House Beautiful
Gone Native:

John Robshaw designs simplified versions of Far Eastern prints and works right alongside local artisans, helping to keep ancient crafts alive, by Christine Pittel

"I caught the Asian bug in art school," says John Robshaw, who now spends half the year in India and the Far East block-printing textiles the traditional way and then selling his designs to clients like Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, and Giorgio Armani. Originally, Robshaw had intended to be a painter, but when a friend called offering a stint on a soap opera in Seoul, he accepted immediately. "Luckily, no acting talent was required, and it was a way to get back to Asia," says Robshaw, who had spent a year in China studying block printing on a grant after graduating from Pratt Institute.

With the soap opera money he traveled to India and watched village craftsmen working with indigo, which is still used to dye textiles in the clay-resist process. "It's so simple and natural," explains Robshaw. "You touch a woodblock to wet clay and then to the fabric. After the clay dries, you dip the cloth into the indigo vat and the clay stays on. One dip gives the fabric a sky-blue color, two dips and it deepens to cobalt, three dips and it's a saturated midnight blue. The dyer says the indigo vats are like a mistress because they need constant attention. Then the fabric is laid to dry in the sun and later the clay is washed off." Robshaw was so fascinated by the process he wound up trying it himself.

He came back to New York with a suitcase full of textiles and realized he had a new career. Now he travels for months at a time, searching out local artisans who are still employing traditional techniques. In Indonesia he headed for Yogyakarta, where the court batiks were made. "Eventually I found a family working and living in an old Colonial Dutch house who had been printing batiks for four generations," he says. "I printed sarongs right alongside them, using a wax-resist and hot copper stamps."

In Jaipur he met a craftsman who had piles of old, intricate woodblocks. But instead of using the five blocks that might make up a familiar Indian print, Robshaw would mix them up, or overlap them, or even print one on top of another. "I was approaching it from a painterly aesthetic," he explains. The result is a cleaned-up version of ethnic designs, still exotic but not quite so identifiable.

Robshaw likes to do his own printing because the work of the professionals is too perfect. "When I need to hire someone to help, I pick the old printers. Their hands are shaky and their eyesight so poor, so the pattern comes out slightly off. I want to feel that human touch."

On each trip, he immerses himself in the local culture, riding his bicycle to the market after work. Next on his itinerary is northern Thailand for handwoven vegetable-dyed ikats. "Then I'm going to Sumatra to look for new weaves and down to Java to do some batiks." In August he will be in Los Angeles for the debut of his own line of throws, scarves, and panels, specially produced for Charles Jacobsen's showroom in the Pacific Design Center. "Actually, I'm still making paintings," observes Robshaw. "Now they just happen to be wearable."

[caption: Interspersed with John Robshaw's woodblock, batik, ikat and clay-resist prints are scenes from his Asian life, clockwise from top left: Robshaw and a craftsman in front of a mosque; silk-weaving at a sari factory; a glimpse of a palace; an artisan handcarves a woodblock to order; after pressing the block into the clay in the tub by her side, a woman lightly touces it to the cloth; Panteji, an experienced painter.]