The Bugattis

When I mentioned Carlo Bugatti in a design meeting earlier this week, I was met with blank stares. This is usually the case, so I thought I'd post a little about the Bugatti family.

Most people are familiar with the Bugatti family, but only for their luxury car designs, which began with Ettore Bugatti (born 1881).

The Bugatti car company is still around, producing not-so-shabby rides.

But it's Ettore's father, Carlo Bugatti (1856-1940) that I care about here. He designed some of the wildest furniture I've ever seen.


His father Giovanni was a prominent Milanese interior designer, so I imagine Carlo grew up surrounded by exotic objects (hence the unique influence from asian and islamic art)


But what's really fascinating is how perfectly some of his work encompasses both the flowing organic forms and intricacy of Art Nouveau, and the radial forms and simple geometry of Art Deco. It's all there.

Most designers from this period fall into one camp or the other- their work is either Art Nouveau or it's Deco. Carlo marched to his own beat.

And anyways, I hate categorizing people's work, and you especially can't categorize Carlo. His stuff is out there. The interior I show below was for a design pavilion, and was intended to raise eyebrows, but still...

Carlo's other son Rembrandt (brother of Ettore the car designer) was a sculptor. Here's a few examples of his work:


Rembrandt committed suicide in 1916, at age 31. Carlo, who had been very active up to this point, pretty much stopped working after this. I mean, he stopped building furniture. He kept busy on other things I'm sure (fish gotta swim, designers with this kind of talent gotta design). I read that he moved in with Ettore's family and spent his time painting, but I've never seen any of his paintings. I'll keep an eye out for them... I'm sure they are amazing.

The Art of Bookbinding

As an artist and a writer, and as a lover of books and craftsmanship, it was probably only a matter of time before I got into the art of book making.

I try not to judge books by their covers, but I've always had an appreciation for books that are beautifully bound. Good stories are treasures, and is there anything greater, anything more sacred than knowledge?

(think of the ancient hadith, that "the ink of a scholar is holier than the blood of a martyr")

(These tasteful F. Scott Books pictured above are by C. B. Smith: www.cb-smith.com )

(The books above that are classic Art Deco pieces, by Adler and Rose.)

Not only can you get into the design of the cover, but there are so many fascinating ways to bind the books themselves. For my own books, I've been using a form of Japanese stab binding for my own books... so simple and elegant...

and open it up:

But there are so many other ways, I'll have to keep experimenting:

And then you can even design boxes that the books will fit in... pretty slick. These are designed by (and created for) Santiago Calatrava's firm:

And then of course, you can get creative with the contents of the book itself, and how they are presented. Love this:

Sohan Qadri

I discovered him a few years ago when the Sundaram Tagore Gallery did a big show of his work.



The pieces grab your attention immediately and draw you in, until your nose is right up against the paper. And they hold you there, mesmorized by the color and texture as you try to figure out how exactly they were made. The better pieces sell almost instantly, despite the very high price tags (some of them are selling for $30,000-50,000 each). But they're beautifully composed, and the colors are very well selected. He's got a good eye for color and composition.


He makes incisions and holes in thick watercolor paper with a large nail, sprays the paper with water, and then brushes on dyes of different colors, letting some soak in, pushing others around. The result: some stunning, very colorful artwork.




He knows what he's doing, beyond just the making of his art. He markets himself as a yogi artist-monk-poet and painter, a sort of modern day Rumi; he claims that he doesn't think while he paints, that his paintings "result from states of deep meditation, and are informed by the colors of India" since apparently he clears his mind completely of all thoughts before beginning each piece.



But I've seen pictures of his sketchbook, filled with beautiful sketches articulating in great detail the composition and colors for his future pieces. So he knows how to play the art game. And he should- he's been in the art world for a long time, and his success is relatively recent, considering that he will be 78 this November. Although he lives in Canada now, he moved to Europe in the 1960s, and lived there as a struggling artist for about 30 years before hitting it big, so to speak, despite surprisingly strong connections to the European art world. So more power to him. I picked up a book of his stuff from Sundaram Tagore, and I found that his art hasn't changed very much in all that time- he switched gradually from oils on canvas to dyes on paper; the compositions are a little simpler, a little more geometric- but the way he markets himself has seen significant change. But that's beside the point: even in his younger days, he had a knack for composition and color. Here are some of his older works, in oil: