Kaffe Fassett

Prince of Color 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.”

Kaffe is coming to California this December and January to teach his Color in Design workshops. Go to http://www.kaffeincalifornia.com/ for more details.

(first published in Arts & Living Magazine Spring 2009, © Erin Lee Gafill, 2009)