Back by popular demand! We're thrilled to announce our best-selling Kip&Co x Ken Done collaboration is back, but for a limited time, with all your favourites and plenty of newness.
No one does an encore like Ken Done! After over half a century influencing popular culture around the world, it’s no surprise that our inaugural collaboration with Ken was a bright and brilliant success.
When we grew up in the 80s, Ken’s art leapt off the walls and into our day-to-day lives, providing an incandescent backdrop to our most nostalgic, treasured childhood memories. This was the time when a Ken Done coaster set, t-shirt, or print became as ubiquitous with the Aussie home as the hills hoists that punctuated our back yards. We soaked it all in. His unabashed optimism and signature enthusiasm for colour has undoubtedly been one of our biggest influences.
We are incredibly grateful that Ken has continued our creative partnership, it has been an absolute privilege and highlight.
1. Why are you excited to see the Kip&Co x Ken Done creative partnership back again?
We were very happy with our collaboration when the first products were released and are very happy to work with them again!
2. What was your inspiration behind the new Frangipani print?
These are classic images that I have worked on over the years and I am pleased that they still have a freshness and a joy about them.
1. Who you are and what you do?
I’m Ken Done, and I guess what I do for my living is make paintings. I'm an artist, although I think that’s a very complicated thing sometimes. But I think the simplest thing is that I’m an artist.
2. What is it that you think people connect with in your art?
My paintings, I want them to give people pleasure, and of course more than anything I love colour, in all it’s forms. Sometimes in its more obvious bright, strong forms, other times soft and subtle, it doesn’t matter. It’s like musical notes, it depends what song you’re singing that particular day, but colour is very important to me.
3. Why do you think colour is so important?
Well, colour brings a sense of excitement, or a sense of comfort, or a sense of pleasure, and that’s why even the simplest objects in your home should be well designed and I think should be beautiful.
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4. What routine do you have when creating art?
I listen to music all the time while I am paining in the studio – mostly jazz, early early rock and roll. I have worked a few times with James Morrison who is one of the greatest Australian / world musicians, in fact we are collaborating on something at the moment, so often I will be listening to James.
5. What does a regular day look like for you?
It’s a bit of a set routine for me in the morning – first of all I have to feed the rainbow loreekets and the magpies who are waiting on the top lawn, and then I come into this studio. I want to see straight away what I’ve been working on. Maybe the fairies have been in the night and fixed them up. I want to see everything with the freshest possible eyes and often i'll work here straight away, before I go down and have a swim. It’s a fairly regular routine.
6. What do you love about the ocean and where you live?
This is one of the great beaches of Sydney, if not Australia, if not the world. It’s only a couple of hundred metres. When I come down to the water in the morning there are maybe a hundred fish waiting for me to feed them. Then Judy and I go for a walk and then we come back and go for a swim. It’s an incredible privilege to live here, it’s a big garden, big house, beautiful studio.
I’ve always liked to be in the water, I always liked to dive and snorkel. I’ve snorkelled in most of the places in the world. Even recently I was snorkelling in Iceland. Nothing nicer than snorkelling on a tropic reed, and that constant kind of evolving patterns, colours, fish and shells. It’s wonderful.
7. How would you describe the Australian aesthetic?
Most of us cling to the edge of the country, even though we have a deep emotional commitment to the outback, most of us don’t live there. I’ve visited it a lot and it’s the most amazing landscape. We’re essential suburban people living on the edge of the country, whether we are living in Carins or in Portesa, we like that proximity to the sea, but always in the sense of this huge continent just out there somewhere.
8. How did this collaboration come together?
I’ve known about Kip&Co for quite a while, and I’ve always liked what they do. A lot of the things that they do, or continue to do, or have done, are not dissimilar to things that we have done. I know It’s taken us a while to get together but it’s terrific timing in your business and the time was right for us, so we are happy to embark on it.
One of the things that really link Kip&Co and us is the shared love of colour, decoration and patterns. Sometimes to put a couple of patterns together to become something else. To make things that are beautiful. To make things that are worth looking at. To make things that you don’t just toss away. Lovely things.
9. What’s your favourite thing about the collab?
I think the shared stuff between Ken Done and Kip&Co is the love of colour, the love of decoration, the love of putting two kinds of patterns together to make something else, and in this collaboration the things I’ve found quite interesting is how you’ve changed the scale of some things. There is a particular print based on yachts and because you changed the scale of it, you took it into a slightly more graphic position – It’s lovely, I like that very much.
There’s a lovely picture I did a long time ago called butterfly dreams – I mean of course it’s going to be pretty! If a butterfly lives for such a brief period time, I like to imagine the kind of dreams that it would have and they would be pretty. So I was pleased to see that you have used that in a really nice way.
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10. What was it like working on bed linen?
When people first saw some of the work we did on fabric, it was on bedlinen, and that changes a room so dramatically. I just treated it always as a big painting. You’ve got to do everything as well as you can. So a duvet cover is essentially like a big painting – lying there on the bed, making an incredible difference to the room itself. I hope it inspires people for great pleasure in the bedroom.
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