Wednesday, Apr. 13, 2005

 

Putting her imprint on the textile world

By EILS LOTOZO
Knight Ridder Newspapers

In Galbraith & Paul’s big window-lined studio in Manayunk, Pa., five artisans work their way along spans of fabric stretched onto tables eight yards long.

They dab textile paint onto carved blocks, carefully position the blocks on the cloth, and press down.

Dab, position, press. Dab, position, press. On they go methodically, until a swath of fabric with designer Liz Galbraith’s whimsical “Donuts” or elegant “Ivy Paisley” pattern appears.

“It’s like a gigantic rubber stamp,” Galbraith says of her method of hand-block printing.

Galbraith, who carves her patterns into dense foam glued to Plexiglas instead of traditional wood blocks, is the only textile designer in the United States producing a large-scale commercial line of fabrics using the ancient technique of hand-blocking. And her efforts have won influential fans in the design world.

“Liz is a tremendous colorist, and the natural quality of the hand-printing just adds so much character to the fabric,” says Erik Hughes, co-owner of De Sousa Hughes, a San Francisco showroom and interior-design firm that distributes Galbraith & Paul fabrics to the trade.

“We’ve got projects with them literally all over the world,” Hughes says.

The company, which Galbraith runs with her husband, Ephraim Paul, has seen its custom-printed fabrics — in Galbraith’s signature tones of grayed greens and blues, subtle burnt oranges, and muted berry shades — snapped up by interior designers and used for upholstery and drapery in luxury resorts in Costa Rica, the Caribbean and Mexico.

Lighting fixtures and shades produced from the fabric can be found in Starbucks stores, Wolfgang Puck’s chain of California Pizza Kitchen restaurants, and in the high-end health-club chain Equinox.

“Pretty much every project I do features a little bit of Galbraith & Paul,” says Jay Jeffers, an interior designer with studios in Los Angeles and San Francisco. An apartment makeover by Jeffers that used the textiles as a focal point earned a spread in House Beautiful last year.

“There is just nothing out there that is as transitional,” he says. “I can use it in a traditional room or in a modern one.”

That’s because Galbraith’s aesthetic is tough to pigeonhole, with designs ranging from the retro-looking fruit slices of her “Citrus” pattern to the elegantly modern etched lines of “Birch” to the demure sprigs of “Smokebush.”

“I like things that kind of bridge the gap between different styles,” she says.

Galbraith’s work has been likened to the punchy designs of the Finnish company Marimekko, with touches of Arts and Crafts Movement visionary William Morris (famed for his nature-inspired wallpaper designs), and a dash of Fortuny, the legendary Spanish-born artist whose Venice atelier devised new ways of dyeing and printing fabrics in the early 1900s.

She acknowledges those influences. “I like simple, bold patterns,” she says. “And I love William Morris for the quality of the hand in his work. He prized the process. He was anti-industrial. And Fortuny was process-oriented, too.”

A brand-new venture is a line of hand-tufted wool rugs that use Galbraith’s patterns. Just introduced on the West Coast, the rug line, which is being produced in Asia, came about after the couple discovered that some of their designs were being knocked off by a rug manufacturer.

They sued for copyright infringement and won. “So we decided to invest the money in our own rug production,” says Paul, 42, who handles the business end of Galbraith & Paul.

Galbraith, 43, started out as a painter. “But the painting never felt like the right fit,” she says. It was too abstract, she says, for a girl whose mother taught her to sew, quilt and braid rugs.

“What I did all my life was make things,” she says. “That’s what I liked.”

High school sweethearts back home in Winnetka, Ill., the couple decided to move to Philadelphia after college (Galbraith at Washington University, Paul at Yale). The choice, Galbraith says, was arbitrary. They wanted to be on the East Coast and near New York, without New York’s crowds and high cost of living. “And Ephraim’s grandmother was living here at the time,” she says.

She dabbled in painting and waited on tables; he was an aspiring writer who taught English and did graduate work. Then, in 1986, Galbraith rented a studio in Old City previously occupied by artist Isamu Noguchi, who had used the space while he worked on “A Bolt of Lightning,” the sculpture that sits at the base of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge.

When the landlord showed her some paper lamps Noguchi had made, Galbraith, who studied papermaking in Japan, glimpsed a new direction for herself.

That same year, she and Paul launched a business fashioning lamps with handmade paper shades. Though it was successful, Galbraith grew frustrated with the rigors involved.

“It really was like wine and grapes,” she recalls. “We made the paper from a plant imported from Asia, and if it was grown during a wet season, that would affect how the paper would come out. Some of the sheets would go bad, and the color would be off.”

Fabric, she decided, was a much more reliable medium for the increasingly intricate hand-block designs she was devising.

Galbraith began using silk for her lampshades in 1996, and soon branched out into printing upholstery and drapery fabrics, including cotton/rayon, velvet and linen.

Today, the company employs five printers, most of them artists themselves, who each week hand-block an average of 100 yards of fabric. Orders through designers for the custom-made material, which sells for $100 to $120 per yard, have an eight- to 10-week lead time.

For more information and a list of interior-design showrooms across the country that sell the products to the design trade, visit www.galbraithandpaul.com.