Today I learned a mind-blowing fact: velvet painting has been around for centuries. It began in ancient Kashmir, where velvet was born. The Kashmiris used it as a medium for painting portraits of religious icons. Marco Polo brought velvet paintings to western Europe. But not until the 1970s did an entrepreneur come up with the brilliantly deranged idea of setting up a velvet painting factory in Juarez, which created a robust supply line pumping velvet paintings into American suburbia in the 1970s.
Velvet painting was never a good idea, I don't care if you're painting religious saints or doe-eyed children. Paintings should not be done on a fuzzy surface. What were they thinking?
The allure of velvet as a painting canvas is that it has a purity of blackness, thanks to velvet's light-absorbing properties. It also has an amazing dust-attracting property, and it is pretty much impossible to dust a velvet painting. Yay.
The blackness of the velvet background makes light colors really "pop" which is just what you want when you're looking at a painting of a tiger lurking amongst some indifferently-placed clusters of bamboo. You want those colors to really roar. (Sorry.)
You can still buy velvet painting kits in crafts stores today, which is wonderfully kitschy. Every time I see one, I think about getting it and doing it and hanging it in my home. Then I realize that, although I may love kitsch and irony, there is such a thing as taking a good joke too far. And "making my own velvet painting" definitely qualifies.
I will say this for velvet paintings: they were striking. I can see why they captured everyone's attention for a while. Like Magic Eye pictures, they were a cultural talking point for a while. But that doesn't mean they were any good. This is a hideous fad whose time, luckily, has come and gone.
Image courtesy Flickr/Sam Howzit
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