Print Stories
Every print has a story…
We love prints and print history so we have a research heavy design process. Our prints are concept driven and take years to develop. We build hardworking repeats and avoid design shortcuts. Our approach to scale is a nod to traditional aloha wear, while our subject matter often is not. We feel that print execution depends on context- a print on you is very different animal than a print that surrounds you. Find out the abbreviated backstory on all our prints…
Islands, The Return
This print percolated for a long time before we felt it was just right. Using both 1920s illustrations and 1800s travelogues, we wanted to capture the feeling of longing when you look at the ocean. An imagined return by boat or looking out from land? Intentionally ambiguous. Hawaiians will note that the shape of Mānana (Rabbit) Island has been intentionally flipped, though that is not what it looks like from the ocean side. The reflection in the print changes in color and placement making a seamless repeat where sky meets sea.
Orchard
We’ve been trying to create a print that captures what it means to be Upstate. From a manipulated photograph of an apple orchard we present you with a modern vanitas. Very lush, a little rotten, and channeling all our goth urges (which remain somewhat Victorian in nature). Think of Orchard as the dark side to traditional Hawaiian muʻumuʻu styles, but we can speak more on empire and fashion at another point…
Source photograph: Liana Mikah/Unsplash
Fruitopia
“I love a photo print, and this one made my list of must-have contemporary print designs! It’s luscious, the colors are perfect, the repeat is well disguised.”
A dress covered in tropical fruit is an old standby for resort wear, some type Carmen Miranda moment (an appropriation Baiana dress). Cut fruit illustrations are a classic for home goods of the hygge sort. We decided to split the difference. A photograph of halved tropical fruit is repeated seamlessly.
Source photograph: Luke Michael/Unsplash
Rainbow
Rainbow harkens back to the super graphics of the 1970s- thank the heavens for Barbara Stauffacher Solomon. The twists and turns of the rainbows wink at us, when is happiness a straightforward proposition? Although this print is infused with nostalgia its outrageous scale and the full use of the spectrum could only be made now digitally. It uses pigment to explain light. Its transparency between layers of rainbows suggest luminosity instead of color.
Pareo
Pareo prints are a touchstone of Hawaiian fashion hailing from Tahiti and connecting the Polynesian islands to each other. We found a postcard of a Tahitian woman from the early 1900s in a pareo. It would take a whole year to find another example of the same pareo print so we could complete the study of the original repeat. And understand they were by the same French photographer. For six more months we tried to figure out where this pareo print came from (not France) and how it was created (not drawn). Inside this deceptively simple print is a portrait of colonialism. We conjecture a ship left France with a Tahitian bound photographer and a bunch of trade goods, as it went through various ports items were traded, heavier for lighter. It stopped in Shanghai to pick up inexpensive fabric to trade in Polynesia. The photographer bought a number of these fabrics as props for his studio. And this is where our Tahitian pareu came from- a Frenchman’s idea of Tahitian dress that is actually a Chinese fabric. We sat scissors in hand, replicating the cut paper technique of a Nantong print to create our pareo interpretation.
Snake
Snake takes the scale of an aloha print but not the appropriate subject matter. There are no snakes in Hawaiʻi. We wanted to make garments bearing a protective pattern, a concept found in many cultures. We were inspired by the ouroboros— a snake devouring its own tail—popularized in jewelry by Queen Victoria’s 1839 engagement ring.
Tiger
Tiger uses an enlarged fragment of a Victorian circus poster. The print retains some of its original content—a tiger in the grass—but also becomes a meditation on four color process printing. There is an internal contradiction in taking a 19th century analog four color silkscreen and spitting it back out as 21st century digital print. The paper “edges” that are repeated throughout the print were meant to be a nod to Kurt Schwitters.
Palmyra
Palm trees are a common tropical trope so we started there. Broad palm leaves provide shielding from prying eyes. And their edges are sharp. To create the print, we drew a Licuala grandis palm leaf and then repeated its shape. In different colorways, the overlapping leaves can pass as shells or even fans. It’s named after Palmyra Island, which has a very mysterious history veiled by its pristine beauty.
July
For July, we wanted to capture summer. It evokes sparklers, long summer evenings, and an intriguing flower. On Hawai‘i Island, the now endangered ‘ōhi‘a lehua tree is one of the first plants to colonize the scorched landscape created by lava flows. When the tree matures, it offers stunning, delicate blossoms—usually red, but sometimes yellow, orange and even pink—which stand out in a sea of rough black rock. Inspiration also came from a series of photographs by Ryan McGinley of naked people jumping over fires and holding sparklers.
Westbeth
Westbeth is named after Westbeth Artists’ Housing, the famed cooperative housing project in Lower Manhattan. The print is a tongue and cheek take on the authentic “artist’s mark.” Brush stroke gestures are repeated at a suboptimal resolution so the viewer can clearly see they were manufactured rather than handmade. The print looks a little messy and broken apart—like out of a 80s post-punk zine.
Alewa
Out of the need for space, many Honolulu neighborhoods have climbed up the often craggy, twisting slopes of O‘ahu’s Ko‘olau mountain range. And Alewa Heights, which inspired this print, is one of them. The community snakes up an arduously steep incline. ‘ālewa means suspended in Hawaiian—a beautiful and perfectly fitting name. The neighborhood is densely packed with small houses ingeniously built on almost vertical plots. The print attempts to capture that feeling.
Tofino
Tofino is named for the idyllic, end-of-the-road enclave on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada. In this marine haven tide pools abound, and are filled with bivalves, starfish, and sea anemones. We wanted to create a floral looking print that was actually something else, something fishy.
Barbican
Brutalist architecture has a somewhat positive history in the tropics. We amassed a huge research file. We found a Brutalist parking lot in Honolulu that I really liked. We stumbled on some old Letraset in a childhood box. We found the work of León Ferrari, the Argentinian conceptual artist, activist, and master of bureaucratic critique and his amazing series of drawings called “The Architecture of Madness,” in which he used architectural Letraset rub-ons. We named it after the epitome of Brutalist architecture in Central London, The Barbican Estate.
Kalama
On the way to Kalama Beach Park, on the windward side of Oahu, along a public right of way, there is a cinderblock wall that has been covered with graffiti and painted over many times. This two color silk screen captures the palette and feeling of that wall. It only exists as a hand silk screen in this color way.