Coral
Coral
Studio Puck
Studio Puck has been working from a collection of antique books in a Florentine atelier on the Lungarno Guicciardini since 1980 - taking plates from those books and bringing them onto new paper, by hand.
This series is the studio's coral. Each piece is a watercolour of a coral specimen - branched, rooted, named - hand-painted in the workshop from an antique zoological plate in the studio's archive: the kind of detailed taxonomic illustration that European natural historians made of the red coral fished from the Mediterranean in the centuries when it was a serious scientific subject and a major Italian trade. The handwritten labels that ran beneath the specimens in those books are kept with the image, with their Latin names in an old hand.
The frames are round, in deep black wood.
Exclusive to Australia.
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Product information
Watercolours of red coral
Hand made Italian timber frame
Frame 50cm round
About Studio Puck
Studio Puck is a Florentine print and decoration workshop on the Lungarno Guicciardini, just across the Arno from the historic centre. It opened in 1980 as a printmaking studio, and at its centre - then as now - sits a collection of antique books, the illustrated natural histories and decorative plates that European publishers produced through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The studio works from those images.
A plate is taken from the archive, transferred to a screen, printed onto paper or onto an object, and then - always, every one - coloured by hand. Each piece is finished by an artisan with a brush. The colour does not come out of a printer.
What started as paper has, over the years, moved onto other surfaces. The same images and the same hands now decorate vases, frames, lighting and furniture. The book is still the source: a serpent painted up the side of a vase was lifted from a centuries-old printed plate, and comes out the way it would have been hand-coloured then.
The studio is in the same building, on the same Florentine street, that it has worked from for over forty years.
Studio Puck is exclusive to Australia at The Leopard.
