Monterey County Convention & Visitor's Bureau Interview

Here's a recent interview with Celeste at MCCVB . . . . talking about Drinking From a Cold Spring, growing up in Big Sur, weaving a life in the arts through rearing children, carpooling, and laundry.

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=319743275

andon the "See Monterey" website at http://www.seemonterey.com/media_gallery/

Enjoy!

Erin

Rick Kleffel's Review of Drinking From a Cold Spring

Something of an insomniac, Rick Kleffel reads books, loves books, and asks great questions of those who write books.I thoroughly enjoyed meeting him and his interview questions were illuminating for me as well.

Click here to see what Rick has to say about Drinking From a Cold Spring in the "Agony Column."

http://www.bookotron.com/agony/news/2009/09-21-09-news.htm

Prince of Pattern - Kaffe Fassett

For Arts & Living Magazine
Spring 2009, by Erin Lee Gafill


He has been called the King of Color, the Prince of Pattern, even the “Mick Jagger of the Knitting World.’

Best known for his exuberant designs in the decorative arts, his paintings, sweaters, tapestries, ceramics, mosaics, and quilts have been showcased all over the world. He has designed over 400 fabric designs and published over a dozen books on design. Designers and everyday craftspeople keep his books on their coffee tables as reference books and daily inspiration.

In 1988, Kaffe was honored as the first living artist to have a one-man show at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, an exhibit which broke records and continues to travel the world today. He has hosted his own BBC program, “Glorious Color,” and been the subject of several documentaries.

Yet for all his world-renown and peripatetic traveling, he is deeply connected to his Big Sur home and family, returning annually to teach and lecture and draw inspiration.

Born in San Francisco in 1937, Kaffe and his four siblings moved to Big Sur in the 40’s where his parents built the now legendary Nepenthe Restaurant. And in April 2008, Kaffe came back to Nepenthe to work on a 100 foot long mosaic, a project inspired by the blank canvas of a newly re-built retaining wall that wraps around Nepenthe’s famous upper terrace. “I love color and layering of color, repetition,” Kaffe says, “but I am incredibly excited by the beauty in the shades and tones of gray, and scale.”

After sketching out a simple pattern of repeating wave-like forms, he ordered 10 tons of stones in sizes ranging from a pebble to a watermelon in tones of grey moving from softest pearl to charcoal. The mosaic, 10 feet tall and 100 feet long, was completed in four days.

How does he do it?

He works fast.

He does not drive a car, make telephone calls, read email.

And he has Brandon Mably, his assistant for the past 20 years who is a gifted designer in his own right and who serves as resident butcher, baker and bottle washer for Kaffe’s brilliant career.

What Kaffe does really well is create. He pays attention to two things – color and pattern – and doesn’t give a fig for rest. Stitchers often criticize him for the messy back-sides of his knitted garments and tapestries. Students of color theory find him impatient and impenetrable.

“I went to art school for six months and studied color theory for five minutes,” he said in a recent lecture. “You can study all you want and read all the books and do everything just so, and come up with something utterly boring and sterile.”

So what IS his color theory? “Look out the window! Analyze what makes something sing, and then jump in and swim for your life!”

Some people like to start things. Kaffe likes to finish them. “The minute I start a project,” he once told me, “I am already thinking about the next one. I can’t wait to finish so I can move on.”

Kaffe credits his passion for color and pattern to his mother, Lolly Fassett, and his childhood growing up in Big Sur. In the 50’s, Kaffe says, “Big Sur was absolutely remote. We made our own entertainment, running down to the beach, making costumes out of old sheets.” With no access to town and little money, the Fassett kids beat tin can lids for Christmas tree decorations and fashioned papier mache angels. In fact, all of his sibling grew up knitting, crocheting, sewing, quilting, painting.

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,” Kaffe says. “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, Kaffe 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 Kaffe under their wing, and there was the brief stint in art school. But it was the suggestion by a patron to go to England “to knock some of the edges off!” that changed the course of his life, and launched his textile career.

In England Kaffe came across designer Bill Gibb and was invited on a trip to Scotland’s woolen mills. “We took the train north 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.” He bought 20 skeins of yarn and asked a woman on the train back to London to teach him how to knit. He credits his washer-woman for showing him how to knit “fair isle,” a two color per row method he has used ever since. “After the first sweater,” he says, “I never looked back.”

Vogue featured that first rough garment, 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 and continues to bring Kaffe’s message of color and pattern to the world.

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. His books have sold millions of copies and are continually reprinted.

Just reading his schedule is exhausting. But Kaffe is energized by his work, and not a little zealous in 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. “

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, and shook his head. “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.”

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Sidebar

Local (Monterey County) Resources

Kaffe’s fabrics, books and tote bags are featured at Back Porch Fabrics in Pacific Grove, at 157 Grand Avenue, Pacific Grove, CA. 93950. (831) 375-4453. Email Gail at info@ backporchfabrics.com for more details.

Kaffe’s yarns (including sock yarn and the new variegated Colorscape) and knitting books are featured at Monarch Knitting & Quilts located at 529 Central Avenue, Suite 3, Pacific Grove, CA. 93950. 1(831) 647-9276. Contact Joan@monarchknitting.com for more details.

Original one of a kind hand-knits, quilts, and paintings are available at the Phoenix Shop at Nepenthe, Big Sur, California, 93920. (831)667-2347. Email Amanda at ahepfl@ nepenthebigsur.com for more details.

Go to http://www.kaffefassett.com/ for more information and direction to international sources for Kaffe's designs.

The Mystique of Tor House, Robinson Jeffers' Labor of Love

First published Spring 2009, Monterey County Herald, Adventures Magazine, by Erin Gafill

My grandmother watched Robinson Jeffers gather stones from the beach below Carmel Point for his tower at Tor House. She was a child then, it was 1920, and the world was a simpler place.
Tor House. Where epic poet Robinson Jeffers wrote his most acclaimed works, reared his family, and took refuge from sorrow, loss, and unwanted notoriety.

Gershin played piano here. Edna St. Vincent Millay was a guest as were Langston Hughes, Charles Lindbergh, Charlie Chaplin. A sanctuary of family life, classroom for his twin boys Garth and Donnan, the home was also a hub for Carmel’s early bohemians.
Jeffers and his wife Una came to Carmel in 1913 between the tragic death of their first–born daughter Maeve and the fatal stroke of Jeffers’ father. And Una was married to another man when Jeffers and she met. Their “love triangle” made the front page of the Los Angeles Times. Carmel was to be a refuge from wagging tongues and a haven from grief.

Scenic Drive was just a dirt path then bounded by scrub, rock and sand. On misty mornings Robinson and Una and their bulldog Billie would walk Carmel Point and picnic amongst the rocks. There were no homes there then, just a nine hole golf course populated by cows, sheep, and a flock of wild geese. Jeffers called it “their inevitable place.”

In 1918 Jeffers came into money and bought five acres on the Point, planted the first of thousands of trees, and began work on the Tudor-style cottage that was to be their home. Working side-by-side with the mason, Jeffers found he could not just write but build, that “his fingers had the art to make stone love stone.”

He called their home Tor House after the craggy knoll – or “tor” – upon which it stood and christened the cornerstone with wine, milk, and honey.

The builders left but Jeffers carried on the work alone, bringing stones up from the beach, adding a seawall, garage, dining hall, and a second wing for his growing boys.

In 1920 Jeffers began work on Hawk Tower as a gift for Una using a block and tackle system as the ancient Egyptians had done. By 1924 stone by stone and word by word he had completed the tower and found a publisher for his works. Critics compared him to Dante and Homer. With new celebrity came loss of privacy. He doubled the height of the seawall facing Scenic.

The tower began as a sanctuary for Una, became a playground for their boys, and continues to be a place to find inspiration. Complete with a dungeon, secret staircase, and battlements it overlooks the cottage and an old world garden, paths and walls adorned with architectural relics and scavenged materials gathered from the Jeffers’ travels. Look closely and you will find Big Sur jade, Hawaiian lava, even a stone from Tintagel, King Arthur’s storied castle in Cornwall.
Jeffers life was rooted in place, in passion, in poetry. Tor House embodies all three, with an unexpected sense of play. Literary quotes and allusions hide behind ceiling beams and above doorways, in secret cupboards and forgotten niches.

Jeffers outlived Una by a decade, passing away in 1962 on the morning of a rare winter storm that left two inches of snow on Carmel beach. In the 70’s a fund was created to purchase the property and maintain Jeffers’ literary legacy. Family members still return for the annual garden party the first Sunday in May.

Today the home, tower and gardens are open to the public. Breathing in the salt air of the sea in the shadow of Una’s tower, it seems as the poet wrote: “They made their dreams for themselves.”

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SIDEBAR

Tor House & Hawk Tower are located at Carmel Point 26304 Ocean View Avenue just south of Carmel Village. The tower and grounds face Scenic Drive and are bounded by Stewart Way and Ocean view.

Tours are offered every Friday and Saturday on the hour beginning at 10AM. Groups are limited to six with no one under the age of 12 permitted. The tax-deductible free is $7 adults, $4 college students, and $2 for high school students. Reservations are highly recommended. For reservations or more information call Tor House Foundation at 831/624-1813 or go to www.torhouse.org.