TEXTILE TALKS: Kaffe Fassett & Erin Lee Gafill, A Creative Conversation

for over 10 years my uncle k facet and i have painted together every year color duets is a celebration of that work keith and i were both born and raised in california 25 years apart he has lived most of his life in london and i have lived most of mine in big sur though we're from two different generations we have inherited the same artistic legacy from our family our family restaurant nepenthe and the people who come here have affected both cave and me so deeply as it was his home during his teens and where i grew up in the 60s and 70s painting together is one of the great joys of my life [Music] do [Music] do do [Music] do [Music] even though cafe has come all the way from london i'm the one who's always late he works in acrylics and i work in oils and i tuck my easel right up next to his watch how he begins and then i begin my own work i am so proud that this book exists and is the first book that offers the world images of cafe as a painter [Music] welcome to everybody i hope you enjoyed that wonderful video as everyone entered we have about 1500 people of you it took us a few minutes to get everybody in and if you missed part of the video it will be on youtube for you to view later um hello and welcome my name is nancy bevore and i'm the director of the san jose museum of quilts and textiles and i'm delighted today to introduce our presentation k facet and aaron lee gaffel a creative conversation uh for those of you who are joining for the first time textile talks is a weekly virtual lecture series presented each wednesday by six different textile and fiber art organizations studio art quilt associates the international quilt museum surface design association modern quilt guild quilt alliance and the san jose museum of quilts and textiles today's presentation and question and answer session will last about an hour and if you'd like to ask a question you can submit it in the q a area use that q a area rather than the chat because it's easiest for us to find it and we'll get to those questions at the end of the presentation we're very proud to be supported by the following sponsors who make this free lecture series possible they are aura fill handy quilter the quilt show misty fuse artistic artifacts shifter publishing equilter moda fabrics nine patch fabrics empty spool seminars quilt mania and cnt publishing and we thank them for their generosity and i hope you'll patronize our sponsors and so that we can continue to offer the talks for free i hope you'll also consider making a donation to the presenting organization and i'll put a link in the chat or you can visit the san jose museum of quilts and textiles website in a couple of minutes we'll have our invited speakers talk about their creative partnership that's inspired their recent publication of color duets there it is a visual memoir chronicling aaron and cave's decades-long collaboration an exhibition of the same name will be on view at the monterey museum of art in monterey california in may 2021 and some of you may be able to visit in person but if not don't worry there will be plenty of online content so that you'll be able to visit from anywhere in the world and there's a special today for textile talk attendees when you order the book you'll also get a set of beautiful postcards with images from the book and there will be information on how to order the book in our chat we'll also be sharing a link to some virtual events and happenings at the san jose museum of quilts and textiles that anywhere in the world you can participate in we have a diy tote bag digital workshop for a beginner soas with brooklyn based designer madhya muhammad on november 7th it's great to share with kids of all ages and we also have a continuing series of workshops with our newly launched digital artist in residence program and now i'm delighted to introduce our speakers aaron lee gaffel and k fassett so kaif almost really needs no introduction he's dedicated the last 50 years of his life to the world of knitting needlepoint and patchwork promoting these crafts through his own work and encouraging others to find their own creativity he began his career as a fine art painter and throughout his life he's maintain a regular painting practice he is also an internationally known textile designer and both his paintings and textiles have been featured in museum and gallery shows around the world he was born in san francisco he spent his early years in big sur and has lived in london for over 50 years he's also the author of over 50 books on textiles craft and design that seems amazing and in 2018 kaefe was appointed as an honorary member of the most excellent order of the british empire wow that's the first time i've gotten to introduce somebody like that he lives in london with his partner of 30 years brandon mabley who oversees the cave facet collective design group and erin is an award-winning artist teacher and author from big sur california and her abstracted landscapes plein air paintings and still-life paintings are collected internationally erin teaches creativity and painting workshops including the passion of painting awaken the art within the art of now and these series explore the connections between art making and mindfulness she teaches regularly at rancho la puerta in tecate baja california mexico every october in italy and at the esselyn institute in big sur california remember those days when we can travel and we look forward to doing those again soon in 2008 aaron was honored as a champion of the arts by the monterey council for the arts and the state of california she's an artist member of the carmel art association and is the author of the inspirational memoir drinking from a cold spring a little book of hope now available through amazon and of course color duets with her uncle artist k facet so we're excited to have them both here today to talk more about their years of creative collaboration so take it away aaron and kaif oh wow what an introduction thank you so much and thank you for having us we're so thrilled and i'm so delighted that this is actually working impossible because i'm always afraid that we won't be able to get enough people in the room and there's a real um hunger i think right now especially for the kind of information that color duets and the work that cafe and i do um in the world at large just this connection between humanity and and creativity and cave is going to join in with me on this slideshow um cafe is my uncle hey cave i know you're you're there watching alongside me that was a great introduction thank you wow um cave was my first inspiration artistically because he was such an incredible force of creativity in my early childhood in big sur and here he is surrounded by his white on white paintings in london in his london studio this is like 90 what do you what year do you think this is okay 1968 sort of uh late 70s probably okay okay wow and this was before color had overtaken your world i think most people were born this goes back a little earlier to cave doing a self-portrait um this might even be on the back of an old door from the restaurant yeah possibly just through nathan and i was looking at my reflection in a window i wasn't even looking in a mirror but it was a wow in big sur wow it's incredible um the the view from nepenthe has become my obsession but this is an early cafe interpretation of the view looking south from our family restaurant nepenthe which is perched on the edge of a cliff looking south about 40 miles on a clear day and you even got a little bit of the packard pond down there in that little green bluff close to the water's edge coming in and that it was so mysterious always isn't it when that mist crawls up the coastline absolutely i mean it's just such an indelible part of life on the central coast and the experience of this place is so changeable because of that mist that rolls in and softens everything um here's a here's a painting that you did of san francisco days that even though i'm a country boy i love cities and i love the weird still life of buildings that grow up uh with everybody's personality stamped on their particular buildings and particularly when they age and kind of fall into disrepair that's when i really love them the best so this is uh sutter street i think in san francisco in the old days when i had an artist's studio there wow you told me a story once about a friend of yours during that era who got it who got a job you never saw him again and you said hey what happened to you you used to be painting all the time and he said well i bought a car and i had i bought a car i bought a car and i had to get a job to pay for the car yeah yeah and that's why i never learned to drive from that moment i'm never going to be out of pocket uh trying to support a car that's right um i accidentally went too fast and skipped right over one of those amazing paintings and tom may have to come back and help me retrieve it but right now what we're looking at is um a uh oh things are going to hell in a handbasket behind me this is the painting done at doris duke's resident wow i took uh they had fabulous flowers in the garden and uh she let me make a huge bouquet and do a uh a painting of it wow well this so cave one of the things we're talking about in our talk today is inspirations and the inspiration of cave and and kate's sisters my mother holly and his sister dorcas this is actually a photograph of this painting by cape on the wall of dorcas's house her living room in pacific grove we could do a whole book just on how dorcas has painted her house and arranged her fabrics and her fabulous quilts i mean he's one of the great free quilters of this world absolutely doing fabulous kind of oriental um quilts i remember going into an exhibition do you remember at the at the art center pacifico and seeing this fabulous painting down the end of the room and when i got to it it was one of darkest's quilts that had entered this show that's right oh yeah i mean her boldness and her freedom and i think that's one of the qualities that we got as kids um that is part of this whole you know legacy of growing up in big sur is the freedom to express and experiment in your own way and to kind of not be rule driven at all i mean really to not to disregard the not to disregard the requirements of craft and the technical things that make or break you know especially if you're doing a quilt and you're cutting and you're measuring you're sewing things together um but but there is also this tremendous energy of freestyle and free freeness in work and she certainly has that this is a great painting actually to to carry that theme forward that you did and i think a lower garden yeah and this is like the inside of my mind i love chinese puzzles uh i love complicated intricate things so when i saw this huge cactus plant with striped uh fronds coming out i i couldn't resist it i had to go on that great uh it's like a roller coaster ride trying to paint it all straight in my head but it was fascinating and i i like this painting because it it has that the energy of that amazing plant for those of uh who don't know where we grew up you know big sur is right on the coast of central california and it's juxtaposed between the santa lucia mountains and the pacific ocean and it has this mediterranean climate that allows all kinds of things to grow very similar to if you've ever been to the island of capri um all the things that grow on the island of capri grow here it was so familiar to me when i went there for the first time and um you know these amazing aloe plants and lontana flowers are their orange petals and so there's there's this abundance of natural inspiration that contains pattern and i think that's something that's really been carried forward um in your work of course and here's something a little bit more um restrained and and but it's such a gorgeous gorgeous painting that i get to see this all the time because it's it's here in big sur but this is a cave painting so so this is um i love tone on tone as part of my nature is that i love extremes so i love high contrast but i also love um very close toned objects particularly old ones like these old watering cans and this faded old keelum carpet that's on the floor and then the um the old uh little pots from a garden shed uh terracotta pots that are worn and used and old baskets and all of this just goes together beautifully i think as as a sort of symphony of golden terracon tones and as in a painter what i would do with if i came across this painting i would really want to understand what you were doing with the background because that that is the most incredible color you know it's not a white wall it's it's lavender and it's blue and it has just this depth and layering and the light in that as a painter that really thrills me because it sets up all of these muted colors with this really gorgeous color behind everything that would make me really look at it's very important mm-hmm golden tones so so all of this you know launched me all of the all of my experiences with you gave me this incredible desire to paint and to or to create i i didn't initially think as you know that painting was going to be the thing for me but but when you would come home from your travels i would just live for the stories you would tell of the world beyond big sur and that that desire to be part of that larger creative world kept coming back for me through writing through eventually through painting i was really inspired by the landscape that we grew up in but also by the textile world that lolly your mother my grandmother was always there was always a kaleem or a tapestry or something woven or knitted that that snuck into my paintings and i became really aware of structure within painting as kind of an underpinning a lot of my early paintings i feel like could have been quilts if i had been in the sewing world i might have been taking huge swaths of you know fabric and stuff this is a good example i think aaron of that penny and and this one too of how textiles have told us so much about color don't you feel that with lumps of fabric or balls of yarn give you uh a gateway into the sensuality of color almost you know i mean that instructs you as a painter because i think it's very hard for a lot of people to come to terms with color absolutely because when you're when when you're knitting or when you're working with fabric you see big color together and then you go into paint it or you're trying to paint something and you get these little itsy-bitsy you know bits of color that that end up getting kind of you know lost so i absolutely agree i mean just seeing a basket of yarn and those huge beautiful chunks of round color this this painting that we're looking at and like tom is going to come teach me how to go backwards so we're sort of stuck here for a second if i wanted to back up i don't know how to do it but um maybe that's my motto always go forward forward we'll go forward but the um well aaron is like a basket of yarn exactly i mean and these round these round shapes and this kind of creased feeling so you know in my in my exploration of color and in my exploration of creativity it came out in in in various ways but color was always this emotionally releasing space for me to be able to play with objects and put them together and just get into how tangerine a tangerine is and how it plays off of the yellow of a lemon and then the fun of pattern and for me it was it was it was really an outcome of that kind of um you know this was a thing that lolly really celebrated in all of the people who came to nepenthe so here's a picture of nepenthe which was one of the great inspirations in in our lives this is my mother's dream isn't it i mean she she dreamt that building up in that particular piece of landscape perched on the hill um i mean that was her great great creative uh vision so how old were you when you first came to big sur and lolly and bill began the restaurant i suppose i was you know about eight or nine or something you know very young and it was just a hill it was a little loud log cabin on a hill and lolly and bill just bulldozed out this huge swath of flat to create a terrace [Laughter] there you are the terrace has been poured and the mountains behind you and the fire pit so this restaurant nepenthe um you know nepenthe is 71 years old now and lolly was the matriarch of you know creating this place and inspiring people to come here not and people would drop out of wherever they were and come to nepenthe and end up being the waiter or the bus or or the cook but they brought with them these incredibly interesting lives of literature and music and traveling and she celebrated all of that yeah because everyone had done great travels when she was young you know you know through capri and fabulous through paris and everything and so i'm sure that she has just told an amazing story and everyone's laughing uh that's just the look she has she was a great storyteller wasn't she she really was and and also point out that she's sitting she's sitting against her chair which was always covered in the most ornately embroidered you know fabric and then her blouses were all made by hand she had bolts and bolts of fabric in her sewing room stacked to the rafters and she wore a different blouse cut cut and sewn to her specifications every day so we we grew up with this force to be reckoned with with her love of pattern and fabric and and making pervading every little bit of nepenthe along with her love of celebration and dance do you recognize any of your sisters in this photograph oh yes i can see kim my youngest sister and uh is that is that holly i'm dancing with that's holly and then i think that's is that dorcas standing with her back to the trees yes yes probably she was always standing off but um very interesting that and and these great skirts i was trying to tell brandon about these great skirts with petticoats a circle and a half of fabric that was used to make these wonderful skirts of the 1950s and 60s yeah well you came to big sur before there was even electricity so you had to make your own fun and i think lolly and bill both loved celebration on some level i mean lolly certainly did with just wanting people to dress up and dance and that that heightened you know joie de vivre and nepenthe became the place in big sur where people would gather and just ha really cut loose um and really have that kind of heightened um experience but at the same time it was a family you were you and your brothers and sisters were building out a restaurant and i remember a story you told about everyone being set to tasks like filling the kerosene lamps you know there's no electricity and chopping wood for the fire your task was to paint the family christmas cards that's right yeah yeah i i would sit down and make hand paint all the christmas cards each one a little painting that went out into the world and so i got out of a lot of hard work that everybody else was doing but i think it's really a great example of the fact that lolly really saw you and and lolly really recognized that you had a talent and really encouraged it and you know this was a family that was literally clearing the land and digging the ditches and putting up those you know rafters to build out this incredible restaurant this physical structure um you know while you were all growing up and so that in the midst of building a restaurant and and now it employs 120 people so it's become this be a myth but to recognize one of the children as being the create a creative you know entity uh it's a it's a huge thing because it she supported she supported you in that flourishing and here here we are we've moved on to sort of more coming into nepenthe again here we are sitting at the the terrace with the baby blanket behind me behind you and that's yeah these are blankets everybody in the family would make a square and then we would crochet them all together to make a blanket for the latest baby to enter the great clan of facets that's right or or whoever was having a baby in big sur would end up getting one of these blankets and it's a wonderful community project where everybody makes this square and it gets stitched together and um i i would you would can't come home to too infrequently so i eventually i found my way to london and this is me sitting on the tear the deck of you know out of your bedroom i think a little bowl of um nice i was thinking where is that in big sur of course it's london it's london garden so one of my turning points in my life as an artist was to go to you when i was i think 28 i left my little youngest child emily behind when she with with her dad and the babysitter and just shadowed you in everything that you did and we had so much fun you dropped everything and took me all around and this was the day we went off to see a play in the middle of the afternoon i had just bought this dress in portobello road and it was probably someone's wedding dress and i'm sure i'm wearing it backwards but we had we had an incredible adventure and you really let me sit at your feet and and follow you you know if you did needlepoint i did needlepoint if you were painting i was painting um and you know i think for an artist you have a living artist who you can just you know learn from and be guided by and i'm so is is a great gift and for me i was really gifted in having your example to follow and this is an image of you and me together at an exhibition in vancouver um when once again i abandoned my family and rushed off to celebrate your exhibition there but to have the um you know we're we as artists and as creative people we're looking for these threads in our lives to to to to pull on and to follow to keep us through the dark days and um here we are again now back at the log at nepenthe um at the beginning of this project of color duets and in and and and and i just want i bring us back to lolly because lolly lolly was so inspired by her grandmother jane gallatin powers and james my mother by the way lolly is it was her nickname that's right everybody called her everybody called her lolly or everybody called her mom yes and this is a painting of lolly by um by lolly's grandmother uh jane gallatin powers and it really celebrates in painting the adventures that lolly was having in italy when she was a young woman into her twenties um it was from those adventures that she came back to big sur and started nepenthe and lolly was jane's favorite model of jane painted so many portraits of lolly during those years that all ended up in a basement in carmel and eventually have come back to light but the jane gallaudet and powers was a really tremendous painter and studied with the cubists and a lot of the work she did is absolutely you can see here i mean maybe it's hindsight is 20 20 but you're looking back at her work now and i absolutely see textiles and quilts and pattern upon pattern that orderliness she would have loved us getting into patchwork quilts and big knitted shawls and things i think she would have i seen season think that's very much her mood absolutely and at the modernism i mean of her ta in her time she was very modern in how she was approaching painting and um and i think many of her paintings this one in particular really lends itself to you know seeing color and seeing shape in that very big very bold way and you know i think this idea of influences and what has influenced you what has influenced me what has influenced me through you this um these ideas you know we're constantly kind of trying to figure it out um when we're not actually making something um this is one of jane gallatin powers paintings of venice which is so exquisite and you know her use of color here is is just absolutely beautiful i mean it actually really goes well with your background right now with those really high sherbety tones um and and and for me as a painter you know as a as a young mom i had two kids i'm trying to find my voice artistically while raising children while working while being part of the whole nepenthe story just trying to figure out well what am i supposed to be doing just as this pull toward painting really kind of surprised me and i really began by going back into first by following in your footsteps and doing a lot of textiles but then really looking at jane's paintings and being allowing myself to be influenced by them and um and you know really going around and around on a dark day i'm always finding myself knitting because knitting is a way for me to take all this visual stimulation and interpret it in a textile medium without the my the headiness of painting and if you look around the big sur landscape from that perspective it's just a wonderful modern quilt with huge swaths of color and shape and uh it it you know there's an infinite amount of inspiration to be to be drawn from the natural world but not always the way people think that it is inspiring to you you know the the inspiration here may find its way out in different ways so something that i think has been very very helpful for both you and me is having a permission to play attitude that growing up in big sur in part gave both of us and and i think as americans we're not stuck to a tradition you know we're very eclectic gypsies who collect you know oriental things and mexican things and you know we're influenced by the whole world of of arts and decorative arts absolutely i mean we have a freedom of just give it a try and see what happens and um i want to touch on some of the painters who've influenced us as well because i think that the realm of the imagination odilon ray dal as a as a painter who just combined his imagination and color color yeah i mean he loved color and look at the electricity of that imagine putting that incredible cobalt on top of that deep gold and yellow i mean it's an amazing shocking exciting combination um and you know he's the first painter i saw when i went to paris when i was 18 years old and the first exhibition i went to was rajon and i've never heard it had a huge effect i i heard that he painted a lot of his flower paintings when the flowers were just about dead because the color became more intense then and it really feels like that yeah oh yeah i just into the to the bravery i mean just the freedom to combine these colors and and the wow that you get out of them and and you know then we go to morandi giorgio morandi was this italian painter whose colors were so interestingly weird and and neutralized and yet um you know you see this bigger effect on me than anyone because he was so pare down he was like a priest sitting in a room don't go too fast with these they're so beautiful um you know these beautiful still lives he had a little collection of objects that he brought out and painted over and over and over again um i mean he would have been a perfect lockdown victim because he just sat in one room and just painted and painted and painted the same objects and brought out of them the theater of form in a way that really inspired me to just do endless white still lives when i started painting i did nothing but white on white i wasn't interested in color at all because of morante and then yeah again to get more taking those forms into color which you can see here i'm playing with all these shades of green yeah i mean his his approach was so instructive because he worked with um the same objects as you said again and again and again and it was really that kind of idea that in um you know in our creation of color duets this is an image of of you and holly this is so this is a photograph of holly my mother and cave together when they were in their early teens about 30 or so years ago my mother began painting and invited us to join her in her home in big sur and for the last 12 or so years cave and i have come together and painted in her cabin in big sur yeah wasn't she she was so she burst onto the scene she went from you know somebody who was afraid to paint afraid to express herself to being a full-fledged painter i mean it took about a year and a half and she was there and and she painted the most wonderful great studies of the coast and the road down the coast uh just wonderfully uh and and it was very exciting to have her come into still life and range still lies for her to paint beautifully in that house it was it was so exciting and what she would do is is bring down the boxes from her house and all of this now is in our book color duets which tells all these stories and contains all these paintings but she would bring down these bowls and jars and dishes and such and then we would paint them together all three of us yeah um it's like funny because these first two that we're starting with are actually from our last time painting together which was in in london almost two years ago a year and a half ago but um this experience of just taking the same objects and arranging them and looking at them and painting them again and again and again is really borrowed from that yes so this these are these are arranged so they're side by side and um they're expressing cave and then they're expressing me and and and mirandi who we were looking at earlier comes through in this approach of gathering the same things and looking at them and it's endless because every day when you look at them together you see them differently and and i we always would find it so intriguing because you would paint the same thing i'm painting and yet our paintings would come out so differently and have such a different vibration and such a different feeling and i'm only a little bit off from you you know here you are okay straight on looking at this amazing circus of pattern and color i i took a big banana leaf off the tree in the garden and brought it in as as the underlying bit for that still life and then painted your version of it right which is probably more realistic in the sense that it's sort of dying and going into this very um you know muted space but um it's really it's really fascinating i mean we continue to be amazed at how each of us sees things so differently and uh the treat for me of you setting up a still life and then giving me the opportunity to paint i thought that was mine that was mine that was mine here's yours yours and here's mine yeah that's right um and um there's a there are qualities that just are really elusive to me that i see in your work and even though i try so hard to study exactly what you're doing i end up going my own way each time um so it's it's we never get bored i mean a painter can never be bored so here's you painting here's me and here's you um and we have so much fun doing this i can't believe that we haven't been able for all the reasons we all know with covet 19 and no traveling and all that um but just going through these paintings together and seeing the years you know because they were both thinking about rust the whole this world of rust and then doing hat boxes as a quilt wonderful yes this is from your first book on quilts and using all of the my grandmother lolly in our in our house in big sur a box filled to the brim with old remnants of fabrics so i stole as much out of that as i possibly could and um so i became an artist around raising children i have two kids and i could make this block by block and get 20 minutes of sewing done there's 20 minutes of designing done and then zip off and what's wonderful about textiles is that for me as in that light is that i can take interpret something that i'm very excited by that you've shared with me or that i've seen you know this sweater here is a sweater i i knit based on a little sweater you made for my daughter emily and when she outgrew it i was devastated so i had to make my own version of it even bigger and it's photographed on an interpretation of one of your quilts as well and hand work it gives us that access to color and it also gives us this way of working when we have to just grab 20 minutes you know and then dash off to do something else so for a parent or for someone who's you know juggling multiple projects uh there's there's utility in that that's that's kind of great um you recognize this i'm sure a big huge flower it's funny that's a flower that comes back and back in my designing i i love it i took it off an old brocade in canada a museum and so i've used that that image over and over many many different moods and scales so beautiful it gives you so many possibilities um and you know this is my my obsession is the persian poppies which is from um from your book i think this is from your first knitting book and also pattern library and i have been obsessed with revisiting this again and again i i think pattern and um this is a a detail from the stone wall that you made which is at nepenthe and my mom's you know bowls of ice cream bowls and this is it from a shirt you gave me from long ago just pattern and color and the natural world are these great inspirations that you we can end this is a series of paintings i made just taking the same idea and doing it again and again and all of this is in is in color duets um but since color duets you know it's i wanted to take us a little bit on a memory lane because we all went to italy together many years ago with this is that my son shai who's now 37 and we had a great adventure with uk keith and brandon tom and chai and emily in venice this is uh brandon and cave and it was such an incredible week and we were so inspired by everything that we were doing there and the sights that we were seeing and emily with her fascination with pigeons um and then on our very last day in italy kaif you and brandon thought you had to leave a day earlier than you did and you left and we were just bereft we we just felt so hollow and so sad so we took a long boat ride to the island of burano which was like an hour and 45 minute boat ride from where we were staying and we arrived in this this village on this island that was just chock full of incredible houses painted every imaginable color and if you hadn't left a day earlier you would have been with us on that day but uh we went back a year and a half ago and photographed i mean you could just spend the rest of your life photographing this island and being inspired every time you turn a corner and um when we were last visiting you in london i remember you saying that you were trying to uh figure out where to go in italy yeah for your next one i wanted to find a location in italy that i could photograph very colorful quilts and we went to uh sicily which was gorgeous beautiful stone carvings and everything but everything was stone bone color so it was very monochrome and very difficult and you showed me these pictures of burano and i went mad that i said that's the saturated color i want and so we went and did a recce there and decided that's what we're going to do our book quilt and verano so it was very very exciting that you showed me the way to this place that was so full of color and of course you're finding the wonderful old corroded corners which we did too we like a bit of texture yeah well we love that we love those old walls and those also those incredible just hot hot colors and the bright colors in my fabrics just went perfectly with this background there's you know um oranges and great stripes of different colors and here you know with that kind of setting it was just amazing it's wonderful to see your quilts in this location because it gives it gives you the opportunity to make the connection um when you're when you're designing something between the inspiration and an outcome and also these juxtapositions um just they're they're so evocative and the found things like that broom that you have well this is this was so amazing about this picture we it was a very dark quilt we couldn't find the perfect location and suddenly i thought this green wall was just perfect and the gold behind it was wonderful but then we needed something just an extra little element and there stood a little broom that was the perfect colors to go with the walls and the quilt and so that's the kind of thing that happens on our locations you know we're out with a suitcase full of quilts in a wilderness and we find beautiful props absolutely and they're all waiting they're all waiting for you to show up and then and then you see them and um you know we're we're gonna favorite house in burano because it it had the wonderful modern color but it has had these beautiful old world uh surrounds to the windows and and doors and so um our quilt just went perfectly there with that chalky blue and this black and white quilt with just shots of color in it absolutely oh my god i mean this this wall looks like it's got a hundred years of paint jobs yeah yeah it was it was just a kind of messes somebody was quickly trying to sort of you know paint some color on to it and i love it i love it that it's so wild and free and it went perfectly with this very saturated kind of berry tones i think yeah incredible i mean there's so much inspiration in this book you know i was watching uh look going through the book and thinking oh my god i mean it wants me it makes me want to make a quilt again i haven't made a quilt for a while that he painted his doors and all the outside of his house and these wonderful colors and it went so perfectly with the bold orange print of my uh quilt yeah oh yeah oh my god and this is what you have behind you yes right yeah so this is an incredibly strong wild quilt but it just looks quite normal there against this beautiful kind of um chalky green just cool green background um but this the background of this is one of brandon madley's fabrics called bali brocade and it's very very wild and it was very strong decision to put this great big star intricate star on top of this very strong background but i think it really works oh my god it's incredible it really does and since uh the book is out and about now you've been working on some other projects during covet and we only have about a minute left so tell us tell us what you're doing now with the um my lockdown project of just getting into my archives of knitted swatches when i knit a sweater i need a great big back of the sweater or a piece of it or and then i send that off to the knitters and they knit the whole sweater and so that when they come back to me they they sit in the archives and they go together beautifully i make color combinations that work together but it's fantastic to see all of the history of the designs i've done in knitting so you've actually hand sewn together all of these old pieces and how many of these have you made i've done i made about 20 of these wow you have an exhibition of them one day wow incredible that's enough just in very very soft colors this one doesn't scare the horses you know uh chalky uh and geometrics i love geometrics the zigzags and yes architecture that are in this and there's persian poppy right in the middle the pattern that you love yeah well as and and i would say as we're wrapping this up you know um kate's book quilts and burano is available now it's absolutely inspiring color duets is available as well and um and and for art for painters for any medium any artists what is so instructive to me about cave's most recent thing of taking his small samples and stitching them together is that i'm going to stop screen sharing now yes okay um is is that you are you're reiterating you're doing you're going back again and again and again and you're not afraid to or or for some reason thank you there's no value in reapproaching a subject and when i'm working with painters i have them do an idea again and again and again because eventually your inner critic just stops fighting you and you see that you can play you can experiment and something shakes loose and when i see the energy and the time and the work you put in to doing the same pattern from a different colorway different take on it the value in that is so so obvious and um it's so instructive to any artist in any medium but it's difficult for people to digest that idea to go back and visit something again you know that uh you always find something new like i love to see a good film five or six times i want to go back and notice every little detail in the the styling of it in the locations and the costumes and the hand movements and whatever um and so that's what what i feel that we both get out of uh revisiting these objects over and over again to paint and also the motifs in my patchwork and in my knitting to come back and back to those flower themes those big geometrics do them soft colors bright colors dark colors mysterious colors you know just keep it rolling yeah and it all changes i mean when i'm looking at what's behind you i think any one of those colors or patterns would look different if you put it in a different combination so you know you don't really know what it can yield unless you do try and do do explore and experiment with that what what's interesting about it as i used a lot of black and white prints in in that big star and uh that i learned from my students and when i go around the world teaching workshops the students would keep playing with black and white and really inspiring me oh it's something so contrasting and so extreme because as i say i love extremes yeah well nancy bavore is back to ask us some questions well i'm just looking at all of the chats and everybody's going wonderful beautiful more more oh such a philosopher i'd like to have a beer with him inspired by big sir um we'll save all these for you no there were just a lot of questions about just about creativity and um kaif especially for you how do you manage um with so many different media that you work in you know practically how do you figure out am i going to paint today am i going to do patchwork am i going to design fabric um how do you how do you do that well that's a very very leading question a very good one when i'm painting or making a quilt there's a point where i run out of steam i'm all excited i've got the materials or i've got the colors and i've got this object in front of me and then i start working on it and then if if i get stale which one always does you kind of lose your energy then i sit down and knit and it's like a meditation my my energy comes back my my whole you know there's something that's very soothing about knitting and so i'll have a big shawl or something on the go and i'll just sit and knit on that for a while completely forget about the project and then suddenly look up at it and i'll know where to go next so uh it's they work very well together the thing of making textiles with your hands and creating ideas with your imagination and your eyes okay well then something just quickly came up when do you sleep well i work very fast you know i've been doing this for years and years and years you're good at it yeah yeah so you know i i mean i can i can sit and knit like a banshee you know it goes very quickly and so does needlepoint i love needlepoint and the paintings go quickly you know um sometimes it's embarrassing how quickly a painting falls into place other times it's quite difficult you have to go back and back and back and work on it but um so i think one of the interesting things about this conversation and you're painting together over so many years is that kaif you've i think acted as a mentor an inspiration to aaron and aaron to you um a lot of the comments that have been coming through too are from people who have taken your classes cave who have been inspired by your books by your teaching by your work um do you believe that everybody has creative possibilities or is this an impossible achievement for some no i i believe that everybody has it everybody has it um what i always say in my talks is i've never seen a boring child's artwork you know every child's artwork is immediate and emotional and funny you know which is very important in life and so i think that there's something about um finding the child in yourselves and some people just get far too grown up and they get i can't be doing with that uh so learning how to play how to be come back to being a child is very important and you know with a little encouragement you can bring people back i find i you know you make them realize that color is important pattern is playful and you know play with those elements in life and don't be afraid to have a good time i love that fearless and the child within so so aaron have you um it seems like with your teaching and your books your writing you are kind of carrying on that family tradition of mentoring um what what is kind of your approach for inspiring and helping people find their creative person within i think that the biggest thing that's challenging for so many people is they're afraid and anything you can do to break out get them to break out of the fear and break through the fear and you know i teach a lot i teach a lot online right now and i give a lot of daily prompts try this try that try the other thing just take paper and paint it a color just do this just do that so to encourage people to actually just get started and get onto a project and giving them time limits sometimes whereas use this for 10 minutes and then walk away because a lot of people really are struggling to manage their time and and once you get started in something you begin and you come back to it every day there's a day cafe is a daily creator he doesn't stop uh he you know he he does sleep like a normal person but he gets up every day he writes in his journal and he creates for eight hours and then he knits while he watches television and he does it every day and every day if a person can just get to their creative side for even 10 minutes it adds up absolutely so i have some just some practical questions um several people wondered about the wonderful paintings you were showing jane's paintings where are they are dorkas's quilts available to be seen online yes i can answer a few that those dorcas is dorcas isn't really in the um internet world at all but you can go to the phoenix shop at nepenthe in big sur and see her quilts there and that's where she sells them and they're all completely original and designed and hand-stitched from beginning to end that's that's where they exist and uh jane power's paintings were when we rediscovered them they were in her her daughter madeline's basement in carmel for over 40 years so finding them was a huge discovery process and now they all live in in the log cabin at nepenthe above the restaurant and there just for the last 20 or so years i've been having them cleaned and re-stretched and restored so there is a book coming out one day that will share them with the world i'm looking forward to that day good good i think people will be glad to hear that um and then kaif why were you drawn to london sorry why why were you drawn to london did you go on a visit and just end up not coming back yeah well i read a book by uh christopher isherwood and i met him and you know he was this archetypal fabulous writer of the english language and witty and funny and so forth and so uh i wanted to go and find out where he came from and so that was one of my big motivations at that time but also i was just curious about these wonderful english people i was meeting that would sit down to a pot of tea in the restaurant you know there was something different about them there was something kind of uh witty and uh you know just marvelous and so i wanted to explore that and when i got to england i was not disappointed it was hilarious they were the funniest people and i've i've never you know i've never budged from here this has been my home ever since great great well i think we're about out of time um i just want to say um is there anything that i haven't asked you that you would like our audience to know i think that thing that uh aaron said about timing is very important giving give yourself a time limit to do something we found that people were completely lost in our workshops until we said by 11 o'clock you're going to have this much done on this quilt and by you know one o'clock in the afternoon you're gonna have this much and they they liked that and they got everything done because they they made themselves just get it done and get over their fear fear is a big thing and getting over it is a huge thing and i'll say one thing i learned from one of kate's um quilt workshops which he somebody would put one or two things up on a design wall and then ask cave what do you think um you know how's it how's my quilt going and he'd say i don't know because i don't have there's nothing for me to really see yet and i thought okay that's really interesting first of all getting something up on a wall if you're designing a quilt and getting enough information on the page if it's if it's a painting then it's paint if it's a quilt then it's fabric choices to actually get a reaction and to respond to something and then the second thing i learned from that was uh don't ask don't ask someone to weigh in on your creative process too soon yeah this is very internal and you as the artist have a lot of work to do for you to feel it's working if you ask someone else what they think they don't have any idea if it's working for you so you they can throw they could throw you very far off of what you are actually trying to do that's great advice okay somebody just said all right everybody get to work thank you so much perfect reaction thank you again aaron and kaif um and all of you who are attending we'll be sharing this presentation as we've said on youtube and if you enjoyed the talk and you'd like to donate to one of our organizations that would be great we thank all of our sponsors and again thank you so much for joining us kaif and aaron this was wonderful i think everybody's inspired and ready to do something great i'll say hooray for museums and i can't wait for the day when you're all open and we can come in great you know because you're a very very important part of the art world thank you thank you we think so too thank you so much for joining us and uh thank you both for being here thank you thanks for having us

Channel: San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles

Views: 11,730

Rating: 4.9400749 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: P3x4oThY-eE

Length: 63min 53sec (3833 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 29 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/BirdBuddi]

Show Notes:

Join us for an exciting conversation with two influential creatives, textile artist Kaffe Fassett and painter Erin Lee Gafill, as they discuss their recent publication Color Duets, a visual memoir chronicling Erin’s decade-long collaboration with her uncle Kaffe. Two artists a generation apart talk about their shared childhood influences growing up at Nepenthe, in Big Sur, California, the deep satisfaction they get from working with their hands, be it painting, knitting, needlepoint, or sewing, and the extraordinary role color plays in their designs, and in their lives.

https://colorduets.com/​

26 Letter Press presents a new book of artwork by Kaffe Fassett & Erin Lee Gafill. This book celebrates a twelve year creative collaboration in still life painting.

https://sjquiltmuseum.org/textile-talks​