LULU DE KWIATKOWSKI- by Susanna Salk for 1stdibs
Even as a child I was a hunter and gatherer,” says Lulu de Kwiatkowski.  “I loved collecting shells on the beach and arranging them in color-coordinated patterns along the mantle. Nothing has changed, except now I tend to paint rather than display them.”
 
The youngest of six children, Kwiatkowski grew up along the sandy beaches of the Hamptons and the Bahamas in eclectic, color-drenched houses decorated in bold style by her mother who showered her brood with love and creativity. “She pushed us to be one with nature,” says Kwiatkowski. “While other kids were selling lemonade, we were selling two-foot long zucchini from our garden and large clams that we collected from the muck of the bay.”
 
Kwiatkowski embraced her mother’s wish whole-heartedly. Her recent book LULU (published by Ammo) celebrates her visual journey as an artist who has been observing and rendering her impressions of nature since she was old enough to grasp a crayon. “It’s a collection of collages based on the influences of my life, combining the memories and experiences of my childhood with the joys and heartaches of a twelve-year romance.” It’s also a hand-written ode to the influential style destinations of her travels, from Paris to Peru. “Whether hiking the mountains of Bolivia or sailing in New Zealand, each place I’ve visited has been a major landmark for my personal growth and my work.”
 
Her metamorphosis into a collage artist began two years ago, when Kwiatkowski found herself jet lagged from a trip home from Southeast Asia. “I have always been an avid observer: I notice color before shape, light before dark, day before night,” she explains. When a postcard of yellow daises and a white coral branch on a lacquer box caught her eye at two in the morning, Kwiatkowski suddenly sought to reproduce them. For years she had traced the many emotional and visual strands of her life in dozens of multi-colored journals. “Suddenly it made sense,” she remembers. “My collected history had a purpose for the future.” Pasting and patching the many pages of her journals into art began a journey not just of self-documentation, but also of liberation. “The collages allow me to at once relive but also be at peace with everything in my life: from friendships to romance to childhood.” Resonant characters and symbols from her past- from the Fruit Loop parrot to the hydrangeas that lined her Westhampton road, to vintage Playboy centerfolds punctuate her art alongside photos of her five siblings, her grandmother and mother (both top models in their times).
 
“I was brutally independent but excruciatingly shy, so I passed most of my childhood as a spectator,” says Kwiatkowski. “I filled my coloring books with vivid scribbles and made sure to use every color in the 55 piece Crayola box. Twenty years later, I still have the desire to understand how colors play off one another.” And she still takes much inspiration from the bold icons of the 70’s, whether it’s David Hicks or the Brady Bunch. Not to mention helicopter rides. Kwiatkowski vividly remembers the distant sound of the propeller engine as her father (who had a company of recycled airplane parts) approached the beach for weekend visits. When he took her up for a ride, her world as a child suddenly had the unique vantage point of an artist: “ Being the smallest forced me to usually look up, so to have the opportunity to look down upon my world created a source of appreciation and fantasy that is a major source of inspiration in my work today.” Creating intricately scaled floor plans at the Parsons School of Design when she became a student there were thanks in part by viewing the geometry of the farmland from those aerial views as a child. “The surreal repetition of trees repeating themselves and the suburban homes lined up side-by-side like a Lego village is still present in my geometric fabric sketches and in various backgrounds in my collages,” she says.
 
After completing a fine arts degree at Parsons, Kwiatkowski spent the next five years in Paris studying trompe l’oeil painting. She also fell madly in love with a bon vivant named Alfredo Gilardini, whom she met one night while dancing at the celebrated nightclub, Les Bain Douche. “Being with him, I often needed to purge my feelings and it was during this time that my journal writing began,” recalls Kwiatkowski. Ten years and over three hundred written pages later, she cut, pasted, and folded the dramatic arc of that relationship into her art. Not to mention, she eventually married him.
 
When Kwiatkowski eventually left Paris, she embarked on a series of travels that took her as far as India, Morocco, and Europe which ultimately launched her into the trade she was to embrace: “I was visiting an artisanal fabric mill in France,” explains Kwiatkowski. “The men there worked by hand in the detail oriented manner of another time. I was mesmerized and immediately sought to adapt the motifs from my fine art paintings from Paris into textile.” Moving back to New York, Kwiatkowski launched Lulu DK Fabrics in 1998 and her collections were immediately acclaimed, cinching places in the sets of “Sex in the City,” “Friends,” and in the real homes of everyone from Diane von Furstenberg to Courtney Cox-Arquette. Kwiatkowski went on to design wall coverings and also collaborate with firms to create luxury bed linens, carpets, and even leather furniture.
Now dividing her time between coasts (houses in New York and Los Angeles) with Gilardini and their infant twins, Francesco and Matteo, Kwiatkowksi is now adjusting to continuing her work while also providing a magical childhood for her children in the spirit that continues to inspire her on a daily basis. But no matter how precious time has become, she is always documenting the present, knowing that it is fertile ground for future creations whether they be textile designs or collages. One has only to turn the beautiful, boldly illustrated pages of LULU for proof of that. “My book is a tip of my hat to all the people, places, images and reveries that have shaped my creative vision.”
 
Q&AFOR LULU:
Who was your first design mentor?
My mother. She had (and still has) effortless glamour and style. Our house was a candy store of color. It was very inspirational and definitely shaped my taste for color and pattern.
  
Can you remember your first collage? How did you choose that medium? It just happened. I was trying to figure the direction of my book and had all my old journals, photos, and old fabric drawings lying on the floor in my studio and notice that there was a color coordination occurring with all the images on the top...so I just started ripping and pasting and painting on top. I did one after the next and noticed that it began to read like a visual journal. After 2 years of sitting on my floor doing one after the next, the book was born.
 
What was your first project in the design world? I painted a room in monochromatic amber squares in a huge bathroom/ sitting room at Alex Kramer's house. I loved it.
 
What kind of travels do you do and which places inspire your work? I tend to be drawn to locations where color and pattern are the culture: India, Morocco, Italy, Peru, Istanbul.  
 
What artists from the past inspire you?  
Frido Khalo, David Hicks come immediately to mind. Also, Beethoven, Kathryn Hepburn, Giotto and Mother Nature.
 
Give me a sense of your life "outside" work....
I just gave birth to twins, so it is a whole new world, but amazing all the same. My husband and I take them on nature walks in LA and I take photos of all the nature and collect sticks and twigs and rocks to make things...
Then I plop the babies in their little bouncies and we get creative. They laugh and smile and think it is all fascinating.