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Culture & Commerce
New Haven is energized by creative capitalists like designer and entrepreneur Lesley Roy
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Business New Haven
6/9/2003
By: Mitchell Young
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A research mission nearly a decade ago to the Yale University Art Gallery provided the final inspiration for what would become one of New Haven's most unusual creative enterprises.
Former fashion model and jewelry designer Lesley Roy was "absorbing" the work of some old masters, luxuriating in the brilliant colors, gilded frames and transforming power that the aged cracked canvasses convey.
Roy was hoping to recreate the powerful drama of these venerable art works. She was studying historically correct pigments with the desire to incorporate them into her own artwork.
This day it was the crackle of that ancient paint that popped up and snapped something in Roy's imagination. "Can I do it in a shorter period of time? Can I do in a day what it takes Mother Nature hundreds of years to do?" she asked herself.
The answer would prove to be yes - but not before the artist turned scientist and innovator and conducted countless trial-and-error experiments to perfecting her process and its product.
There more to Roy's designs however than the appeal of the "crackle" in her patented faux aging process. Roy liberally incorporates gold, silver and platinum leafing that adds luxurious accents to elaborate her brilliantly colored illustrations, and lush glazes to create dazzling decorative but functional works of glass art.
Roy's signature look captures the style and character of Old World art work with a modern interpretation of traditional floral and fruit themes.
The process and the designs that incorporate it have helped provide the artist with an international following for the designer and her company, Lesley Roy Designs. Based in Westville Village at 824 Whalley Avenue, in what at first glance is just another art or antique store, Roy has built a small but important manufacturing boutique for her artistic creations. Her manufacturing operation is housed in four contiguous buildings encompassing more than 25,000 square feet of space, including retail, studio, production areas, showroom and a recently added gallery show kitchen.
Her intricately designed collections with names like Fruit Orchard, Rosarium, Orchidaceum, Apricot Peony and Lepidoptera celebrate color and flowers in a process the artist-entrepreneur calls "reversed glass art."
"People always ask me who taught me how to do this," Roy explains. The artist clearly could have used a manufacturing mentor one day around July 1996, while preparing one of her first large orders.
"The air conditioner wasn't working and the paint wouldn't dry, so I went back to the drawing board and had to re-invent [the process]. Roy's confidence in her innovative abilities may have come from her father, an organic chemist who she says held 70 patents.
In truth, Roy's genius is her incorporation of a multitude of artistic and craft disciplines into her creation and a disciplined process that allows her to duplicate her pieces in a manufacturing process to fairly exacting standards of quality.
Plain glass "templates," plates, goblets, bowls, vases, etc. are primed and then painted with pigments that include ground-semi-precious stones, to create varied and intense colors. Intricately detailed, brilliantly colored and finely printed illustrations are painstakingly cut and adhered on the underside of the glass. Then gold (or silver, or platinum) leaf, her signature crackle is then added to simulate the old masters look. Finally, the piece is glazed.
One might call the end result nothing short of spectacular if the product were a single artistic work.
But each is typically part of a complex array of coordinated and complimentary dinnerware, centerpieces, teapots, candlesticks, champagne buckets, coasters and vases - the "collection" itself a remarkable creation in whole.
The collections are reproduced en masse, but each piece is individually hand-crafted by a crew that has ranged in size from ten to 25 skilled artisans in the New Haven facility,
Individual pieces can take as long as 25 hand hours over two weeks to complete. And the company has shipped tens of thousands of pieces. Each and every one is hand-signed by Roy following a final quality inspection by the artist.
Roy's designs can be found at Neiman Marcus stores around the country as well as at high-end boutiques from Beverly Hills to Boca Raton - even at Harrods of London. Items in her collection sell from $50 or so for a coaster to as much as $4,500 for a limited edition vase.While Roy's designs may be based on timeless art, the fortunes of her company depend on Roy's ability to navigate a course through the high-stakes world of upmarket retailing.
Soon after establishing her company and developing its first main distribution outlet - the Frank MacIntosh stores at Henri Bendel locations - Bendel's was sold to the Limited and the merchandise focus changed dramatically. MacIntosh - and Roy - were out.
Roy's efforts at building a relationship with the Neiman Marcus store in White Plains, N.Y. appeared to bear fruit when the company's buyers decided to expand their relationship with Roy.
Unfortunately, Roy says the chain wanted several hundred thousand dollar worth of merchandise - and they wanted it within four weeks' time. Roy reluctantly turned down the business. So she hunkered down and continued creating.
"I turn to creativity; it makes me the happiest," she explains. "Some time when things get worse, the designs that come out are the most beautiful."
Roy took this production shortcoming lesson well, claiming that she has never back ordered a customer's shipment. "I learned then I need to stock glass," she says.
Despite the early disappointment, Neiman Marcus remained interested in Roy's creations and that company has been a mainstay of Roy's distribution network ever since.
Today, much of Roy's day-to-day challenges involve developing new outlets and markets to obviate the vagaries and risks of a major customer's changing needs.That changing market and an indomitable need to create today find Roy seeking new directions for her creative impulses. In 2002 she concluded a two-year effort to craft a show kitchen and display rooms at her Whalley Avenue facility.
Gold and platinum leafing covers the walls, columns and floors of the four rooms. The kitchen includes a counter that seats 12, as well as extravagant kitchen appliances. There's a guest bedroom and luxurious bath, a dining room with a Louis XIV dining table all accented by columns, trellises and a ceiling mural hand-painted by Roy,
"I believe the right space is paramount to the creative process," she explains, and perhaps to the selling effort as well.
Roy uses the space to fete important customers as well as to present fundraisers, such as one for the New Haven Symphony Orchestra later this month. There guests will wine and dine using Roy's dinnerware, surrounded by a total environment incorporating her artistic creations and vision.
More important than a space for magazine shoots or sales dinners, the show kitchen and rooms has become a new kind of laboratory for Roy's next creative foray.
Here she is incorporating her designs and technology into tiles, panels, sinks, even furniture - a total home environment.
It's a beautiful thing.
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