Remember Home.

Here at the studio we are excitedly anticipating and preparing for the O-Canada art show at The Milkman's Daughter, on Canada Day, this Friday. It is going to be fabulous.

There is another art show we are excited about around here, one that we have not yet announced!

Trish, Rachael and I are doing an art show together at The Fifty Fifty Arts Collective, a Victoria gallery located at 2516 Douglas Street (between Bay and Hillside). The opening will take place on Sunday, July 10th between 1pm and 4pm. The show will consist of works using various mediums, including: painting, sculptural installation, living art, and silkscreening, of course! There will be much to see and taste, with delicious food and wine available.

The show will run from July 11th to July 29th, with the gallery open 1pm - 4pm daily.

Lily Projects

Some exciting things are happening around here, despite almost all of our sewing ladies being away (Steph is about to have a baby any second, Nicole is galavanting around New York City, and Joanne is in her hometown, Gibsons Landing)!

We still have many projects on the go, of course, and here is a little sampling:

Trish is recovering this chair with fabric printed in

our new garlic print!

Furniture waiting to be rejuvenated with new fabric...

Our newest addition to our Cypress skirt collection:

black linen with a grey ship!

New blankets with a variety of beautiful prints and

finished with lace trim...

Vintage miniature tea sets...Trish is still deciding what to do with them.

Grey Squirrel Hunter tunics ready for printing...

and Korrine sewing Lucrezia dresses in Stormy Night fabric!

We are fortunate to be sending our goods all over the world, to Smoking Lily fans near and far, through our online mail orders. Sometimes we wonder who all these great people are, and what they are doing in their lives? We would love to know what you are up to out there! If you have time in your busy life, we would be thrilled to receive a photo of you, doing something fun (or mundane) while wearing Smoking Lily goods. We also thought it would be fun to post them on our blog! You can send them to info@smokinglily.com.

Lily Spotlight

The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, and inside the studio we are still busy as bees making things! As it gets warmer out, everyone starts to think to themselves, "Hmmm.... I really do need to add a few lovely items to my wardrobe... summer items even!".

Well, today, for the first time it felt like summer may be on the horizon here in Victoria. And, today for the first time, I got to silkscreen actual clothing pieces! I have done a bit of printing, here and there, such as paper bags, cotton print scarves, and adding a print to a table of fabric before it is cut....but today was a bit of a milestone for me in the printing world!

It was me and the Fandango skirts today, squaring off. With three different prints (the cruiser bike, the side plate, and the swerns) and printing over a side seam, I feel pretty good about my first print job completed! These skirts are a steal of a deal for $54; lightweight with swing, they are a perfect start-to-summer skirt.

Here is Joanne modelling a freshly-printed Fandango skirt!

Studio Update!

Today is Steph's last day at the studio before she leaves us to have a baby and embark on

motherhood! We will miss her, and wish her and baby all the best!

Here is a photo of Steph doing some last minute drafting:

And to wish her farewell:

Nicole made some button-shaped gingerbread cookies!

And lunch from the amazing Red Fish Blue Fish:

(Scallop tacones!)

And... a few more new things from the studio!

The bike print on the Periwinkle Garden State,

now available in size Extra Small.

New Cypress Skirt colour and print!

Cornflower Blue with our branch and blossoms print.

New Rowan Dowans in the works!

This one is a lovely gold with bees and peony.

Spring Fashion Shoot

Lately here in Victoria, we seem to be getting a few hints of spring; brief moments of beautiful, sunny, spring-like weather...and then, as though it had never happened: back to wind and rain.

Today we had some moments of gorgeous sunshine, just long enough to get Rachael to throw on some pieces with our newest colours and prints. We headed out onto the rooftop outside the studio to snap a few shots before the wind picked up and brought some clouds with the raindrops back...

Garden State in periwinkle with Cuckoo Clocks ($108)

Mt. Pleasant top ($85) with New Brighton skirt in denim ($81)

Wonton Love top in moroccan blue ($104)

Ivanhoe bag with Horse print ($220)

Ivanhoe bag (reverse side) ($220)

View from the studio rooftop!

Lily Inspiration: Beasts and Beyond

Sometimes good design stays with you. When pondering today what I should write about for my "Lily Inspiration" blog, I started remembering a few designers that I drew inspiration from when I was studying interior design in Montreal years ago. I was most inspired by a duo from Glasgow who called their design studio Timorous Beasties; Alistair McAuley and Paul Simmons attended the Glasgow School of Art together and founded the company in 1990.

Aside from the lush, detailed imagery of flowers, fish, lizards and insects that they convey with their textiles and wallcoverings, what impressed me most was the way they could take something done many times before and completely redefine it in a provocatively contemporary way.

Take the Glasgow Toile, for example. From afar, the fabric seems to closely resembles the classic Toile de Jouy wallpaper from the early 1800's, which featured impressively intricate scenes of couples picnicking and was used for wallpaper, teapots, curtains and bedding. Up close, however, their Glasgow version has crumbling infrastructure as a backdrop to homeless people on benches, people being mugged at gunpoint and scavenging pigeons. Social commentary and interesting design make for a memorable combination.

Timorous Beasties design with the production process in mind, as they do everything themselves with a combination of traditional and technological methods, including blockprinting, silkscreening and digital printing. You can learn more about their designs and ideas here.

Glasgow Toile

Iguana Wallcovering

Grand Thistle Wallcovering

Lampshades

Homegrown Heroes

It's always inspiring to seeing talented Canadians make it big worldwide, especially when their story has a humble beginning.

Take Marcel Dzama, for example. Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba in the late seventies to a working class family, he attended the University of Manitoba, and at the same time founded The Royal Art Lodge, an arts collective (that included his kid sister) that would meet every Wednesday to draw together. During his last year of school, he lost everything (including all of his artwork) when a fire consumed his family home, forcing his family to live in a motel for four months. Instead of dwelling on the devastation, he channeled this dark time into his work, using root beer extract as ink at his grandparents' house and developing a distinctly recognisable dark brown and blood-red colour scheme that would push him into art superstardom.

Fast forward to 2011. Dzama lives and works in New York City, and is in the permanent collections of many major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. He has exhibited extensively worldwide, and has a star-studded list of private collectors including Spike Jonze, Brad Pitt and Steve Martin.

Dzama's work began as elaborately eerie watercolour and ink drawings of beasts, mythical creatures, human-animal hybrids and snappily dressed businessmen with guns and swords pointed at the beasts and each other. Bats, bears, lagoon monsters, and identically-masked women with bayonets create large-scale patterns that are as beautiful from afar as they are close up. Dzama's work has expanded into large sculptural replicas of these characters, such as bears with bats hovering overhead, tree stumps with eyes and legs, and full scenes of suited men with guns, picking bats and birds out of the sky.

Learn more about Dzama here.

Artistic Inspiration

After recently picking up Juxtapoz, a magazine based out of San Francisco that describes itself as "the leading monthly contemporary and underground art bible," I was suddenly enamoured with the brilliant images of Tiffany Bozic. Detailed lines, magnificent acrylic colour palettes on maple wood panels, and dark but beautiful subject matter are the focus of her work, whose narratives are both magical and grounded in the natural world.

Kirsten Incorvaia, a writer for The Citrus Report (an online arts and culture publication) describes her as "...Tiffany Bozic, the wildlife enthusiast who discusses the contradictions of life using critters as her metaphor. Painting on maple wood, her images are smooth and telling; calm animals accept their interplay with other creatures, often with the tension of imminent death a moment away.”

Tiffany's focus reminds me of the spirit of Smoking Lily images: beautiful and sometimes macabre, using rich colours and an unexpected pairing of subjects, and a love for the natural world. I have been inspired to start drawing and painting again since seeing her work, after a bit of a hiatus in the last few months, and I feel compelled to explore bold contrasts while challenging myself with details.

Toxic Longing

32” x 49”

Sunday Mass

18.5” x 26.5"

Priceless

22” x 28”

Untitled

47” x 47”

Check out more amazing paintings from Tiffany Bozic here.

Read Kirsten Incorvaia's interview here.