GILD THE LILY: COLOR AT THE EDGE
By Leslie Clark
The moment Dorothy opens the door of her drab black-and-white Kansas farmhouse
and beholds the land of Oz in all its glorious, glowing Technicolor still reminds
us how color itself transforms everything. The idea that color has a life of
its own; that infinite juxtapositions of color exist and speak to us in ways
outside our experience and assumptions, is a moving principle behind Gild the
Lily’s one-of-a-kind art-to-wear. Husband-and-wife partners Uosis (pronounced “Wasis”)
Juodvalkis and Jacquelyn Rice launched their atelier in 1999 in Providence, Rhode
Island, inspired by the explosive possibilities of manipulating color and design
at the intersection of craft, art and technology. With characteristic brio, Gild
the Lily has become synonymous with ambushing aesthetic conventions, creating
instead a mesmerizing ebb-and-flow of eclectic natural and geometric forms and
patterns in edgy, arresting palettes of color.
Two formidable careers contributed to Gild the Lily’s audacious artistry.
Rice had been head of ceramics and a former dean of fine arts at the Rhode Island
School of Design, a three-time National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient,
an international lecturer, and an acclaimed artist whose ceramics were exhibited
in New York’s American Craft Museum (now the Museum of Art and Design).
Juodvalkis, a digital photography expert, owned a 35-employee commercial photography
studio and color lab. After they married in 1995, Juodvalkis introduced Rice
to the creative capabilities of Adobe Photoshop, and she was transfixed. Then
Juodvalkis was asked to test a new line of liquid acid dyes for inkjet printing.
Grappling with translating Rice’s computer-generated images onto paper,
they experimented with printing on fabric and, wildly excited by the results,
decided to focus on textile printing and design.
Their dazzling, unearthly confections of color play into Gild the Lily’s
quirky designs, well-controlled by spacing and scale. “I had a reputation
in the world of ceramics for color,” Rice explained. “I see color
as subject matter; it means something. Color combinations tell stories that have
an implicit effect.” She makes her color choices intuitively, working for
hours in Photoshop® blending tonalities and hues until it “looks right.” A
larger-than-life, luscious pinky-mauve ginkgo leaf floats off-center across the
back of a silk georgette jacket, overlapping a stippled-water effect in burnt
orange and purple.
Juodvalkis was as well-known in the photography world for a color sensibility
that drew customers like glass artist Dale Chihuly. While he masterminds the
printing, he and Rice consult with each other on every detail from image selection
to which fabrics to use, how to achieve the colors they want, and which garment,
scarf, wrap, or handbag harmonizes with the composition. All of their jackets
are completely reversible, with both sides printed in strikingly different yet
resonant designs.
Behind Gild the Lily lies Rice’s lifelong passion for textiles and handicrafts.
In high school, she harbored fantasies of becoming a fashion designer. She bought
her first sewing machine at the age of eight with money earned picking cherries
in her native Washington. “I truly love to sew. The first few years at
RISD were hard, and at the end of the school year I would sew for about six weeks
before I started working in my ceramics studio.” Now several years into
production, Rice constructs each garment with the help of their long-time seamstress.
Last comes the trim, in what Rice dryly refers to as “strange flavors,” chosen
from fabrics collected over the years and never repeated to keep each garment
unique. Fashion dictates silhouettes, like the trend towards smaller, tighter
jackets. White wool crêpe and white silk georgette are stock basics, but
just as often Rice and Juodvalkis follow their own whimsy, coming up with new
concepts in response to a fabric they cannot resist. It happened with a handwoven
raw silk organza that they discovered in New York. “We found out Balenciaga’s
term for it was gazar. Uosis looked at it and said, ‘I’m going to
have to print on cobwebs now?’ “ Rice recalled. The distributors
told them they could specify the weave to get the density they needed. “It’s
very sheer, and because it’s made out of tussah silk, it has a natural
goldenness that gives a sheen and luminosity to the colors that is marvelous.”
The design process starts with digital photos, usually shot by Juodvalkis using
a 10-megapixel Nikon D200 camera. He and Rice have stockpiled hundreds of CDs
of images waiting in the wings. They travel to rejuvenate their ideas, recently
returning from Istanbul with scores of shots of vaulted brick-and mortar domes
and light irradiating the waters of a Byzantine cistern. Rice cherishes drawings
of mechanical tumblers that “I’ve hung onto for 25 years.” Flower
and plant images, originally from their own garden in Providence, are still significant
in their repertoire. A move to Prescott, Arizona, in 2004 triggered Skull Valley
Sunset, a turquoise and orange skyline vista flaming across a silk georgette
jacket. But otherwise their desert surroundings have had little influence. “Because
it’s so culturally different from the Northeast, it’ll take a while
for these images to filter in,” Rice commented. “It’s awfully
brown here,” Juodvalkis interjected, “and Jacquie would never let
any of her students use brown.” Rice smiled, declaring, “Anything
made with iron oxide was out!”
Juodvalkis continually experiments with the dye performance. At first, every
effort went into “getting the dyes to adhere so that the fabric would retain
its hand and trying to get the right amount of penetration,” he explained.
He usually fine-tunes the acid dye formulas even further. “We’re
remixing them to achieve the kinds of effect we want and diluting them so we
get smoother tonalities. Over the years I think our colors have become a little
clearer and more defined.” He is still not as satisfied with the technical
restrictions of the four-color CMYK process: the cyan, magenta, yellow, and black
replaceable color-ink cartridges in the magazine. “There are certain intensities
of color that you just can’t get, like lemon yellows or deep purples or
really brilliant, saturated tones.”
They moved up from an old Encad 300 dpi poster printer to a used 600 dpi Encad
with a 60-inch width which prints about three yards an hour. Though Juodvalkis
considers an inkjet-printer relatively low maintenance, it takes vigilant monitoring—for
example when the image starts drifting from internal snafus. Because the Encad
was designed to print on paper, whatever fabric they use must be mounted on plastic-coated
paper to feed through the roller. “That has a very beneficial effect on
sheer fabrics because the paper traps the dye and it bounces back into the fabric,
so it maintains the color brightness,” Juodvalkis said. They send all their
fabric to a company for paper bonding, from experience allowing for four to five
percent shrinkage in the final dimensions. Since the fabric is not totally weft-straight
on the paper, they oversize pattern images by an inch or two. Unable to print
cut lines onto the fabric, they use paper patterns. Structurally that hands-on
step compels attention to the drape and planes of the fabric as a function of
the design, rather than images alone predominating.
Their mutual interest in exploring textures has generated other innovations.
Intrigued with working in leather, Rice designed a pig-suede bolero but hit an
impasse: “I wanted a collar which was separate and stood up, and couldn’t
figure it out.” Juodvalkis took over, cutting a curved c-shaped piece of
scrap material and sewing it into a ruffle around the neckline. Rice was thrilled.
They have gone further, stacking up three or four layers of ruffles in fabrics,
feathers, fur, lurex, or whatever else strikes their fancy. “It frames
the face, which everyone wants,” Rice said. “That kind of collaboration
happens to us a lot. ”They have incorporated pleating, striving to integrate
more of the presence of the cloth. “I’m a messy, tactile person,” Rice
said. “Printing’s an illusion; it’s trompe l’oeil. Pleating
adds another dimension to what we do.” They recently introduced subtly
mixed fabrics in a garment, like rich heathery tweeds with silk, evoking the
terrain and the touch of the fibers themselves.
They shun predictability, ready to go wherever their own yellow brick road will
lead them. Repeated prototyping before committing to the final version of a garment
usually guarantees the results, but those random effects that sneak into production
stimulate them. Even after printing, when the fabric goes into a seven-foot-tall
pressure steamer for three hours to set the dyes, they relish the surprises that
show up—what Juodvalkis calls “that margin of uncertainty.”
“What’s really interesting is combining this control with not knowing
what’s going to happen,” Rice said. “The pleasure is how to
capture the unexpected. We’re working directly with the process, varying
it, accepting the accidents.”
— Leslie Clark is a writer living in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
This article was published in the Surface Design Journal, Volume 31, Number 4,
Summer 2007.