapes and patterns required.
Repeat over six sessions to create the layered effects.
Define lines and add stitch marks (in paint) to authenticate real tartan.
Cure phase for all paintings (14 days).
©Photographs are courtesy of Michael Sewell Photography Ltd and are subject to copyright.