Kaffe Fassett
Kaffe Fassett is coming to Chattanooga. The California artist was born in San Francisco and came of age in Big Sur in the 60’s. His ground-breaking work in knitting took the textile world by storm over 40 years ago. He has been called the “Mick Jagger of the Knitting World.” For the first time, this fall he is coming home to Chattanooga, to lecture, teach, and inspire new legions of fans.
While Mr. Fassett spent his formative years in bohemian Big Sur, Ca., and has lived in London, England for the last 40 years, he has deep roots in Chattanooga. Hiss paternal grandfather was Edward Lee McCallie, son of Thomas Hooke McCallie, founder of the McCallie School and the Presbyterian pastor who served Chattanooga during the Civil War.
Kaffe Fassett may be the most inspirational artist in the world. He lives, eats, breaths and drinks the inspiration of the natural world and exudes color, pattern and beauty through the clicking tips of his knitting needles and paintbrushes. And he invites you to do the same.
Mr. Fassett derives his inspiration for color and pattern from the wold around him. Both the natural world and everything man has created, from the humblest vegetable market to the most beautiful cathedral, fill him with a desire to create, interpret, and, above all, play. Now he is coming to Chattanooga to inspire and be inspired, to be enriched by the surroundings, and to share his theories on color and pattern with anyone who will listen.
Ask him what his color theory is. His reply? “Look out the window! Analyze what makes something sing and then jump in and swim for your life!” That simple intuitive answer is liberating, inspiring, and (for some) frustrating. It can’t be that simple!
Mr. Fassett is considered one of the most influential designers in textile arts living today, yet he literally designs his garments on the needle. His credentials are irrefutable.
Best known for his sense of color and exuberant pattern, he has published over 15 books which have sold in the millions, designed over 400 fabric designs, and seen his hand stitched garments on permanent tour around the world for almost two decades. From paintings, sweaters, tapestries, and ceramics to mosaics, quilts, and fabrics, his works have influenced millions of home crafters.
Designers and everyday craftspeople alike keep his books on their coffee tables as reference books, and crowds throng to his slideshows and lectures in countries from South Africa to Sweden.
In 1988, Victoria & Albert Museum in London honored Mr. Fassett with a one-man show, the first ever for a living artist, and an exhibit which broke attendance records. He hosted his own BBC show, “Glorious Color,” and has been the subject of several documentaries.
Born in San Francisco in 1937, he and his four siblings moved to Big Sur in the 40’s. To feed their growing brood and the never-ending parade of guests, his parents, Lolly and Bill Fassett, built the now legendary Nepenthe Restaurant, still in the family to this day.
Mr. Fassett credits his passion for color and pattern to his mother, Lolly, and his Big Sur childhood. “Big Sur was absolutely remote, he said. "We made our own entertainment, running down to the beach, making costumes out of old sheets.”
Though Nepenthe was a haven for artists, writers, and creative souls, it is his mother above all whom he credits for his design aesthetic.
“I think my mother was really a frustrated artist,” Mr. Fassett said. “She had collections of Asian art, fabric, little things from Japan. She would take us (kids) up to the city and drag us around antique shops and places with gorgeous things. Eventually when I started doing textiles, it was just a natural.”
In his late teens, he set up a painting studio in a shack in Andersen Canyon a few miles south of Nepenthe. Ironically, early still lifes were all white on white.
Eventually color crept in. Early influences include the color-saturated interiors of Pierre Bonnard, tonal still-lifes of Georgio Morandi, and row-house paintings of Diebenkorn.
There were the artists who took him under their wing, and there was the brief stint in art school.
Perhaps it was the suggestion of a family friend, artist Liam Gallagher, that was most pivotal in Mr. Fassett's early teens, bringing him to Happy Valley School in Ojai for part of his High School career. Now Besant Hill School at Happy Valley, the school was a cocoon for his creative impulses, allowing him to indulge his love of art-making and costume, and inspiring him to return to Big Sur with the folk dancing which Nepenthe became known for (and which is immemorialized in the 1965 film The Sandpiper, starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.)
Another family friend suggested Mr. Fassett might benefit from a few years in Europe to “knock the edges off” his country ways. Bored with art school and looking for adventure, he flew off to England for what was meant to be a three-month holiday and is now going on over 40 years. And in England his life took yet another turn.
In London he met Scottish designer Bill Gibb and soon was on a train through Scotland’s woolen mills, exposed to a huge variety of color “through bracken, heath, old world peat bogs. And when we got to the mill there were all those very colors. I thought, ‘has the world gone mad?’ No one was using color in knitting then – it was all beige on beige.”
Mr. Fassett marvels at those who say they cannot do what he does. After all, he reminds us, he learned to knit from a woman on that train ride back to London, and credits his washer-woman for showing him how to knit “fair isle,” a two color per row system he’s used ever since.
That first rough garment combining 20 heathery tones led to a feature with Vogue magazine, which led to work with Missoni, the Italian fashion house. Knitting led to needlepoint. Commissions flooded in. His first book, Glorious Knitting, sold an extraordinary 40,000 copies in the first two weeks, is still in print, and has sold in the millions.
Today, he designs yarn colors and knit patterns for Rowan, fabrics for Westminster Fibers, garments for Peruvian Connection, even pajamas for Pine Cone Hill. He has his own line of table-wares at Neiman Marcus, and continues to knit once-offs, paint still-lifes, and take on needlepoint commissions.
Just reading his schedule is exhausting. But Mr. Fassett is energized by his work, and endlessly encouraging young people to pick up a brush – or a set of needles - themselves.
“Art is so deeply satisfying. You’ll never regret going into it. It’s a way of making sense of your life," he said.
During a recent slideshow he jumped from a new four-story quilt in Friesland (shown suspended from the top of a 450 year old church) to a mosaic commission in Scotland to a knitted cardigan for Peruvian Connection, then paused, laughing deeply.
“People are a bit confused about my career, because I do so many different types of art-making. But in a way I do what I’ve always done. It’s always been about color. And color can transform your life.”
Invariably audience members will ask, “When do you sleep?” He may lose patience with that question. “I work fast and I work bloody hard,” he said, urging the audience to do the same. His secret may lie with what he doesn’t do as much as with what he does so well.
He does not second-guess. He rarely rips out his stitches, adding more of an offending color if something has gone awry to “set it right.” He does not drive a car, make telephone calls, read email, or put up with the nattering of “husbands and small children.”
With preachers and teachers deep on both sides of his family tree, Mr. Fassett might rightly be described as evangelical about his work. And this October he is bringing his message home to Chattanooga, working side by side with local students to introduce new ways of seeing and doing.
Knitting groups and Quilting Bees in the Volunteer State may never be the same.
Information about the Kaffe Fassett Color In Design workshops can be found at www.bigsurarts.com/kaffe or by calling Studio One – Big Sur at 831 646-9000.