Rug Art -- Carl Chew Can Floor You With His Vivid Pieces Made To Be Walked On

THE SMALL BOY LAY face down on the new wool rug, breathing in its colors. His nose tickled, but he kept on gazing. Oak leaves and acorns in a dozen shades of maroon twirled across a creamy background. He was, in that moment, hooked on rugs.

"I can still see myself right up next to that rug," muses Seattle artist and rug designer Carl Chew, now more than four decades removed from his 5-year-old wonder. "It's as vivid as if it happened yesterday."

Vivid is a word that often springs to mind for those discovering Chew's Tibetan-style rugs today. This is not artwork to be held at arm's length, protected by museum ropes and stanchions. Go ahead. Lie down and nestle. Dig in your fingers, scrabble with your bare toes. Be alive to color, texture and depth. Be 5 again.

Unfortunately for Chew, for his American agents such as the MIA Gallery in Seattle and for his rug factory in Katmandu, Nepal, that's easier urged than done. "They're rugs. They're made to be walked on," he has to keep telling people.

The artist who created hilarious, self-mocking video projects and perforated the boundaries between stamps and high camp from the mid-'70s onward is in deadly earnest about rug-making in the '90s. And oddly enough, he has trouble convincing people to take him at his word.

"This is really serious," Chew says. "I need an art therapist to help me and the public with this." Then behind his glasses, a smile begins to crease. Chew laughs as he considers the irony of being treated like a boy who cries woof.

Wrapped around a pure cotton warp, the hand-spun, three-ply wool weft (or woof, as some have it) lies 60 knots thick in each square inch of a Carl Chew rug. The style, known in the trade as Tibetan to distinguish it from the more densely knotted products of China, lends itself particularly well to the bold outlines of Chew's designs. "When I saw Tibetan rugs I went crazy over how they looked, because I saw in my own work these big, broad areas of color."

During his first visit to Katmandu, in 1983, Chew was disoriented by the business at hand. "I knew nothing of rug-making," he admits.

When his first commissioned rug arrived at Sea-Tac from Nepal in 1984, Chew went to pick it up at U.S. Customs and was horrified to find its texture strangely flat, with the design reversed from his original. Then the Customs agent pointed out he was looking at the wrong side.

What a difference a decade makes. These days, Chew talks with authority about the Swiss chemical compounds his Nepalese dye maker applies to careful blends of long-stapled Tibetan and New Zealand wools.

Aided in good part by a year-long stay in Katmandu between 1986 and 1987, Chew speaks Nepali now. When he makes his annual, month-long visit to his factory, the Contemporary Carpet Center, he is able to sit down and work side-by-side with his weavers.

The current offering of 17 rug designs, mostly in limited editions of 10 to 15, demonstrates Chew's fluency in his new language. In one of the "Koi" series, reddish gold fish flicker through lily pads that seem to float against a midnight sky. In "Edo," torn stamp-perforation strips serve as both an active layered element of the design and as a visual reminder of Chew's pioneering work in the 1970s, creating artist stamps that drew upon the then-emerging technology of the color copier.

With increased skill in parlaying the pixels of his computerized designs into a sheared, contoured pile, Chew has developed further self-imposed requirements. "I have put a lot of effort into trying to have a central point, both for the rug to feel balanced, and for people's lives," he explains. "It's really neat to have some unconscious thing in your life that centers you in the room."

A centering point for Chew himself is caring for his two daughters and for his wife, family physician Laura Mae Baldwin. "Commitments are a really big part of living, I've discovered."

Thus the enigmatic C.T. Chew, who once described himself for a biographical blurb as the offspring of a half-Chinese, half-Irish father and "an intriguing organic labyrinth," has become Carl Chew, family man, son of two standard-issue American zoologists. On the other hand, his early years weren't quite so standard as the urban California setting might suggest.

Chew remembers sneaking out with his buddies, red cellophane taped over their flashlight beams, to watch kangaroo rats and other nocturnal creatures his father had imported as part of a desert habitat in the back yard.

He remembers being fascinated with stories of pearl fishers, and learning to hold his breath so that he could lie for up to three minutes on the bottom of a swimming pool, studying the stars through a watery lens. And, from a later time of college studies, he recalls the thrill of holding marine life newly drawn from the 15,000-foot level of the San Clemente Trench.

Animals - especially his totemic elephant, Chew Baba - remain a frequent element in Chew's designs today. Although he has long renounced following in the exploratory footsteps of Charles Darwin, the former biology student has been pursuing his own evolutionary course.

In "Big Chili," the protean creative power of the computer has transformed Chew Baba into several humpy, friendly octopi finding the title pepper too hot to handle. "Hoopoe Emerging" passed through similar permutations, documented in printouts for the amusement of the MIA Gallery staff. The images include a complete developmental morphology for a strange, moth-like creature that has never taken flight save in imagination.

"The space where I work is more like virtual reality," Chew says of the time he spends in a spartan studio behind his Ravenna-area home. "It's an extension of my mind, because it does not exist on paper or on canvas." Then, with a characteristic chortle of amusement, "It only exists in electrons."

But what about the Carl Chew rugs that do come to dwell in three dimensions, right down on the floors of ordinary people's homes? Do their aesthetic returns justify an investment that runs about $80 a square foot?

Wallingford resident Betty Mullin needed something striking to balance the beige and white equanimity of her remodeled Craftsman-style home. At MIA she found Chew's "Blue 3," a wide-bordered pond in which dragon flies flit at the water's surface. Mullin's placid carpeting, furniture and walls are now a textural foil to the rug's complexity. An undistinguished coffee table has become a kind of glass-bottomed boat through which to study the design.

"I can sit in my front room and go fishing," Mullin says, a response that would surely satisfy the not-so-latent whimsy of rug-maker Carl Chew.

Karen Mathieson is a Seattle freelance writer. Barry Wong is a Seattle Times photographer.