March/April 2005 STYLE Magazine
STYLEspotlight

Wrap-ture
Linda Gravina Ridings' fanciful scarves, shawls and mufflers are more than just stylish accessories - they're one-of-a-kind works of art.

By Michael Yockel
Photographed by Kirsten Beckerman

Smartly attired in a crisp, knee-length white lab coat and wearing latex gloves, Linda Gravina Ridings stands at one of her several work stations in her Charles Village basement-cum-studio/laboratory, mixing a concoction of soda ash, urea, water, Calgon and the brightening agent Ludigol. She calls them her "chemical assistants" and they're used not for some arcane science experiment, but to dilute the concentrated liquid dyes that constitute her wiggy artistic palette. Ridings pours each dye - from "wasabi green" to "karcade," a hibiscus-like red - into individual plastic squirt dispensers, resulting in what resembles a kind of artist's snowball stand, and from there she fills separate tiny Solo cups with a panoply of colors. Now she's ready to roll.

Well, paint, actually, using as her canvas fringed rayon silk velvet to create luxuriously colored, one-of-a-kind wraps - shawls, scarves and mufflers that embody what Ridings terms "wearable art." Hovering over a length of silk velvet that has been stretched and raised from a long wooden workbench, Ridings paints quickly and intuitively, applying with various brushes a series of layers consisting of different fiber-reactive dyes. "You can't stop and contemplate," notes Ridings. "Everything has to flow. If the dye dries, it will form a hard edge" that spoils the desired "diffuse effect."

Gradually, a pattern emerges, and after a bit more than 30 minutes of nonstop manipulation with dyes and diluting solutions on both sides of the silk velvet, Ridings has fashioned a wrap with a distinctive giraffe motif. Overnight it will dry and set, at which point Ridings will pop it into her homemade steamer, a Rube Goldberg-esque device she has assembled from a hot plate, aluminum flashing and (honestly) a crab pot. "It looks like a missile," she jokes. Forty-five minutes in the "missile" fixes the colors, bonding them with the silk.

Her finished wraps range from 9-by-54-inch mufflers to 22-by-72-inch shawls, and cost between $150 and $300. Benefiting from word of mouth, her wraps are finding a clientele, and she counts actresses Jane Fonda and "The Wire" regular Maria Broom among her customers. "I see these as an accessory," Ridings explains, "like jewelry. Women today wear so much black, and it can get sort of dreary. A scarf or a wrap is a way of injecting some vibrancy and some personality and richness and sensuality (into one's garb). You have to touch these velvets and silks."

Ridings, began making "wearable art" in 1998 while living in Atlanta, where for 15 years she ran her own business, Artemura, working in ornamental and decorative painting - on walls in homes, on furniture, on tables and floors in restaurants - with architects and interior designers. "I decided I wanted to do something else," she recalls. "I've always been very much influenced by materials; for me the material is a very tactile, sensual kind of experience."

Along with her husband, painter/illustrator Cornel Rubino, Ridings relocated to Baltimore in the summer of 2002, and, to date, she has exhibited her wraps at the 2003 and 2004 ArtBaltimore shows at the Convention Center, at School 33 and at Washington's annual Flower Mart.

For her part, Ridings was inspired initially by the tortoiseshell coloring of her cat Canina, Italian for "little female dog - she follows me everywhere." These days her non-representational patterns run the gamut, with colorations and designs reminiscent of gemstones (lapis lazuli, malachite) and animals (leopard, cheetah, peacock). "Color is what I work with the most," she says. "It's what I feel the strongest affinity to. I'm not the sort of person who enjoys drawing with a pencil; I'd much rather paint with a brush and get some color in there."

Given the singular nature of her creations - "It's not a mechanical process" - no two wraps can be the same. In fact, Ridings keeps copious and meticulous records for each scarf, shawl and muffler, including swatches of color, and numbers them individually, in effect producing a "birth certificate." So far she has made more than 500 wraps, and is exploring the possibility of distributing them through local boutiques. Additionally, she plans to "expand the line to include evening coats and accessories" in the future.

"I can sort of look at people and see, "Oh, this color would be wonderful on them, with their hair or their eyes," claims Ridings, who estimates that she personally owns 200 scarves, seldom leaving home unwrapped. "I encourage people to play with them and try them on. They're like little paintings."

"A scarf or a wrap is a way of injecting some vibrancy and some personality and richness and sensuality (into one's garb). You have to touch these velvets and silks."