About Chiara Grifantini
Exploring Chiara Grifantini’s hand-painted fabrics is akin to stepping into a magical forest, where colors and materials captivate the senses. Originally from Rome and now based in London, Chiara began her career in architecture. However, her deep passion for textiles and decoration ultimately led her to pursue a different path.
Travels and Decorative Art
Her fondness for decorative art has taken her to far-off places where textile traditions remain deeply rooted. She draws inspiration from sketches, photos, and fabric scraps collected in Turkey, Thailand, India, and America. Additionally, she is interested in the Maori and Aboriginal peoples from her travels in New Zealand. Her fabric collection features silks and linens that are hand-painted with astonishing attention to detail.
Natural Fabrics and Pigments to Create Unique Pieces
Chiara expresses her creativity through the use of precious fabrics, including raw silk and pure linen sourced from France and Italy. Without a sketch, she crafts unique pieces using natural pigments in both ancient tones and vibrant colors inspired by nature.
A quick technical inspection is all she needs to follow her creative instincts and envision the new life of items like tablecloths, tapestries, or cushions designed specifically for her clients’ homes. Her fabrics tell stories inspired by dragonflies, golden-striped leaves, and hydrangeas, often drawing influence from the flowers found in Notting Hill’s municipal gardens. The essence of the Mediterranean also resonates in her work, reflected in fields of red flowers reminiscent of Slim Aarons‘ iconic photograph, “Dining al Fresco in Capri.”
Through her painted fabrics, Chiara celebrates sophisticated rituals of hospitality and conviviality, infusing them with elegance and a touch of glamour.
The Beauty and Suffering of Nature
Chiara Grifantini’s artistic sensitivity transforms raw fabrics into articulated stories that evoke images from nature. Her creative touch captures the spontaneity of plants as well as the irregular shapes of cobwebs and clouds. By applying metallic leaves to the fabrics, she aims to depict the suffering aspect of nature, emphasizing its transience and changeability through intertwined arabesques of branches and ancient dunes.
Her works possess the strength and power to create a harmonious connection between the spaces that host them and the natural world outside, achieving a perfect symbiosis between art and craftsmanship.
