The image above shows my first exercise in colour matching: pieces of cloth about 1cm by .5 cm. This size was a generous luxury. Bernard once gave a printer a single thread as a colour reference which was kept in the MDs drawer and produced to illustrate the impossible demands placed on the printer by tyrannical clients.

Of course the colour and tone of the cloth changed as the light hit the grain of the material. My palettes grew turgid with gouache, as I spent hour after hour trying to find the point at which I could claim a match.

I was learning about hue and tonal qualities, but more importantly, I was learning that the aim was not really to find a match but to create an equivalent for the cloth colour on paper. It was an exercise in translation: the visual equivalent of identifying a mood or atmosphere of a piece of writing and finding a way of expressing the same in another language: the difference between a literal and a ‘true’ translation.

The second image was my first design for furnishing, and a brilliant lesson in the use of inductive colour.(Painted in yellow and grey the yellow induces a blue.) The way colours work together was a device to express the burnish and play of silk damask on a dry linen/cotton. It worked: hours of painting on this made my eyes buzz.

A further device was the fine lined ‘distress’, hand drawn by Roger, which follows the forms and varies in intensity over the pattern to suggest the way in which natural or candle light falls on silk. The time and judgement required to do this as opposed to just putting a uniform distress screen over the whole thing is one of the things which has given the pattern its special quality and made it a favourite which is still selling, 20 years on. The whole idea was not to make an academic reproduction, but to convey the very damaskiness of damask through another medium.
Perception, illusion, finding ways to convey reality, these are the preoccupations of painters, not exclusively, but characteristically. Francis Bacon who calls painting the most artificial of the arts says ‘to me the mystery of painting is how can appearance be made…how can this thing be made so that you catch the mystery of appearance within the mystery of the making?’

We didn’t pretend for a moment that somehow that we were recreating silk damask, we wanted customers to engage, pleasurably, in the illusion that it was silk damask, as they might engage in the illusion of looking into a room in a painting. This idea informed the whole collection brought out through Beaumont and Fletcher: we wanted to provide the experience of ‘antique’ fabrics and make them available by the length. Once in New York, waiting for the ‘Don’t Walk’ to change, I saw a man take a diagonal right across the intersection of 59th and Lexington. Stunning, black, 7 foot, he was carrying a tray of fluttering fabrics on upturned hand, waiter fashion. ‘Antique lace’ he called out, growling past on a pair of king size roller blades, ‘by the yard’.