Tags
drawloom, Eva Basile, Jacquard, Loom, Princely textile, Rahul Jain
As i always say- there are many curators who study princely textiles but few who have the capability of designing them! We must be thankful to the curators and researchers too who make their studies available and who allow artists to view collections but it takes many more years of trial and error on the looms before one can create high caliber textiles. Such textiles would be worn by royalty (there are hardly royal families anyone anywhere who life the way as royalty did earlier) or used for furnishing imperial palaces (reproductions for palaces run by govt. or for 5 star hotel decor) or places of very high aesthetic, and also cost hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on the scale. Unfortunately these days with low level of know how, i was horrified to see some absolutely ghastly work by a top textile producer in France- it looked like it was produced off a computer loom made with industry (textile industry) quality yarn (the yarn used by textile industry is very sturdy meant for automated machine looms) – looked like a perfectly printed piece of work which totally ruined the look of a woven textile. It had NO depth!
Rahul Jain in India and Eva Basile in Italy are 2 superstars of execution! I call them superstars because both have spent years experimenting on looms to develop expertise in creating lavish textile structures.
Rahul is an expert and authority on middle eastern, central asian and indian silk woven textiles and has constructed draw looms to produce his works. His expertise on executing complex weave structures (with more than 1 warp) on draw looms is rivaled by almost no one in the world – Hes the closest you can come to when you talk about rivaling production of historic imperial textiles..
Eva is an expert on analyzing European weave structures and uses Jacquard hand looms at the Lisio Foundation in Florence to plan elaborate structures. Unlike a lot of weavers that i have interacted with, she understands the vocabulary of princely textiles which itself is really hard to grasp for most people to begin with! So her skill is absolutely rare and priceless and that’s why i think shes a superstar!
Here you can watch her weave
Both these artists should be commissioned by top collectors to create one off & ground breaking works of art. And both these people are VERY easy going to deal with; it helps a lot if you have the right attitude and im thankful that iv had the pleasure of interacting with both on a one to one basis!
The current crop of textile design students coming out of university programs are trained for mass volume industry textile production and their ways of thinking have “time efficiency” and “ease of operation” drilled deep into their heads. No matter how good those kids are with drawing and painting, VERY few might have the mind set suitable for creating princely textiles.