China Seas Fabric: Bonaire II - Custom White on Beige Belgian Linen / Cotton

Bonaire takes its name from the Caribbean island — the smallest of the ABC chain off the Venezuelan coast, a place more famous for its coral reefs than its nightlife — but the design owes as much to a studio in Nice as it does to anything in the Antilles. The pattern is a dense field of organic forms cut loose from any obligation to represent specific things: shapes that could be leaves or could be coral, forms that suggest sea fans or fronds or the silhouettes of tropical plants seen from below. It has the quality of Matisse's late paper cut-outs — Jazz, The Snail, the enormous compositions he pinned to the walls of his apartment when painting with a brush was no longer possible and painting with scissors turned out to be better. The forms are flat, the edges are decisive, and the negative space between them does as much work as the shapes themselves. Nothing is outlined. Everything is declared.

White on beige is the quietest way to experience this pattern. The tonal closeness means you have to be in the room to see the drawing — from a distance it reads as texture, almost as a woven jacquard, and only up close do the individual cutout forms emerge. That restraint makes it usable at a scale where a higher-contrast version would overwhelm: eight yards on fifty-four-inch Belgian linen-cotton is enough to cover a pair of club chairs, a settee, or a full set of curtain panels, and the white-on-beige will anchor the room without competing with anything else in it. Hand screen-printed in the USA, twenty-one-and-a-half-inch repeat. Matisse said the cut-outs let him draw directly in color. This fabric lets you upholster directly in drawing.

All quantities given in yards.

Please note that colors may not represent accurately in photo. Additional photo(s) provided to show scale, not colorway. All sales are final, and we do not send cuttings for approval.