SCHENECTADY – Had Jeffrey Nebolini followed his head rather than his heart a few years back, he'd probably be working as an environmental consultant or teaching geology right now.
Instead, the 29-year-old Schenectady native is on his way to Iceland to design new clothing and study the country's fashion trends and history. His living expenses will be covered by a Fulbright scholarship.
Geology. Fashion. Iceland. Say what?
“I've been infatuated with Iceland for a long time,” said Nebolini, who earned a bachelor's in geology from Union College and a master's in fine arts from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan.
His diverse interests were woven together seamlessly in his thesis project at Cranbrook this past spring.
Combining materials
For a fashion show he staged with professional models, he sewed dresses, skirts and tops that blend some of the traditional fabrics of high fashion, such as silk, with the more durable synthetic materials associated with rugged outdoor gear, including as ripstop nylon or Tyvek (which is used in construction).
“I'm using industrial materials out of context,” said Nebolini, who was the only young male in the sewing classes he took in the Detroit area to expand his artistic skills beyond what he could teach himself in his art school studio. “When you start to re-contextual materials, when you use them for what they weren't intended for, it starts to get interesting.”
He has made textile patterns using geographical information, creating abstract shapes from the spaces between rock and mud cracked by geothermal heat, map grids or even the aerial view of bird tracks in the snow.
“This is me creating my own empire,” he said, using his laptop to show off some photographic art that has the professional look and slick presentation of ads in glossy fashion magazines. “The focus is not commerce. I'm doing this out of genuine interest.”
Focused on traditional graphic arts when he entered art school, Nebolini found his bliss in fabric and fashioning garments by hand. In the summer of 2003, he went to Philadelphia for The Fabric Workshop & Museum's apprentice training program.
Icelandic influences
He plans to study how the terrain of Iceland – an island in the North Atlantic known for its climatic extremes – has influenced clothing materials, design and style over the ages.
“It hasn't been looked at in an academic sense,” said Nebolini, who will work on the Fulbright project for 10 months.
Nebolini found out he was one of the 2,000 scholarship winners in the United States for 2004-05 earlier this summer. The grant program – named for the late Arkansas Sen. J. William Fulbright – was created in 1946 to promote cultural exchange.
In addition to exploring historical trends, Nebolini will be making his own clothes and meeting regularly with Icelandic fashion designer Steinunn Sigurd. He'll also be working with Halldor Gislason, the dean of the Department of Icelandic Design and Architecture at the Icelandic Academy of Arts.
He'll post images, writings and conceptual sketches on a Web site dedicated to the project. Check out www.nebolini.com, for updates on when that will be launched.
Early promise
This is all a dream come true for Nebolini, though not something he'd ever have imagined as a kid growing up in Schenectady. He first dreamed of becoming an astronaut and later chose geology as his major in college.
But he always loved the graphic arts and showed early aptitude. In elementary school, he won his family a free trip to Disney World for his entry in a Father's Day drawing contest sponsored by a local mall.
“He drew four pictures of me in different hats and told a story of me,” said his father, Chet Nebolini, a retired Schenectady firefighter. “When it was completed, he called it 'Hats off to Dad.' ”
As a high school student at Albany Academy, the young Nebolini was heavily involved in athletics – participating in soccer, lacrosse, wrestling and ski racing. During the summers, he was into mountain bike racing, hiking and leading wilderness trips as a camp counselor at YMCA Camp Chingachgook.
He loved the outdoors and the sciences, so geology seemed a practical course of study in college. The numerous arts electives he took at Union, including photography, sculpture, bookmaking and traditional Chinese painting (during a semester abroad in Nanjing, China), fed his creative impulses.
“I kind of wanted to do art at Union,” he said while in Schenectady recently. “At the time, I was too concerned about career options.”
Changing goals
His mother still believes her son's true passion when entering Union was geology, though now she recognizes that his interest in the arts may not have been nurtured in the same way as his interest in the sciences.
“When he entered Union, he was focusing on something that he could build a career in. Students are a little fearful of art as a career. It was more of a hobby thing,” said Diane Nebolini, who is the office manager for the Graduate College of Union University. “We knew he was creative. He had done neat things at Albany Academy for different art projects.”
The moment of truth in Nebolini's career path came after he'd spent several years skiing, mountain climbing and working odd jobs in Colorado, including building a Web site and doing network administration for a small record company. He was set to start graduate school in geology, having accepted a full scholarship to a university in Alaska.
But before classes started, he walked away.
After learning Web design on his own, he became part of the dot.com boom by going to work for a technology company in Boston. He did back-end database work.
One day, the girlfriend of one his friends noticed the elaborate hand-made envelopes and typography of one of his handwritten letters.
“She said, 'You should be a graphic designer.' I said, 'Oh, what's that?' Then, it all clicked,” Nebolini recalled.
Graphic design
He eventually put together a portfolio of artwork that won him entry into some of the top schools in the country, including Yale University's School of Art. He studied a year at Rochester Institute of Technology – where his dad studied printmaking – before deciding that Michigan's Cranbrook Academy of Art was where he belonged.
“I'm still a little dazed, even after he has his degree,” his father said of his son's change of course. “I'm still a little flabbergasted how he made the transition. But I'm glad that he followed his passion.”
Elliott Earls, a graphic designer and performance artist on the faculty at Cranbrook, said Nebolini was an “excellent” graduate student whose interests evolved from the classical graphical arts (posters, logos, magazine covers, etc.) into textiles and fashion.
“The design department here has a physical and conceptual proximity to other artistic disciplines, which is unusual,” Earls said of Cranbrook, a studiobased art school that has no classes, assignments or grades. “After being exposed to sculpture, painting, photography, ceramics, fiber and textile, he rethought his goals for his life and work.”
Nebolini's skill in designing clothing has so impressed his mother and sister, Amber, that they have urged him to do the dresses for his own December wedding. He will wed fellow art school student Jana Stockwell, a sculptor now finishing up her own Fulbright project in Buenos Aires.
So what does Nebolini's sister tell people about her brother when they ask? “I just say he's an artist,” said Amber Nebolini, who hopes that his interest in clothing design isn't just a phase. “He does a little bit of everything.”