A Forest for the Home

Henry and Eleanor Kluck, the design duo known as Elenhank, drew inspiration for Forest from the northern Indiana landscape surrounding their home. When the fabric panels were hung as curtains or wall coverings, the pattern would repeat across large expanses to envelope a space as if it was a woodland glade. This is a continuation of their mural print concept of creating large scale continuous patterns. These mural prints depicted nature both abstractly, as in Rhythm (1972) or Solar (1974), and naturalistically, as in Forest and others from the late 1970s.

Sketched in ink and gouache on translucent paper, this design was drawn in one-quarter scale and enlarged photographically. For this colorway, the background and flowers were hand screen printed in walnut brown and black. The line drawing of trees, leaves, and grass in the foreground is the white color of the fabric.