The Hand That Draws the Silk — Tatiana Alban's process

6 Apr

A portrait of Tatiana Alban, the artist behind the Carousel.

Seventeen years ago, Tatiana walked out of the University of Art and Design Cluj with a diploma and a question that has never left her: what does it mean to make something that lasts?

She didn't find the answer in a single discipline. She found it in all of them at once.

Today, Tatiana works as an illustrator, jewellery maker, painting teacher, and traveller. Not as separate careers, but as one continuous conversation with the same obsession. Each discipline feeds the others. The precision required in jewellery sharpens her line work. The freedom of painting loosens it. The children she teaches remind her why any of it matters in the first place.

Art That Is Shown

Tatiana's work has been exhibited in national and international exhibitions, spaces where her illustrations move from the intimate scale of the sketchbook to the wall, where they are seen in their full intention. Her practice sits comfortably in both worlds: the fine art world of galleries and curators, and the applied world of objects made to be touched, worn, and lived with.

It is a rare combination. And it is precisely what makes her collaboration with Copin London so considered. She brings to the silk not just technical skill, but an artistic vision that has been tested, exhibited, and recognised beyond the commercial realm.

Art That Travels

Every year, Tatiana packs her paints and leaves. Art and Travel, is her annual project: a series of painting workshops held across multiple destinations, where art becomes the reason for the journey and the journey becomes the art. Participants don't just visit a place. They sit with it, look at it slowly, and put it on paper.

It is, in many ways, the purest expression of how Tatiana sees the world. As something to be observed with full attention, before it is interpreted.

Art That Gives

Alongside her own creative practice, Tatiana runs international art projects for children. Non-profit initiatives that bring painting workshops to young people across the world. Children who might never have held a brush find, through her, that they already know how to see. She simply gives them the tools to show it.

This is the thread that runs through everything she does: the belief that art is not a talent you either have or don't. It is a language. And every person deserves to speak it.

Art That Endures

The Copin London scarves are where Tatiana's hand meets silk. Each design is drawn by hand, observed, studied, and translated into line with the same slow attention she brings to her canvases and her jewellery bench. The horses of the Carousel. The chess pieces of the Chess Scarf. The ancient wood grain of the Bristlecone. Each one begins as a drawing. Each one carries, in its final printed form, the trace of a human hand.

This is what separates a Copin London scarf from a printed accessory. It is an artwork, made by an artist who has exhibited internationally, taught across continents, and never stopped drawing, compressed into 65 square centimetres of pure silk.

Designed to be kept. Because it was made to last.