The very fabric of tenacity
After Harvey wrecked his workshop, textile artist getting back to custom interior design projects
Rusty Arena is sitting in a plastic chair near the front of his warehouse on the north edge of Houston, his elbows propped on his knees. He leans forward and wipes his eyes.
“I have a hard time asking for help,” said the 63-year-old artist and designer who’s been making custom, handmade fabrics and wall coverings in Houston for three decades.
Drywall is cut 5 feet up on every wall, a post-Hurricane Harvey watermark in this 20,000-square-foot corrugatedmetal building close enough to Halls Bayou to send water rushing through just a few months ago.
His 100-foot-long work tables are back in place, and he and his small crew have only recently gotten past the shell-shocked stage.
They’ve gone back to basics as they toil daily, mixing inks for just the right colors to reverse-emboss images onto luscious velvets.
Right now, Arena and his crew have been scrambling to emboss fabric for $50,000 in back orders for Restoration Hardware for a pillow collection that’s an homage to 17thcentury Turkish Oushak rugs. It’s his second collection for the home-furnishings store, but this one employs ancient motifs for modern textile art.
Just enough pillows existed for photography and promotion, and weekly deadlines loomed to silkscreen the fabric that would be turned into pillows to fill orders already stacking up.
Arena had left on vacation, barely aware that a storm was brewing. Once Hurricane Harvey’s devastation had shocked the world, Arena was stranded on the East Coast, unable to return.
When he finally made it to his warehouse to assess the damage, he could barely believe what he saw: Tables, refrigerators, chairs and desks were all washed to the back of the building; mold was everywhere.
Except for wooden silkscreens resting on high shelves, everything was lost.
Some 300 yards of velvet that hadn’t even been taken out of their shipping boxes were sodden and molding. Barrels and jugs of ink and paint had floated in contaminated waters, their lids breached. Computers were unusable. Six three-ring binders that held every ink-color formula this old-school artist has ever devised held illegible pages. In all, the loss was valued at $1 million.
“I have made a lot of wonderful friends, and they’re all coming out of the woodwork,” Arena said of the calls he’s received and donations made on his gofundme.com site. “It gives you the strength to carry on when you’ve really had everything pulled out from underneath you.”
Old and new
Arena and Lee Wilde stand on opposite sides of the long, wide tables where rolls of bonecolored, cotton/rayon velvet have been stretched. A wooden silkscreen frame has been fastened in place, and a puddinglike mix of deeply pigmented paint is poured on.
They squeegee it one direction, then back the other way until the color has passed through the nylon-mesh design and absorbed into the soft fabric.
His process is proprietary information, developed over 20 years of trial and error. Artists and designers would tell you it can’t be done on velvet; Arena is the guy who figured it out.
His books that held the color formulas are ruined, but Arena waves off the loss.
“The books were destroyed. Good,” he said. “I know how to mix colors: 2 grams of blue, 1 gram of yellow, half a gram of black … I’m not saying it’s deadon, but they’re pretty damn close.”
Wilde is Arena’s right hand and so much more. It’s the 27-year-old’s job to bring her not-so-tech-savvy boss into the 21st century.
Together they are a blend of old and new. Wilde uses technology to turn simple sketches into larger designs, but they still do their artwork by hand. Her tech skills have put Arena’s work on the internet — that’s how Restoration Hardware found it — and have helped him adapt to a changing marketplace.
The fabric embossed by hand is cured in a one-of-a-kind machine built by Arena’s brother, artist-teacher Ron Arena.
“The curing unit is functioning, but it’s worked a lot better in the past. You really have to watch the thermostat. It goes from really low to really high, and you have to open the door once in a while,” he said of the now-temperamental contraption. “It’s a clown show around here.”
Four years ago, Wilde wandered into Arena’s office after a local designer friend cajoled him into meeting her. She had a bachelor’s degree in fine art in printmaking from Ole Miss and was willing to be an intern.
Coincidentally, Arena had just bought an expensive piece of equipment that sounded easy to use in the store. Unassembled in his office, he didn’t know what to do.
Not only could Wilde help him finish putting it together, she had experience working with it. She was hired.
She didn’t immediately remember that Arena was the artist who years prior had handpainted trompe l’oeil designs in her grandparents River Oaks home. Now, she was helping him adapt to a changing marketplace and art world, using computers to turn simple sketches into actual patterns.
The design they’ve just embossed onto fabric is meant to look like a section cropped out of an antique rug. Depending on the size and style of pillow, the cut will shift left or right, up or down to capture different parts of the design for each.
By spring, they’ll expand the line, making bedding with similar designs and in the same color family, on linen and velvet.
Arena is part of Restoration Hardware’s collaboration with designers from around the world, whom RH CEO Gary Friedman calls “the most dynamic thinkers and inspiring designers” working today.
“These new collections represent our passion for curating the very best people, products, ideas and inspiration from around the world,” Friedman said.
Art and textiles
For 20 years, Arena worked in a First Ward art studio, and when the building was slated for demolition, he needed a big, new space — and it needed to be cheap.
“So I had a big sale at the studio of all the work I had, and I think I made $90,000 in one night selling all my artwork,” he said of his effort to buy this abandoned warehouse in 2005.
His brother helped build tables, racks were set up, and he was in business. In time, Arena put drywall up and sectioned off a couple of corners for air-conditioned offices.
His goods used to be sold in the I.D. Collection in the Decorative Center of Houston, and in 2014, Arena decided to take it back.
“We were sending him all of our sales, and they made a 25 percent commission,” Arena said. “I got cranky one day and said, ‘I’m not doing this anymore.’ ”
As a child, Arena was always creative. The High School for the Performing and Visual Arts brought out the best in him, and by graduation, he had college scholarship offers. Instead of accepting them, Arena went to work. He was 18 and could support himself producing paintings and other art.
Soon he found himself creating trompe l’oeil murals in homes and businesses across the country. That led to hand-painted wallpaper and fabric, and ultimately Arena had transformed himself into a textile artist.
His work finds its way into homes primarily through interior designers, and for his current setting — before the hurricane — he’d built portable walls, created vignettes and set up racks to show his wares to his clients, primarily interior designers.
“No one can sell your product better than you can. You understand it, and you’re passionate about it,” said Wilde, who thought their work was overshadowed by bigger commercial brands stocked in showrooms.
Then, one day, Restoration Hardware called out of the blue. The home-furnishings company found Arena’s website — arenadesign.us — and liked what it saw.
Because Arena Design’s fabrics are used in luxury goods, he needed to re-evaluate what he could do.
“Things made with fabric that costs $400 a yard are heirloom pieces that will last generations,” he said. “So we had to modify stuff and say, ‘What can we do?’ This is what their price points are. How can we set it up in a way that we can make money and get exposed to that many people who would never have access to our product?”
Looking ahead
Wilde pulls a swath of washed linen from a pile of samples and flips it over, showing off the design that’s as pretty on top as it is on the bottom.
“I want to make clothes,” Arena declared as his dog — Rufus, a rescue dog who’s his constant companion — made an appearance. “Wouldn’t this be a great scarf ? I’ll have some prototypes ready for a trunk show next spring.”
Already Wilde had handed off some fabric to a seamstress to see how it would work, and they’re both excited about the new opportunity to dress Texas women.
Outdoors, behind the warehouse, a handful of large-scale paintings lean against the building, frames falling apart and their insides rippled and stained.
Just a year ago they’d been on exhibit in the Jung Center. They’re a series of dots and dashes, screen-printed or the work of a digital printer.
“You stand back, and it’s circles and orbs and pyramids and all of this crazy (stuff) that I just pulled out of my subconscious,” Arena said of his lost art. “It kind of breaks my heart, but that’s the way it is.”
This new idea is a welcome diversion from the grind of meeting yet another weekly deadline for Restoration Hardware. In one week, they embossed 551 blocks on 178 yards, and the big cardboard box they’d been packed in was just picked up for delivery.
“We joke we’re Rusty’s little minions. Tina and I are these cute, little, short blondes who run around. But we bust it out. I would love to know our yardage total,” Wilde said proudly.
Arena, Wilde and Sloan and their friends and families showed up after the storm once they could get to the site. Once they got past the shock, they got busy.
“I really kicked it around and thought, ‘I don’t know if I can do this,’ ” said Arena, who recently hired a new printer, Matt Sanchez. “But I had committed to this deal with Restoration. Things were already in print. They’d already photographed the samples. I’m going, ‘I have to do this.’ ”