Throwing Ideas at Glass Houses
New York’s most fashionable couple retreats to the Northwest.
Isabel Toledo on the deck of an executive cabin at Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood.
View Slideshow »Ruben Toledo
View Slideshow »On the way to dinner, Ruben showed us his favorite treehouse, where one lucky glass school participant got to live for those three weeks.
View Slideshow »All of the buildings on the campus are gorgeous; very Northwest, simple, modern, and elegant.
View Slideshow »This is the view from the main dining hall out on to the Puget Sound.
View Slideshow »It was clear that the Toledos were affected by the Northwest landscape; here, Ruben’s watercolors of wildlife.
View Slideshow »This is a watercolor that Ruben did of a totem pole on campus. He and Isabel imaged a woven web around the structure, and then they made it come to life. Students wove fabric strips together, collectively in a ceremony-like environment, and expressed their wishes and expectations for the session.
View Slideshow »These are some of the fabric strips left over from the ceremony. They were tied to a railing outside the Toledo’s work studio.
View Slideshow »Inside Ruben and Isabel’s studio
View Slideshow »Inside Ruben and Isabel’s studio.
View Slideshow »Even the blotting papers and scratch pads were beautiful.
View Slideshow »These are the paintings, done by Ruben and referred to in the story, that inspired glass artist Roger Parramore to create the baroque, gothic perfume bottle (also shown here).
View Slideshow »This is Ruben’s interpretation of hot shop choreography. He has a rich history of painting dancers, but he marveled at the glass worker’s speed and agility and remarked that it was very difficult to capture. They were both in awe of the improv and the organization of the hot shop. This image, as mentioned in the story, was made into a silkscreen and painted on to just about every tee-shirt and pair of boxer shorts in Pilchuck during the last week of the session.
TALKING WITH ISABEL TOLEDO outside a cedar cabin at Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, it’s clear that she doesn’t mind being known as the Designer Who Made Michelle Obama’s Inauguration Day Dress. And if she and her collaborator and husband Ruben Toledo—the Artist Whose Fashion Illustrations for Nordstrom Make Models Obsolete—were to gain recognition for influencing the style of Pilchuck’s hot-shop artisans? That wouldn’t be a problem either.
Continuing an almost 40-year tradition of visiting artists as disparate as Judy Chicago and Maya Lin, the Toledos arrived for a three-week stint at the bucolic 54-acre Snohomish County campus in midsummer—in time for that three-day heat wave in late July—without a formal plan for their next collaboration.
Ruben, handsomely buttoned up in workmanly yet timeless Carhartt gear, and Isabel, whose black and red dress complimented her large, kohl-rimmed eyes, explained how that freedom allowed them to dream up a series of gorgeously anthropomorphized perfume bottles. Ruben captured their ideas in a series of gothic, eggplant purple watercolors and presented them to instructor and master glass artist Roger Parramore, who then created one of the bottles, complete with womanly, articulated parts and Isabel-like eyes. Another collaboration evolved more subtly. Students got ahold of Ruben’s painting of the glass artists in motion—“They’re faster than fashion models,” he marveled—and, by the final day, just about every T-shirt in Stanwood was silk-screened with his interpretation of their soft black silhouettes.
For Isabel, who refers to herself as a technician rather than an artist, the retreat was less outwardly productive. She let the hot kilns and cooled vessels simply suggest ideas. Amid jewel-toned glass pieces in the studio, she contemplated gemstones and unrefined silks. Those vague notions, she says, like glass, “will solidify later.”
Will the Pilchuck-inspired ideas appear in any upcoming designs? It may be just a matter of who sports Isabel’s Northwest looks first. The Toledos return to Seattle at the end of October to serve as honorary cochairs of Pilchuck’s annual fundraiser. We’ll be watching to see if she comes back to town wrapped in silk the color of Chihuly corals and golds. Or maybe it will be Mrs. Obama who carries that torch.
Published: October 2009
Add a Comment
We retain the right to remove comments containing personal attacks or excessive profanity, and comments unrelated to the editorial content.