ART GALLERY FABRICS
DANIA BEACH, FLORIDA, USA
Born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Pat Bravo fell in love with sewing and knitting at the age of nine. Her mother encouraged her vivid imagination, busy hands, and tactile nature by enrolling her in a home economics school. At thirteen, Pat asked to attend an academy for seamstresses. Despite her mother’s reluctance to let her go at such a young age, Pat spent two years “learning everything about fabrics, dressmaking, and patterns.” She graduated as a fully qualified seamstress two years later. Pat continued to fashion bespoke garments as she pursued a more traditional education. After several years of studying law, she embarked on three years of painting lessons.
During that time, Pat met Walter Bravo. In 1989, the couple moved to the United States. Until that time, Pat had never seen a quilt. “When I saw the magic of the squares and triangles, I said ‘I have to do this!’” She quickly mastered the elements of traditional quilting and dove into the world of art quilts. Pat recalls:
I used to do a lot of raw edge appliqué, and I started to do landscapes:... rivers, mountains, lakes...At that time, around 1990, there was only a small selection of batiks or fabrics that could replicate the trunk of a tree or a rock or leaves or bushes. I was feeling very limited. I said, What if I start painting my own fabrics to use in my quilts? I came out with ranges of colors [with] imperceptible differences between one color and the other.
Pat introduced her painted fabrics at a local quilt guild. The members loved Pat’s fabrics because of the subtle tonalities: “warm reds to super-cool reds” and “blue-greens to super-warm greens to almost mustard and olive.” She traveled to shows around her home state of Florida and “people went crazy! They started buying it because they didn’t see those colors in stores.” Pat invited Walter to join her at the International Quilt Festival in Houston. At first he was skeptical about his wife’s “hobby,” but “when he saw that floor with sixty thousand people, he said, ‘This is serious business!’” In Houston Pat was approached by several companies to design fabrics, but Walter said, “No, we will do it ourselves!” Art Gallery Fabrics was born in 2004. The Bravos developed their business without any external financing, a choice that demanded a lot of hard work and sacrifice. Working with mills in South Korea, the Bravos printed Pat’s designs on premium cotton. The high thread count (133 by 72 threads per square inch) gives their quilting fabric a silky hand and exceptional drape.
As Art Gallery Fabrics grew, Pat noticed a gap in the industry: “The ‘contemporary elegant’ was missing. Discerning quilters were looking for something that challenged them, a different print. I saw the gap because I’d been quilting myself for so many years.” To provide quilters with sophisticated designs, Pat “started doing two collections a year. And then four collections and six and eight collections a year. From 2004 to 2011, I did this all myself,” she says. “But I was getting a little bit tired, and my husband said to me, ‘I think it’s time to license our first designers.’”
“Modern fabric design is not a word—it is a feeling.”
In 2019, under Pat’s creative leadership and Walter’s business guidance, Art Gallery Fabrics released twenty-six collections from twelve designers. Each design must meet Pat’s exacting standards: “The print has to make you happy. It has to make you feel young. It has to be chic and elegant; the style doesn’t matter.”
Although Pat leads the design team at Art Gallery Fabrics and mentors the company’s other designers, her own design work is paramount. Since 2004, she has released more than forty collections. The patterns and motifs in Pat’s collections focus on a central idea or theme; she begins by creating as many as fifty designs, then selects those that best embody that theme. “When I have that concept in my mind, I start doing drawings of the flowers or the geometric elements. I draw a lot,” she says. “In the beginning, I was hand drawing on paper, but now I use my iPad. With Procreate, I have my tablet and my pen; it is a natural way of drawing.” She begins with large- and medium-scale focal prints, followed by connector prints and, finally, small prints for blenders. Pat notes that blenders may seem like the easiest element, but “all the dots are made, all the stripes are made; you always have to come up with something that is different. Maybe I find one element of a picture I can convert.”
Colors, too, can be muses. “I perceive their vibrations. Maybe call me a crazy lady,” she laughs. “Red doesn’t have the same vibration as blue and so on.” For inspiration, Pat travels the world from her studio:
I go to Google and...I hand pick the colors to make me feel like I am in a market in Istanbul or Morocco: bold, saturated, rich colors! Or I can see an ad in a fashion magazine. A few years ago I saw an ad of a lady on the beach. It was done in very pastel colors, peach and aqua—super-soft colors, super-pastel colors...Immediately, I thought, “Oh! This is summer love, all the love of summer!” From that image alone, I created the collection Summerlove. I love fashion—I am a fanatic! In 2011 I designed Rapture, inspired by Kenzo. It uses beautiful, super-light colors and is very citric.
Pat often works through the night, creating collections to be printed on Art Gallery’s quilting fabric, cotton voile, knits, rayon, canvas, and denim. “I live in the night!” she laughs.
Each collection is a child. Each collection has its own process. It has bad moments, ugly moments, exhilarating and beautiful moments. But I do it all with a view of “take comfort, take refuge [in] the beauty that you can make with fabric and a needle and thread.”
