Interview. Turning Hobbies into Commercial Success with Jean Pelle
Jean Pelle, a Yale-trained architect turned designer, blends imagination and risk in her pioneering landscape-inspired artworks.
A relentless imagination and a willingness to take risks are the qualities that appear responsible for New York City-based designer Jean Pelle, a Yale-educated university-trained architect becoming a veritable contemporary Renaissance master of the arts. This past May, Calico Wallpaper debuted a new collection called Memoir, which features an enormous bucolic landscape, available in different hues, that is based upon a painting by Pelle of the rural region in South Korea where she spent her early childhood.
With her foray into landscape painting with oil pastels, Pelle, who stopped her formal art training after high school, is reviving a childhood passion and paying tribute to her Korean heritage and to her father, an artist who took photographs of the landscape upon which Pelle’s paintings are based.
“It just like one thing leads to another thing and then you make connections in your mind and then you make new work,” Pelle explained about her design process during an interview with ArchiExpo e-Magazine, at the Zen-like studio illuminated by chandeliers shaped like plants and bubbles in the industrial Red Hook neighborhood of New York, where she and her husband Oliver Pelle manufacture most of the products they design.
