Underneath a Tab

>> When Gmail did that very clever tab separation thing and everything “important” would be Primary and all that junk that you used to have to huff through would be put aside under the disposable labels of “Promotions”, “Social” and “Updates aka the tabs that you will never ever look at again because it’s all supposedly a lesser extreme degree of junk, I rejoiced.  Only momentarily though.  Because then actual important stuff would get into those tabs and every once in a while, a real email from a real important person as opposed to an automated bot would also end up there.

Therefore sporadically, I’ll have a peek at “Promotions”, “Updates” and “Social” just to double check that I haven’t missed, say an email from Dame Judi Dench asking me to come to tea (still waiting for that invite Judi…) or the like.  The other day under the Promotions tab, I struck email gold.  Or blog gold.  I saw something cool, colourful and a little bit like Henri Matisse’s excellent cut-outs work GIF-ing away at me and the email read “Get your hands on some silky psychedelic goodness.”

Sold.  A few clicks down the line and I found out more about ELOI, a very new silk scarf label set up by Paige Russell, an artist based in Austin, Texas.  These “deranged technicolor ramblings on silk” are all based on Russell’s construction paper cut-out collages that owe much to the likes of Stuart Davis, Sonia and Robert Delaunay and of course Matisse, but only by method and perhaps colour combinations.  The subject matter of her collage work definitely comes from Russell’s head, as she peppers her designs with odd characters, psychedelic fun and in her own words, “doses of crazy”.

From selling 2-D artwork that hang on walls, Russell has ventured into the world of silk scarves.  It’s a crowded one for sure as every day on average, I receive five emails about new scarf labels.  There needs to be a real point of difference to stand out and ELOI is definitely has that from the designs to the visuals.  Russell started off with five designs where dripping eye balls, flora and fauna and abstract monsters are rendered in the brightest of hues.  She’s just released four more scarves with curious names like “Narcissus”, “Footie Garden” and “Sheebean Queen”.  They’re designs that shy away from the requisite that silk needs to merely just be pretty.  They’re awesome looking of course but they’re not needlessly girly as is often the case with a lot of silk scarves.

Good thing Google didn’t send ELOI into my dreaded Forums tab, which is definitely the out of sight, out of mind forgotten email fodder.

ELOI’s first collection 1-5: 

 

 

Paige at work in her studio

ELOI’s second collection 6-9:

In the spirit of being all grown up and hanging proper “art” on walls, I’m seriously contemplating commissioning Russell on a piece as her own illustration and graphic artwork is so brilliant.