John Robshaw

After he earned a fine arts degree at Pratt and studied traditional block printing in China, John Robshaw journeyed to India to find natural indigo dye for his paintings. Instead, he fell in love with the local artisans fabric-making traditions. The hands-on immediacy and vitality of textiles dyed, printed, woven, stitched, and worn piqued what was to become a lifelong fascination.

John's forays in Asia have taken him to the villages of Gujarat and Rajasthan to work alongside artisans and study their traditional printing methods; he has made court batiks in Yogakarta, Indonesia; block printed sarongs alongside a family who has been printing for four generations; he has vegetable-dyed ikats in Thailand. In India, John found that he could apply a painterly aesthetic to the traditional method of block-printing by mixing up patterns and overlapping them in a more formally artistic way. There, his signature dynamic look was crafted: an updated spin on the exotic, handmade object; a vibrant mix of sophistication and romantic allure.

Now John works with various workshops in India, where he travels several months out of the year to oversee production, experiment with new dyeing and printing techniques, and to work alongside the artisans creating the fabrics. He takes care to cultivate and preserve their traditional techniques, but not only in India. As a consultant for Aid to Artisans, a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating economic opportunities for craftspeople in developing nations, John has traveled to Vietnam, Cambodia, Zimbabwe, and most recently, Bolivia, in support of the textile artisans there.