You may have come across the work of former mural artist Rachel Spelling. Her unique miniature artworks, which she began creating during lockdown, bridge the worlds of art and interior design. They are created on paint cards. In fact, Spelling’s first-ever one was produced on a card by Farrow & Ball, with the tiny chips of colour serving as a backdrop to charmingly surrealist images .
If you are a fan of interior design, you know the creativity that can be sparked by a paint chart – the possibilities presented by those enticing colour spectrums. For Spelling though, they offer a very different opportunity. They are akin to ‘a collection of tiny walls, already prepped and ready for me to tell stories on,’ the artist told Harper’s Bazaar.
The magazine (particularly the mid-century era, under the art direction of Alexey Brodovitch) has long served as inspiration to Spelling, with scans from its pages decorating the walls of her studio alongside vintage colour charts. It was the work of surrealists like Man Ray and René Magritte, featured in Harper’s Bazaar during the 1930s, that sparked her creativity. Now, though, she has taken the relationship further, granted access to the title’s archive and commissioned to create an original artwork.
Titled Shades of Flat and Lustre Finishes the limited-edition piece is available in an exclusive run of just 300 (£300 each), with sign-up for priority access to the sale open now.
The first third of the artwork (featuring 24 illustrated paint chips) can be seen above, with the next third to be unveiled in the October issue of Harper’s Bazaar, on sale 3 September.
