DROOLING OVER COLOUR

Len arrived in London, penniless in 1926.  Local artists, intrigued, with this character from the Antipodes and his unusual ‘Pacific ’ aesthetic, took him into their group. Eric Kennington, a well-known portrait painter and sculptor, offered him a place to stay on his river barge, moored near Hammersmith on the Thames. Celandine Kennington ran a fabric workshop nearby. Len spent time there learning to make batiks – a fabric dying and printing process, using silk and aniline dyes that resulted in translucent designs that could be viewed from either side. Batik was a popular fashion in Europe and the UK in the 1920s. Len exhibited some of his batiks and others he sold or gifted to friends.  Perhaps this was Len’s foray into painting directly onto film. Both techniques required special paints and dyes that would not flake off and that light could pass through. Len made his first colour film, A Colour Box, in 1935. He was intoxicated by the richness of the colour, especially when projected and said:   

“If my first film Tusalava was the slowest film on earth, my next film was the fastest film ever made up to that time!  A Colour Box was an experimental commercial for the British Government, all credit to John Grierson and Alberto Cavalcanti for allowing the try. It came about because I had been messing around drooling over the translucence of colour as I painted it directly onto celluloid.“ 

Ninety years later Dries Van Noten, from one of the influential group of avant-garde Belgian fashion designers, discovered Len and his films. He immediately felt an affinity with Len’s use of vibrant use of colour.  

“Len Lye is so fascinating because when you see the films you think about the 1960s and its psychedelic era. Yet you discover that, in fact, this work was done in the late 1920s/early-30s by a guy in New Zealand who took a strip of celluloid and started to paint directly on it. He painted it black and scraped motifs out of it.” 

“I knew I wanted to focus on colour, lightness and movement. When I was researching related ideas online, Len’s name would pop up often and so we looked deeper into his work and found it was exactly the mood we wanted to convey.” (quoted from Viva magazine at: https://www.viva.co.nz/article/fashion/dries-van-noten-len-lye-viva-volume-two/

Dries approached the Foundation who were happy to licence him to use or make reference to the colours, designs and texts from Len’s films in a collection of men’s and women’s fashion clothing.  The collaboration between van Noten and the Foundation resulted in the stunning Spring/Summer 2021 Collection that was showcased in stores in Europe, the UK and the USA and also at our local Zambesi stores in Auckland and Wellington, New Zealand.