A Sydney woman with a talent for designing wallpaper and furnishing fabrics

Press, 12 October 1979, Page 14

A Sydney woman with a talent for designing wallpaper and furnishing fabrics

By

GENEVIEVE FORDE

A laconic lady from Sydney with a deep Australian voice stopped by last week to show her hand-printed wallpapers and fabrics to Christchurch interior decorators and wallpaper enthusiasts.

Ronaele Jones has been designing wallpapers and furnishing fabrics since she left the National Art School in Sydney 15 years ago, having spent two years with Sandersons in London — “the ones, with the Royal warrant” — and the last dozen years or so with Wilson Fabrics and Wallpapers in Australia as their group design manager.

The designs she came to Christchurch to show are from the new hand printed “Signature” collection which will be available in New Zealand soon. “I sometimes think New Zealanders feel we just dump anything on them from Australia, so that’s why we’re making sure they know about Diane,” she said. “Diane” is Diane Cooper, who graduated from the School of Design, Wellington, and after teaching art, moved to Australia to become a fashion designer. She has since taken a job with Wilsons and has designed half of the Signature collection, which will be marketed in the Far East as well as Australia and New Zealand. Ronaele, who hasn’t got a family — “I’ve got a husband, that enough” —

comes to New Zealand three or four times a year, just to see what the customers are thinking. She said that the number of people in New Zealand who were interested in hand-printed wallpapers and fabrics were not manv, but that it was a

growing market, the majority of customers being interior decorators. “Put it this way,” she said, “there’s enough for the company to pay our fares to come from Australia to show them.” The hand-printed wallpaper costs between $7O

and $lOO a • roll, but the rolls are twice the size of a normal roll of wallpaper —28 in. wide and 15 yards long. The cost, Mrs Jones said, related to the high labour input with screen printing. Eight people, including the two designers, are involved.

The original Indian ink drawing is transferred to a positive photographic film, and the positive is then transferred photographically to the printing screen — a wooden frame over which a polyester (formerly silk) fabric has been tightly stretched.

Then the colours are hand-mixed to suit the design and the ink is applied with a wide squeegee which forces the

liquid through the unblocked screen. The colours most in vogue at the moment are the “apricoty peachy shades,” according to Mrs Jones, and most of the designs in the new collection have an oriental look about them.

“The collection as a whole has an oriental theme which is becoming very popular — that covers everything from Persia to Japan.” Wistaria and peony are the most common flowers used and the designs have such oriental names as “Chinese

Peony,” “Honshu” and “Persian Garden.” Mrs Jones said that the oriental theme had always been popular in Australia, but this was even more so recently. “We have a lot of cane furniture in Australia and it goes with that; also more people are travelling to the East and they start to get interested in Asian culture and bring back bits and pieces with them.” She tries both to lead and respond to public taste at the same time. “We are a leading distributor of wallpaper and fabrics so we do set the fashion — others follow us,” she said. “But we do keep our eyes on overseas trends and we do market research as well. The cus-

tomer is the one who's buying it after all.”

She doesn’t have any of her designs in her own home. "Working over them on a drawing board for a week is enough for me,” she said. "The only prints in my home are William Morris.” William Morris was an English 19th century socialist, poet, writer, artist and — in Mrs Jones's words — "the greatest textile and wallpaper designer ever.” She said: "His basic principle was that life should be better for everybody, and he tried to make it more beautiful for everybody with his designs.” Morris’S designs are stylised floral ones, some of which are still being made in London from his original blocks. Mrs Jones said that she would never try to copy them — “some people have done so, but as he was such a great draughtsman he makes everyone else look quite tawdry.”

She said that, oddly enough, William Morris papers and fabrics sell better in New Zealand than Australia; but one thing that is universal, she has found, is that in their homes people on the whole prefer florals — and designs based on natural vegetation — above man-made geometric patterns.

“I think they find this more relaxing, more natural,” she said.