Monday, January 27, 2014

The Art of Being Gladys

The vivid and frisky and witty fashion drawings of Gladys Perint Palmer have always been admired—but until now almost impossible to acquire or collect.

Now, the fascinating California fine art print company, Tiger Flower Studio, has selected nineteen highlights of Gladys’s recent fashion illustrations—and is offering them in artful limited edition prints.

Come and see these exquisite, beautifully observed, ironic, chic, sexy, fashion-insider and artful paintings, and chose your favorite to adorn your walls. Start a Gladys collection. 




Fabulous Prints for Fine Fashion Illustration Collectors

San Francisco artist Gladys Perint Palmer has spent her life capturing the color and creativity of the fashion world with her paints, inks, pens and pencils, even makeup.

Gladys, who is the highly popular executive fashion director at The School of Fashion at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, travels to London and Paris frequently for fashion events, to meet top designers, and to draw and capture the newest fashions.

Since the eighties she has attended thousands of seasonal fashion shows. In those far-off early days she succeeded in gaining a coveted invitation, a seat at top shows, by sheer determination and will-power. Versace, Dior, Chanel, Beene, Kawakubo, Yamamoto, Armani, and Gaultier and Lacroix, and Dolce and Ungaro and Ralph Rucci and Yves Saint Laurent, she has seen them all.

And all the time she has been experimenting, drawing, sketching, photographing, painting and illustrating fashion. Now Gladys is also happily using iPad technology to create virtuoso instant sketches, which she posts on social media, to great success. And she is also making her art available for fine art prints from Tiger Flower Studio. 


I’ve known Gladys for ages, and have always loved the way she interprets fashion with a slightly wicked and provocative and ironic point of view. She has fresh and very insider knowledge, with a jolt of skepticism of the cavalcade of characters of the fashion world. She captures beauty, and she loves to puncture egos.

Now a selection of these drawings and paintings and bold splashing of ink are available from Tiger Flower Studio. Follow me, view Gladys’s collection, and at the end I’ve got all the information you want so that you can collect these newly released and ultra-limited editions. Delicious. 



Her work is not always pretty-pretty or saccharine—but rather bracing, jumpy, spicy.

Gladys has written a series of highly successful books, and each one is laced with her wicked sense of humor. She grew up in Hungary and later in London, has been studying couture and ready-to-wear shows in Paris for most of her life and she fearlessly interprets the new styles with her sharp eye and sharp pen.

Illustrations show here are all available from Tiger Flower Studio. Details below. 



Gladys has also captured interiors—including the residence of Dolce & Gabbana, the villa of Versace, and the apartment of Chanel. 



Gladys approaches fashion and design with appreciation and admiration of creativity—and it’s her style to instill a sense of the silliness and sexiness of fashion.

This characteristic flash of wit gives vivid life to her drawings and paintings of runway designs by the likes of John Galliano, McQueen, Mackie, Alfaro, Vivienne Westwood, or Montana. 




"What makes a difference between Gladys and others, is that her drawings have life."  —Valentino Garavani





Gladys Perint Palmer, Executive Director of the School of Fashion at Academy of Art University, San Francisco is an engaging and inspiring instructor. She is also a best-selling author and a life-long obsessed and passionate fashion illustrator. 
"Gladys is one of the foremost fashion illustrators in the world. Only she is capable of capturing fashion moments with humor as no one else can, making them far more memorable than they were when they actually happened.” — Zandra Rhodes, CBE



"Once you have been illustrated by Gladys Perint Palmer, you are part of Fashion History."  — Cameron Silver, Founder and co-owner, Decades

Gladys: The Prints

I asked Harrison Howard, the co-founder of Tiger Flower Studio, and a wonderful artist/illustrator himself, to tell us how he managed to persuade Gladys to work with his fine print company.

Harrison:  
Gladys invited my wife and me to her studio north of San Francisco on a day trip from San Diego to see her work in her studio. We were overwhelmed by the impact, skill, and imagination of her wonderful drawings. The prints available on our website are a result of that day’s visit to Gladys.” 

“Gladys was a major attraction for us once it occurred to me and my business partner, Justin Nangle, that we might approach her because her work so completely embodies the spirit of why we wanted to start Tiger Flower Studio in the first place,” said Howard. “We see a lot of overlap between the fields of interior design and fashion, and that is a key reason that we sought the participation of Gladys with Tiger Flower Studio. The world of interior design which some of our artists illustrate is wrapped up in the fashion world. That intersection increased our determination to pursue Gladys Palmer’s consent to let us make prints of her remarkable drawings. The very surprising discovery that only a few prints of her work have been previously made fuelled our desire even further to secure her participation” 





I asked Harrison Howard what attracted him to Gladys’s work:

“Gladys is a central and international figure in the world of contemporary fashion illustration. We love her work. The scope and nature of her drawings qualify Gladys not only as a leading fashion illustrator, but also as a remarkably accomplished fine artist. I can’t overemphasize that particular point. There is a satirical, social, and psychological content to Gladys’s work that will long outlive any commercial purposes it may serve in the immediate present,” said Harrison. 




Harrison Howard continued:  

“Gladys’s work demonstrates not only great drawing skills, but great style, and when all else has been said her work is also fun. If there is an amusing side to her subject, Gladys will find it. We want above all to present Gladys’s work through her limited edition prints to a much broader audience beyond the fashion world where her work requires no introduction.” 

"Gladys’s impudent and exuberant brush vividly nails the fashion zoo's excesses; she is our reincarnation of Toulouse-Lautrec." — Henry Steiner, Graphic Designer, Hong Kong


All About Gladys: A Short Biography

Gladys Perint Palmer (GPP), Executive Director of the School of Fashion at Academy of Art University, is a working journalist and illustrator. In 1998, The Fashion Book (Phaidon Press) named GPP as one of 500 people of influence in fashion since 1860. In 2007, she was honored to be one of 150 creative forces invited to participate in the Victoria & Albert Museum’s 150th Anniversary Album, as well as the corresponding exhibition. Her illustrations were used to promote the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in New York City for both the Fall 2011 and Spring 2012 seasons. Her editorial work has appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, UK Sunday Times, The New Yorker, Vogue, and Vogue.com

Her advertising clients have included Chanel, Christian Dior, Fendi, Missoni, Versace, and Valentino. In 2004, Fashion People (Assouline), her first book of drawings and irreverent captions was published and has since sold out. The launch for her second book, Adam & Yves (Firefall Media), took place in September 2013 during Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week at Lincoln Center. She is working on her third book, ‘You Are Not on The List’.


WHERE TO FIND AND FRIEND GLADYS:

Tumblr: http://gladysperintpalmer.tumblr.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/GPerintPalmer
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GPPillustration
Website: http://gladysperintpalmer.com/ 


"Gladys has a rare gift. Her sketches capture the politics, prose and personalities of the fashion world in a way that is sometimes humorous, sometimes thought-provoking, and always original." — HRH Princess Reema Bandar Al-Saud 



WHERE TO BUY: www.tigerflowerstudio.com

Go to www.tigerflowerstudio.com and click on “Gallery” and then click on “Gladys Perint Palmer”

All limited edition giclee prints produced by Tiger Flower Studio are made on a textured archival 100% rag paper that closely resembles the best quality watercolor paper. The inks used are pigmented and also archival, which will provide the greatest longevity and resistance to light, and the faithfulness of each print to the original work that makes the distinction between a print and the original work difficult to discern. Each limited edition print is trimmed to size by hand and numbered. Two sizes are available for each of Gladys’s images, which range most commonly from about 18” x 22” to 32” x 40”, but there is a range of sizes in between and a few prints that are slightly smaller or larger. Prices for Gladys Perint Palmer’s prints range from $ 395 to $ 620. 


About the Prints

Tiger Flower Studio is the brilliant concept of Harrison Howard and his business partner. Tiger Flower Studio represents artists such as Harrison Howard himself (an expert on fantasy Chinoiserie paintings) and Mita Corsini Bland (who portrays superbly detailed interiors) that have strong ties to interior design and decorating, textiles, and fashion. We make and offer for sale very high quality limited edition prints of work by artists in these areas. The work and careers of visual artists in these fields often defy any convenient category but have greatly enriched each of those areas. 


Says Harrison Howard, “Our goal to succeed in business is joined with our intent to bring greater focus to bear on the critical role of visual artists in the design process. We are striving to offer prints that typify the best aspects of the artists’ work that we represent. We above all seek to appeal to design professionals and all other people that cultivate a special interest in the design field.

“We can focus substantial attention on attracting artists of exceptional abilities and retain a personal approach to our business practices. My business partner is Justin Nangle, who has a background in magazine publishing in St. Louis. We developed a friendship and a common interest in representing artists in design through previously working together over several years and our common interests and preoccupation with art and design. If not for Skype our phone bill would be breaking records.”



CREDITS: All illustrations by Gladys Perint Palmer, who owns the copyright. All images are used here with express permission. 




4 comments:

The Devoted Classicist said...

I had always wondered about those delightful drawings of the interior of Versace's villa on Lake Como.

peggybraswell said...

love her illustrations + bravo to you for featuring her. xxpeggybraswelldesign.com

Diane Dorrans Saeks said...

JOHN AND PEGGY-

Thank you so much for your comments--so much appreciated. Yes…Gladys did a series of drawings for Versace himself…and there is somewhere a book of them…

happy days, DIANE

Diane Dorrans Saeks said...

Dear Friends-


I received this lovely message from my friend Susie--an accomplished photographer--

wonderul.

thanks for sending.

fun to just fall into the "friskiness" of the fashion

cheers,
Susie Biehler
www.biehler.com
www.patriciasbiehlerphotography.com
415.987.7929