Sitting in the Park

Our Spring 2023 textile print, Sitting in the Park,  is an update of our 2017 print collaboration with Primo Pitino, Climbing in the Wind. 

This new edition features Primo's illustrated faces, woven into a plane of his abstracted flowers. We updated this print in-house, reworking the pattern and repeat with illustrations from our archive of Primo's drawings. 

We printed the fabric in two, new color ways, on various fabrics: canvas, cotton jersey, and woven linen fabric. The fabric was used to created a small capsule of clothing, table linens, and personal accessories. 

Part of the impetuous behind re-working this print was the news that Primo is relocating from San Francisco to New York City. We wanted to celebrate Primo and his contributions to our vibrant San Francisco art, and music scene.

I spent a recent afternoon in Primo's Hunter's Point studio, thumbing through an accumulated stack of illustrations and party fliers that span the last 20 years. Sifting through, I asked about the themes found throughout his work. 

In particular, I was curious about the elements found in our print collaboration - his flowers and faces. They are both abstracted and gestural, while unmistakable and woven together seamlessly.

My feline loving ears were pleased to hear that it all goes back to cats. 

If you look at some of primos earliest party fliers, cats abound. Sometimes solo, sometimes in clumps. They were the stars of the Oldies Night fliers from the late nineties, well into the mid 2000's. In 2017 Primo was asked to mural-ize his cats on Valencia St. for the facade of the Parlor Gallery. But the cats go back farther, to his youth, when he drew a comic strip featuring mischievous furry friends, causing trouble. 

Over time, Primo's cats evolved into faces. Partly an exercise to try and communicate deeper meaning and feeling through line drawn expressions and partly just because Primo sees a lot more faces than cats.

As a full time DJ, Primo has spent 20 years conducting nightlife, and passing through a crowd. When you study the faces in Primo's drawings, you see a wide range of expressions, ranging from elation to anxiety, crafted with a seemingly off the cuff line that falls off, into a background. It's as though these faces are caught and captured, passing through a foreground of haze and disco lights, only to then disappear into a blurred mass. 

While Primo's faces communicate something specific and recognizable, his flowers explore the less precise language of intermingling form and shape, making space for the viewer, and his own interpretation. 

We love what the combination of these motifs does for our textile print, providing a hint of realism to the typical, romantic floral.