CECILIA MOK
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA
Cecilia Mok is an artist, designer, and painter, and a lover of color, storytelling, and wonder. Her surface designs are explorations of rich color palettes, movement and flow, and decorative illustration. Born and raised in Sydney, Australia, Cecilia earned a B.A. in communications and went on to study fashion design at the Sydney Institute of Technology. For her coursework, she was awarded the New South Wales State Medal for Fashion Design and Industry Practices. “I was completely passionate and committed to the study of a broad range of design subjects,” she says. “This began my path to surface design.” After graduation, Cecilia worked full-time as a graphic designer at a sports-apparel company and studied traditional oil painting at the Julian Ashton Art School at night to earn a degree in fine arts.
Cecilia’s job as a graphic designer provided excellent training in Illustrator, which became the basis of her digital surface design. Her “incredibly fulfilling” work as an oil painter allows Cecilia to bring her inspirations to life:
My painting informs my surface designing, and my sense of design and color influences my painting. My art celebrates the natural beauty of this world at the edges of the otherworldly. My paintings are representative of what I see, combined with layers of the subconscious, memories, and storytelling. Landscapes are filled with the memory of a place and the emotions of a day. Portraits often transform into dreamscapes of the subject. A floral still life can blossom into a forest.
To Cecilia, patterned textiles are works of art. Her passion for textiles and pattern design was ignited by the philosophy of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement: that all homes should be decorated with objects both practical and beautiful. She deeply admires the painting skills of the movement’s designers. Cecilia also finds inspiration in imagery from the golden age of illustration that occurred during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ancient Chinese and Japanese textiles, elaborate European chinoiserie, the work of contemporary picture-book artists, and Australian painters.
She is constantly driven to create and design:
Everything excites me! Seeing an elaborate antique wallpaper, admiring shades of blue in a set of tiles or the bold colors of a contemporary painting [sparks] the idea of a story I want to tell in one scene. When I hear a piece of music, I imagine how I can create that feeling visually. The whole world is vibrating with ideas!
Cecilia’s studio, with inspirational images, studies, paintings in progress, and uplifting art from her children
Inexorably drawn to prints and patterns, Cecilia fills scrapbooks with clippings from fashion and interior-decorating magazines, pieces of wrapping paper, packaging, and fabric scraps. “I love the feeling I get when I see a beautiful pattern...which activates my imagination,... sparks a childhood memory [with] its design or color palette, or simply captures a sense of playfulness and joy.” Cecilia describes herself as a fabric hoarder and admits she can’t resist buying little samples of fabric to add to her extensive collection. Her stash includes “snippets” she collected as a child when she went to fabric stores with her mother, a talented seamstress who made clothes for herself and for Cecilia and her sisters. “My mum is now making clothes for my kids, using the fabric she kept from when I was little!”
Cecilia loves to be outside with her children: going on a bush walk, swimming at the beach, or flying kites. Together they spend many weekend afternoons at the dining-room table with piles of paper, painting with watercolors or exploring new materials and techniques. “They are very curious about my art making and will follow along, only to produce something far more original and exciting than I could!” Cecilia also teaches at a children’s art studio, where she encourages young people “to express their unique personalities, ideas, and their hearts through art making and to cultivate a curiosity and sense of wonder.”
“Mid Century Droplets” in Kaleidoscope, “Aquamarina” in Kaleidoscope, “Bauhaus Geo Dreams,” and “Daydreaming”
When Cecilia began to design her own textiles, she developed all of her motifs digitally using Illustrator, which allowed for easy color and scale changes. Over time, she became increasingly interested in the singular texture and quality of hand-drawn and painted lines and the visual depth that watercolor and oil-painted elements add to her designs. Cecilia often creates each element of a design individually by hand, so that they can be digitally assembled and layered.
Cecilia offers her surface designs to customers through several print-on-demand companies, including Spoonflower and Redbubble. Several of Cecilia’s designs are also featured on Boba baby carriers. She carefully takes into consideration contrast and clarity of color, weight of line, and the size of painted elements over a range of mediums and end products.
Most of Cecilia’s design work is done at the desk in her studio, surrounded by inspirational images and constant music
As a mother of young children and an art teacher, Cecilia sets aside two- to four-hour blocks of time to work on design projects, often between her kids’ bedtime and her own. Cecilia and her partner, also a painter, share a studio, “a room with a big window and too many books.” While she prioritizes client work and projects with a deadline, Cecilia will create self-imposed deadlines for projects of her own that she finds particularly important or inspiring. At times, Cecilia feels challenged by “finding the right balance between spending enough time on a design so the idea has had time to develop, mature, and be the best version it can and working on it longer than is productive; it’s the law of diminishing returns.”
Cecilia dreams of having her own line of upholstery fabrics and wallpapers featuring her painted designs. She seeks to combine “traditional techniques with modern production” for designs that become personal expressions of beauty in individual homes.
“In our age of access, we have boundless information about patterns and fabric making from ancient civilizations and different cultures, from traditional techniques to the most contemporary artisans. We are valuing the work of the artisan over the work of the machine.”
