About : standard furniture nj
Title : standard furniture nj
standard furniture nj
coming up on craft in america… it was one of those epiphanies, you can makethings that are wonderful. you start with a chunk of wood, you end upwith a violin. i mean, it’s almost like magic. this kind of activity, pressing the tiles,helps me think about what it is that i want to do. you really don’t know what it’s goingto turn out like. that is the great joy of printmaking. there's something about the inspiration youget in your early teens through your early
twenties that is probably going to be themost important inspiration in your artistic life. i was just really young, and i had to kindafigure out how to be an artist, which means that you're an artist all the time. you're not an artist from 9 to 5. (thinking of texture…) we ask students to be very aware of what itis in the world that gives them the impulse to make. the reason why i want to make violins is becausei was tired of making things that people didn't
appreciate. most of these kids are receptive. they're like sponges, and that's when i liketo get them, when they're spongy. always creative, always wanting to work, work,work, work. there may be an opportunity here for a realresurgence in craft. there is a great difference between leavingwork at the end of the day having made something, and leaving work having returned any numberof phone calls. it's a very special process to teach someoneto make jewelry and then have them walk out the door and wear it.
it's a thrill. my brain kept handing me these ideas. so well now, let's do this. and so well now, we don't have that machineanymore. i'm always talking to my brain in the thirdperson. my brain would say, okay, well how 'bout this? so it turned out that i had to get the lasercutter because i couldn't go back. culture doesn't really beg people to pursuea career in the arts. people don't just come barreling into yourstudio to find out what you're doing, you
have to let people know what you're doing. the found object is really important to ourwork. it's telling a part of our story. you know that will at least get us startedin thinking about how this moth is going to relate to the way that it will be worn, andhow we would see it to … when we begin thinking about a piece, daveand i see things almost identically. we're layering and layering and layering. it's like a dance, really, of our hands aswe manipulate the vocabulary that we use. the part that i love so much is when we takeour found object, like this beautiful antique
moth, and then we set it into the position,and it's like, oh, that's it. the found objects that we collect not only arebottle caps and little mementos that humans have created, but nature offers the most bountifulcollection. the stones we find, even the littlest tinyseedpod may be part of a piece, and eventually they'll find their way into one of our pieces. we don't bring anything into our archive hereunless there's a relationship we've formed with it, so that we know it will connect tosomeone else. when someone looks at a piece, they may say,oh, that's the little charm my mother had
on her charm bracelet. there is a connection there. it takes someone back to a memory. it opens up a wonderful dialog and a wonderfulconnection we feel with that person that we facilitated that. here's some more cyclamen. it's such a perfect heart. yeah. isn't that amazing?
my epiphany happened when i was very young. i was born in the pilsen area of chicago. where we grew up there wasn't even grass. there was nothing, i mean, i would go outsideand we would just sit on the steps and that was our play area. and as a little girl, there weren't any insects. there wasn't the smell. one day it changed because my dad surprisedus. and he had built a house out in the suburbs,and i heard birds for the first time.
i had never experienced that. so that's why i get so emotional talking aboutit, 'cause i, it brings back that day for me that was so beautiful. and in that moment it opened up my spirit. i just began to draw with the twigs and theinsects and little miniature dolls. and that was the moment i think i became anartist. it was so fortunate for me that roberta andi met when we were freshmen and we were eighteen. (18 years old.) yeah, eighteen.
i was so naive that i would go past the potterystudio at the university, and i thought it was an archaeology lab. i said, looks like you can go out and digthese pieces of pottery up. and she said, no, this is a ceramics classwhere the students are making these things. and i thought, no way. we signed up for the class the next semestertogether. she kind of led me along and it was one ofthose epiphanies that you can make things that are wonderful. it just opened my eyes to a world i didn'tknow existed.
with our students, we're always talking abouthaving integrity in the ideas that you want to manifest in the work. each of us have a story that is really importantto tell. our stories are all different, but it's allthe same message really, because we're all so connected. these students are at a place that we're beginningto open the door. my grandmother lived in ukraine in the '30sand through the war, and she walked through a number of countries to get out, and oneof the places that they ended up staying when they were traveling was an old bombed-outbarn.
and the only thing that was there was thisold icon. and so she carried this with her all her life,and it was always in her room. is this the icon? this is the icon. oh my gosh, what a treasure. they're going to go home. they're going to begin thinking about thethings we talked about and feeling a real bond with the other students. that's where a lot of growth will happen.
it's when you can't fall asleep at night,you're thinking of that story maybe fifty times at night and in your head you beginforming what you're going to do. you know, that's not bad. i think that's doable. our workbench is a big table, and there'ssome things that roberta likes to do more than me. we've found our own niche. dave's the master solderer. he loves that process.
it's really difficult to get a career goingas a craftsman or as an artist, especially in times that we're living right now. we market our work by attending three or fourretail craft shows around the country. the philadelphia museum of art craft show,smithsonian craft shows in washington, d.c., the american craft exposition in evanston,illinois. and there's just a couple fine craft galleriesthat we've had a long relationship with. and then there's some commission work. we do wedding rings for people, brooches,necklaces. we like to say that it's the two personalities,but there's the third person that's the blend
that is the one that really creates the work. when you take a look at how many people comethrough the doors here every day, it's really quite extraordinary. the 92nd street y reaches about 300,000 peoplea year. in the school of the arts, we offer more than1,500 classes a year. i have determined that the prong is 1.5 millimeterslong, so i take 1.5 millimeter into the caliper, and from there into the divider. this particular ring that this workshop ison is called a tiffany ring. it's a four-prong setting.
this is a sample that shows you how the prong,after it's soldered together, how it's inserted into the ring shank. it's a very technical assignment, but that'swhat the students here are very interested in. klaus bã¼rgel, was trained at the academyin munich, which is a tremendous school and produces amazing artists. he teaches six classes for us. his ability to create objects of specificquality, specific control, stone setting, his technique is flawless.
(you make your first mark…) with this group, it's a very serious groupof students. they heard about the 92nd street y, they heardabout the great program, and so that made them come. they are interlocking. it's like a key mechanism. the essence of silversmithing is to take anunformed piece of metal and transforming it into useful object using proper tools andtechniques. han beak originally trained in korea.
han is a dramatically able silversmith. he is one of the primary silversmiths fortiffany. when you go and you see a big silver fabricatedtiffany something or other, it's very likely that han had his hand in making this old schoolsilversmith raised object. the arts really began at the y in earnestright at the very beginning of the great depression in 1930 with the establishment of this buildingthat we're in now. one of the first things we did was to offerart classes and in particular, we offered craft classes. (here you go, excellent.)
this class is for jewelry metalsmithing. they come in, they start learning all theprocesses. today's project, it's a thumb piano, so they'redoing a little instrument. and the more advanced kids end up doing moreindividualized projects. new york is one of the most important culturalcenters in america, and obviously artists are attracted to come here. it is a personal choice. some prefer to live in a rural area becauseof the nature. others like to be in the center of all ofthe energy and benefit from all the stimulation
that's here. but over the years there've been a numberof important artists who have resided here. some have come to have association with schools,including the 92nd street y, the greenwich house pottery, hunter, new york university,so the studio craft movement is integrated with new york itself and its vast array ofactivity. i'm a lawyer here on wall street. after work i go to the 92nd street y, andmake things that relieve the stress of my world. and i like to make a lot of pots that arenot perfect, because being a lawyer everything's
about perfection. ceramics allows me to be creative in a waythat i can't do in my, my regular nine to five world. this is a piece, crunched up all togetherand then glazed it. when we fire it, this is going to have tobe bare of any glaze. yes. right? i came to the y after having taught at theuniversity level for about twenty years, and about five or six years ago i noticed thatthere was a schism that was taking place between
what the ceramic community was doing and howculture was developing. unfortunately the university ironically seemedto be a kind of inert place, so an opportunity came to work at the 92nd street y. you start with a chunk of wood, you end upwith a violin. i mean, it’s almost like magic. you really don’t know what it’s goingto turn out like. that is the great joy of printmaking. that you're an artist all the time. you'renot an artist from 9 to 5. (thinking of texture…) we ask students tobe very aware of what it is in the world that
gives them the impulse to make. most of these kids are receptive. they'relike sponges, and that's when i like to get them, when they're spongy. always creative,always wanting to work, work, work, work. there may be an opportunity here for a realresurgence in craft. there is a great difference between leaving work at the end of the dayhaving made something, and leaving work having returned any number of phone calls. the door and wear it. it's a thrill. my brain kept handing me these ideas. so wellnow, let's do this. and so well now, we don't have that machine anymore. i'm always talkingto my brain in the third person. my brain
would say, okay, well how 'bout this? so itturned out that i had to get the laser cutter because i couldn't go back. culture doesn't really beg people to pursuea career in the arts. people don't just come barreling into your studio to find out whatyou're doing, you have to let people know what you're doing. the found object is really important to ourwork. it's telling a part of our story. when we begin thinking about a piece, daveand i see things almost identically. we're layering and layering and layering. it's likea dance, really, of our hands as we manipulate the vocabulary that we use. the part thati love so much is when we take our found object,
like this beautiful antique moth, and thenwe set it into the position, and it's like, oh, that's it. the found objects that we collect not onlyare bottle caps and little mementos that humans have created, but nature offers the most bountifulcollection. the stones we find, even the littlest tiny seedpod may be part of a piece, and eventuallythey'll find their way into one of our pieces. with it, so that we know it will connect tosomeone else. when someone looks at a piece, they may say, oh, that's the little charmmy mother had on her charm bracelet. there is a connection there. it takes someone backto a memory. it opens up a wonderful dialog and a wonderful connection we feel with thatperson that we facilitated that.
yeah. isn't that amazing? my epiphany happened when i was very young.i was born in the pilsen area of chicago. where we grew up there wasn't even grass.there was nothing, i mean, i would go outside and we would just sit on the steps and thatwas our play area. and as a little girl, there weren't any insects. there wasn't the smell.one day it changed because my dad surprised us. and he had built a house out in the suburbs,and i heard birds for the first time. i had never experienced that. so that's why i getso emotional talking about it, 'cause i, it brings back that day for me that was so beautiful. and in that moment it opened up my spirit.i just began to draw with the twigs and the
insects and little miniature dolls. and thatwas the moment i think i became an artist. (18 years old.) yeah, eighteen. i was so naivethat i would go past the pottery studio at the university, and i thought it was an archaeologylab. i said, looks like you can go out and dig these pieces of pottery up. and she said,no, this is a ceramics class where the students are making these things. and i thought, noway. we signed up for the class the next semester together. she kind of led me along and itwas one of those epiphanies that you can make things that are wonderful. it just openedmy eyes to a world i didn't know existed. each of us have a story that is really importantto tell. our stories are all different, but it's all the same message really, becausewe're all so connected.
they were traveling was an old bombed-outbarn. and the only thing that was there was this old icon. and so she carried this withher all her life, and it was always in her room. they're going to go home. they're going tobegin thinking about the things we talked about and feeling a real bond with the otherstudents. that's where a lot of growth will happen. it's when you can't fall asleep atnight, you're thinking of that story maybe fifty times at night and in your head youbegin forming what you're going to do. you know, that's not bad. i think that's doable. than me. we've found our own niche.
dave's the master solderer. he loves thatprocess. we market our work by attending three or fourretail craft shows around the country. the philadelphia museum of art craft show, smithsoniancraft shows in washington, d.c., the american craft exposition in evanston, illinois. andthere's just a couple fine craft galleries that we've had a long relationship with. and then there's some commission work. wedo wedding rings for people, brooches, necklaces. this particular ring that this workshop ison is called a tiffany ring. it's a four-prong setting. this is a sample that shows you howthe prong, after it's soldered together, how it's inserted into the ring shank. it's avery technical assignment, but that's what
the students here are very interested in. produces amazing artists. he teaches six classesfor us. his ability to create objects of specific quality, specific control, stone setting,his technique is flawless. (you make your first mark…) with this group,it's a very serious group of students. they heard about the 92nd street y, they heardabout the great program, and so that made they are interlocking. it's like a key mechanism. han beak originally trained in korea. hanis a dramatically able silversmith. he is one of the primary silversmiths for tiffany. in 1930 with the establishment of this buildingthat we're in now. one of the first things
we did was to offer art classes and in particular,we offered craft classes. this class is for jewelry metalsmithing. theycome in, they start learning all the processes. today's project, it's a thumb piano, so they'redoing a little instrument. and the more advanced kids end up doing more individualized projects. are attracted to come here. it is a personalchoice. some prefer to live in a rural area because of the nature. others like to be inthe center of all of the energy and benefit from all the stimulation that's here. butover the years there've been a number of important artists who have resided here. some have cometo have association with schools, including the 92nd street y, the greenwich house pottery,hunter, new york university, so the studio
craft movement is integrated with new yorkitself and its vast array of activity. i'm a lawyer here on wall street. after worki go to the 92nd street y, and make things that relieve the stress of my world. and ilike to make a lot of pots that are not perfect, because being a lawyer everything's aboutperfection. ceramics allows me to be creative in a way that i can't do in my, my regularnine to five world. what the ceramic community was doing and howculture was developing. unfortunately the university ironically seemed to be a kindof inert place, so an opportunity came to work at the 92nd street y. the y i felt wasable to be more responsive to these ideas that i had. we're fee based. we have to makesure that the programming is relevant.
the moment i discovered that i really likedsilversmithing was when i finished my first spiculum shape, which is sort of a conal shapethat tapers at one end. denard had a career as a dancer, and throughhis life collected objects of silver. he started here as a ranked beginner and found this spiculumthe object of his obsession, and has now progressed to put his line together based on these forms. i'm from a farm, and the shape of the spiculumreminds me of some of the tools that my grandfather used, particularly an oil can or a funnelthat he would use to pour the gas in the tractor. i think there is a continuum. making thingsby hand is as old as civilization. it's certainly alive and well today. and it's my belief itwill continue. it may even be more important
as our world becomes more dehumanized to dosomething that is a choice of making something with pride and passion, and then sharing itwith others and i think that kind of underlying instinct is something that's central to whatcraft is all about. here we are on bolinas ridge. it drops offalmost 2,000 feet to the pacific ocean. i was born and raised right near here, juston the other side of this mountain. it's always these interfaces, these transition pointsthat are so beautiful in the natural world. the way i start working on a print is, i havethousands of sketches. i go out and sketch all the time. i go hiking, a lot of the sketchesi do are from the places i go backpacking. to build the layers of a landscape print,you need to figure out how to break the distance
up into these different planes, and then buildthe layers up. and that's what the lines of my sketches do. they show the different layersas i see them, so that i can build that up. i put in notes about color, about background,because you can't put in all the levels of detail that eventually will be in the print. now this is a topo map of the marble mountainsup in the wilds of northern california. i was up right around here, gathering firewoodone day, and i came across this view of mount shasta through a little ravine, and it wasjust awesome the way the mountains stuck up there. so i did this sketch on the back ofa topo map. all my life i'd spent a lot of time with theprints of hokusai and particularly his 36
views of mount fuji. that was one of my greatinspirations since i was a child for doing woodcut prints of landscape. and this viewhad the elements of several of my favorite of hokusai's prints in it. one was this printof his of pilgrims measuring sort of the japanese equivalent of the giant sequoia. this is afaded, old print of it i had up on my wall at the time. and then the other is that wonderfulred fuji, which is one of hokusai's two or three most famous prints. and this is theprint i finally made from it. i've started to get to the point where i'm almost paintingwith the wood, but it's not immediate. it's a very delayed gratification sort of painting.there's always this surprise that comes, because everything is carved. there's so much workbefore you actually get the color onto the
page that you really don't know what it'sgoing to turn out like. that is the great joy of printmaking. it kind of takes partof the construction of the image out of your hands and puts it out into this magical space. this california landscape, it's really a landscapethat appeals to someone who has what my good friend diagnosed as topophilia. he figuredout my disease and he gave it a name, and i think i have it, which is a sort of a loveof the landscape. well the way i got started making japanese-stylewoodcut prints that look something like hokusai was - when i was a child, i grew up on theslopes of mount tamalpais. one side is the san francisco bay, the other side is the pacificocean, and it's quite a place, this mountain.
and i wanted to make pictures of it that weresomething like those wonderful pictures that hokusai had done in his series, 36 views ofmount fuji. i didn't realize that hokusai hadn't donethe block carving himself. it was a whole group of craftsmen that produced those incredibleprints from the 1820s and 1830s, the ukiyo-e style woodblock prints. but i did know thatit was about a series, about a place, and the first place i wanted to do a series, ofcourse, was this mountain. and i started in on it when i was still in high school. andby the time i had finished college, i had enough of them to make a book, which i called28 views of mount tamalpais. i, i hadn't quite gotten to 36. i wanted to get to thirty-six.i didn't get there. i never studied art. i
just learned how to print on a printing pressat uc santa cruz, so i could make this book. some of the prints in this book went way backto my teenage years. this is one of the early prints that i did that i thought really worked.mount tamalpais in the background. and i did want to put in color, but i didn't know howto use color yet, so i would hand roll it. so the only color ones in this book were oneswhere i could divide the scene into two pretty obvious colors. so here we've got the fieldsare all yellow and the mountain and the sky are blue. and just a few years later, around the timei was finishing this book in 1975, i've become much more refined in my ability to carve.all of this carving was done with a single
japanese v-gouge, which i was laboriouslylearning how to sharpen at the time. sharpening is one of the most important parts of this.so this book i finished in 1975, and i don't think i would ever have made this book, andprobably never have become a printmaker if i hadn't been hit by a car turning left withoutsignaling on my bicycle as i was coming down a steep hill one day, and had to spend fourmonths in a full leg cast. and, and therefore i couldn't go out surfing and bike ridingand playing with my friends and i was forced to, to do something productive, and this iswhat i ended up doing was this book. the first step in making a print out of thissketch from up on bolinas ridge is to transition this sketch onto what becomes the key block,and that's the basis for creating a multi-colored
print. so i take a piece of tracing paperand i go over the back of all the lines of the sketch on the tracing paper in a verysoft pencil. and i turn it upside down on a uncut block. so before this block was cut,it was just a big, flat surface. and i went over the back with a ballpoint pen. and theni go to the carving. once i get the key block carved, it has all the information from thesketch on it. it works like the template for the print. i take the key block and print it onto mylarsheets and i turn it over and i rub it, and i get the whole image transferred onto asmany blocks as i'm going to need for the different colors of the print. then the key block becomesthe very last darkest color and it's this
black that really gives the image a lot ofpower. i really use some of that possibility of thedark blacks and that strong coloration to give the print a lot of power, and to giveit a little more oomph, i would say. so now i am going to try to get this blockregistered so that it's going to hit the right place along with all the other colors on,on the print. and the way that i do that, i have made a whole stack of registrationproofs. i run these through the press, and then i move the block a little bit if i needto, and it's a process of trial and error 'til i get it to hit exactly in the rightplace. and i'm going to put some ink onto the plate. okay, it seems to be inking nicely.let's see what happens. oh, way off! now this
is a good example of, see how far off thatis? that distance is how much i need to move the block over in the bed of the press. i got into making money at art when i wasreally young. i was very fortunate to grow up in a town that appreciated art, and i alwayshad around me the inspiration of people that did art and some of them sold it. when i wasa teenager i would take some of my pen and ink drawings down to the little outdoor artfair a couple block from my house in mill valley, and i would sell them to people forten, twenty-five dollars. i always got as many people as possible that were interestedin my work to give me their mailing addresses, and i have assiduously cultivated a mailinglist that has grown and grown and grown, and
anybody that's interested in trying to makea living at art, i suggest that they don't rely on galleries to take care of all that. okay. this was it before we had the secondlayer of green on, and here it is with the second layer of green. so now, the final layer of black. here itcomes. oh, look at that. that looks good. voila! that's it. kansas city has several examples of beautifulart deco terra cotta. the bright colors are all ceramic glazes on clay that's been carved,and then glazed with these pinks and yellows and blues and purples and oranges. in addition,the beige color blocks are also made out of
clay to simulate stone, and that was verycommon in the early part of the twentieth century. and it really took me a while tounderstand that it was clay. i always thought it was painted stone. i was really importantto me in my development as an artist because suddenly a whole new world of possibilitiesin ceramics was opened to me. they have one scene on one side, and anotherscene on the other side that's completely different but there's some sort of relationshipin his mind conceptually. now i know that you're talking about thiswhole idea of the metaphor of the bull in the china shop, and so is he actually goingto be kind of sitting on a, a dining room table?
the kansas city art institute is coming upto its 125th anniversary in 2010. it was really when ken ferguson came to the kansas cityart institute that ceramics became its own department. from 1971 until 1996, ken, georgeand victor were the three professors in the department. and the three of them built areally, really important and wonderful department. there was a nice cross, you know, kind ofa, a mix, you know, of information pouring into the department. the students, i think,ended up, along with the faculty, in some kind of a soup to which flavors were beingadded to every time and it got richer and richer and more complex. they were artistsand they were here to find out why. i've been here for a fair amount of years.i think i'm starting my 37th year here. i
am here, my colleagues are here for the studentsbecause they're damn interesting kids. you're always going to be mating these piecestogether in this case. it's a wonderful opportunity to take a studentthrough process, but at the same time they have to have some sort of intellectual connection,passion, and they have to be able to take things farther. i mean, you know, i'm going to challenge you,though, really to stick with that. okay. so you got an idea, but it's complex. i don'twant you to walk away from that, 'cause i think it can work both ways. you're a sharpenough guy you can cut it.
this little guy was actually found in a tombin egypt, and he was left in there. it was one of the workers presumably that, you know,they locked them in and so they, you know, perished there in the tomb. a lot of times, especially when you're firstworking with clay, things will look really beautiful in the green state and then youfire them and they're less exciting. this is exciting because i think it's more beautifulin the fired state. i've enjoyed working with barrett. she hasbeen very affected by death of family members, and she's trying to understand the mysteryof death through what happens to the remains to our bodies.
i'm going to be doing three of these largerfigures, eventually moving to life size. i think it'll be more powerful, the larger thatwe, that we go. but what's interesting to me is the way itseems to be now is like a small animal, you know, like a raccoon or a possum or somethinglike that. i mean, the egyptians even mummified theirpets, so i thought about going that route as well. really? i didn't know they mummified theirpets. yeah, yeah they mummified their pets a lotof times. maybe i'll do that with my cat. [laughs]
i'm kind of setting up an interior structurefor my plaster to kind of flow on. it is a constant challenge to balance teachingand working in the studio. but what i try to do is just get down here and what i findis that, even if i'm tired, if i start working, then the clay revitalizes me. this kind of activity, pressing the tiles,is a very good meditative kind of activity that helps me think about what it is thati want to do. this work goes into these pieces that are like large, i call them honeycombmosaics and they go together in these horizontal kind of compositions. i want people to beenticed to touch them and to want to move them around. i want them to be extremely lusciousand very sensual and that seems to draw my
audience to the pieces. i do love the tiny detail and the preciousand the things like that. and then i also just like to bang out a bunch of pieces aswell, so i kind of have a split personality in that way. nikki lewis was a student of mine and georgetimock and victor babu. you could tell when nikki was a student that she was going tobe one of the people that would go on and continue to work with clay. when i came here, i didn't know what was expectedof me, and then slowly i really learned i guess how to be an artist, which means thatyou're an artist all the time. you're not
an artist from nine to five. we are in the ken ferguson teaching collectionroom with cabinets full of the collection that kansas city has collected over nearlysixty years of being the epicenter of ceramics in our country. this is an incredible, incredible bowl byan artist named jim makins. we would stare at this piece for hours. the fineness andthinness of the way that this was thrown, and the beauty of the lip. i love to touchit, i love to feel my fingers in the throwing lines that his fingers made when he was here. there's two pitchers in this cabinet thatare made by a woman in iowa named clary illian.
they are so beautiful. she's thrown it sothin, yet it feels incredibly study. i could carry it like this and be completely confidentthat i wouldn't drop it. her skill is so, so profound. and just the simplest decoration.just black and white hugging each other. it's just that beautiful little dance of the glazethere. thinking of texture, i see some really nicestitching going on. can you, can you tell me what's going on? the stitching symbolizes recovery process.soldiers get injured and tend to have stitches. paul has a real political bent to his workand his thinking. the assignment was to find an object in the museum to work off of, andhe is working with saint michael expelling
the rebel angels, and connecting that to theamerican military in iraq. when something is stitched, there's a tension,there's a pulling. okay? and i don't feel that here. to be honest,compared to the way that i've seen you like really handle clay, it seems a little biton the timid side. and i don't want to suggest exactly wherefor you to take it, 'cause i want you to think about that for yourself, but, but that's somethingthat i think can be much more powerful in this piece. when someone has a strong reaction againstit, are you going to be, you know, ready to, to talk to them?
sure, why not, you know? yeah, i mean, that's like how you're goingto … that's what i'm trying, like, i'm trying toput it out there so that people could see it. okay. all right. what we have here are smallerexamples of the larger piece that i was working on. so this is the object. you can kind ofsee through the piece, and then it just kinda sits flush back onto the wall. when you are done with school, you are sortof plopped down into the art world, and you're told to sort of figure it out. in my case,i looked in the yellow pages. i, i once, i
called up every ceramic studio in the city.but my other piece of advice to somebody who's doing this is to try and have fun, you know,while you're, while you're making stuff, because what's the point of being an artist unlessyou're going to have a good time? culture doesn't really beg people to pursuea career in the arts. i think you just decide every single day, you know, when you wakeup, you just decide you're going to do it. because there's so many reasons not to doit. every time that you go into the studio and you make something, every hour that youspend there is what keeps you moving onto the next hour. i'm putting together a part of a pop-up thatgoes in my most recent book, panorama, and
the pop-up is made up of four layers, andthen the four layers go into a page, and everything just gets threaded together, so there's verylittle adhesive holding it all together. panorama, the theme of the book was climatechange. when i started the project it was because i felt personally that i was reallyavoiding learning about climate change. not as an artist but just as a person. there are three folded sections in the book.they are always surrounded by these panoramic photographic images. my work doesn't tendto be political in nature, but in this case the topic seemed so important to me as anindividual that i felt that i would explore it and see what happened.
and then the next page spread will be a pop-up. i ended up discovering that in fact the issueof climate change was even scarier than i had anticipated. so i tried to alternate betweenfacts about where we are today with meditations on the beauty of the planet. even if we'rein the middle of big environmental challenges, we can still appreciate the world we livein. and then the next section again will be apop-up, which would give you a little break from the text and have a little bit more ofa, a visual experience. and now we're coming to the ending of thepiece. an artist book is really a book that is madeby an artist with the intention that the book
itself is the work of art. this is a book called true to life. you openthe box, the book itself is this tablet with panels, and you read the text and then youslide up every panel. i did my training at mills college. and wedid really study beautiful letterpress printing, literary text, beautiful wood block illustrations,all put together to make a very luxurious, very beautiful product. i think i felt a little bit intimidated bycoming up against the whole tradition of, of fine press, about using my own content,so i would labor over, you know, is, is my writing up to standard, is, is the illustrationgood enough to be in a book? and it took me
years to realize that i could take what ineeded from that tradition, but then go out and take it to perhaps a place that no oneelse was taking it. time and memory are always moving, alwayschanging. it is the mind which insists on sometimes staying in one place. life mustbe interpreted while it is being lived. i produce one book a year, and i spend maybethree or four months every year thinking about that book, starting to design that book andthen printing the pieces. then we spend years putting the rest of the edition together forsale. why don't you go ahead and put the, the textscripts on that piece. on the world?
yeah, and i'll trim this. i feel like sometimes i have a committee ofvoices in my head for running my business. and it is a business, because i am printinga hundred copies of every piece, and then we put them together and sell them to librariesand collectors. i'm not an artist who starts with an ideathat's very clear, that i'm going to make a book about climate change and it's goingto have x, y and z. i think that i do, but very quickly it becomes clear that it's notgoing to go the way i think it's going to go. and i have to constantly adjust. so this is the project i'm working on now,and this is a mockup of the project, so i'm
trying out different designs on my computerin preparation for doing it letterpress. you have an ongoing text that you read throughoutthe piece. the text starts out with the phrase: this is a test. you will not be given anyassistance or instructions on how to proceed. i wanted to find a technical language thatwould be very hard for most people to decipher. the obvious choice was math, because mathhas always been a very difficult thing for me. so i had to get some help. this was acollaborative process with a couple of friends of mine who are really into math and verygood at math. i told them what i needed, which was mathematical equations that had a lotof really interesting data embedded in them, but that most people would not be able todecipher.
my work is really rooted in the physical object,so i'm using those traditional book arts techniques to develop an object that is beautiful onsome level, but it also has to have a lot of meaning. everything that goes into thepiece should contribute to the meaning of the piece. when i first started, i spent about five yearsproducing editions, going to book fairs, showing the work to librarians, but it really tookabout five to seven years before the press started to turn any kind of profit. tryingto make a living with your work is a double-edged sword. make sure that you're doing the workyou want to do before you think about how you're going to make a living doing it.
north bennet street school has eight programs.in a way we're a university of craft, because we're bringing together so many disparateelements that have, as a connecting tissue, hand skills and the importance of the hand. cabinet and furniture making is a two-yearprogram where students are given programs of increasing complexity and introduced totools as they go. when they leave here they can make any piece of furniture they want.there's nothing they can't do. we've been here for 125 years, but not aslong as our neighbor, old north church. if you look out that window you'll see the one-if-by-landand two-if-by-sea church. it is the church that triggered paul revere's ride to savethe colonial army.
boston in the middle of the 19th century wasthe destination for hundreds of thousands of immigrants coming from europe. and it wascharacterized really by poverty, by unemployment, and by crime. so a large number of socialservice programs were initiated. north bennet street school started in 1885when its founder, pauline agassiz shaw, rented the building that we're in to house a numberof social service programs. what you want to do is tighten this one up. tighten this up, tighten this up, and thenyou know where to make the knot and then pull it inside and it'll kind of like, yeah. bookbinding is a program that has experienceda tremendous growth in the last ten years.
we are so used to thinking that we're enteringa paperless world, and with all of the technology, books are going to be irrelevant. well, iguess not, because the waiting list to get into bookbinding has never been longer. locksmithing is one of my favorite programshere at north bennet street school. locksmithing trains our students in the repair and maintenanceand installation of locks. we do focus on historic locks. here on the bench we have three 17th-centuryantique locks. this came from the charles street jail. and as you can see, the locksmiththat created this lock, the only reason for these heart-shaped cutouts is really for thepride that the locksmith that built this had
in what he was doing. this would only be seenby another locksmith. yeah, a4 is still a little sharp. piano technology is a program that lasts twoyears. the first year really focuses on tuning and also the repair of pianos, anything thatcan be done within a person's home. the second year focuses on comprehensive restorationand rebuilding of pianos. we take the entire piano apart, saving only the case and thecasting. so if you stay for the second year, you're able to basically build a piano. this one for me has slightly more, there'sa little bit of a gap here. just remove some material, so when we clampit, it will fit more snug.
violin making and repair is the only three-yearprogram we have here at north bennet street school. so the curve would be fitting better. they start from scratch with no required skills.the first several weeks is just about tools, sharpening tools and the materials that areused in violin making. i am gouging out the channel on my cello plate,so that i can get ready for purfling. purfling is the white and black inlay that goes aroundthe edge. it's kind of a decorative feature, but it also helps if the instrument were toget a crack that started on the edge, the crack would stop at the inlay and not go intothe instrument.
during the course of the three years, theymake six violins, a viola and a cello. we don't teach bow-making. we really stick toviolins, violas and cellos and similar stringed instruments. we have scans of the actual molds that stradivariused. in different points of his life he used different molds. so this, this particularmold is one of the larger of the stradivari molds that he used. and it's actually theexact same size, and we will actually take a, a finished measurement of the back plate,which is a standard way to measure a violin. and we try to get it to within usually a tenthof a millimeter as to what stradivari had. it has great sound. all the ratios and, youknow, and proportions are, are very classical,
very, they're really good. i'm preparing purfling to fit the c-bout ofmy viola. you just use a small amount of moisture, and i'm using a bending iron, bending thepurfling to the shape of the c-bout. you can see the one i did from a little bit earlier.i did this c-bout and the lower bout here. growing up, my father owned a violin rentalshop. when i was fourteen i started working for him in his shop in the summers and schoolbreaks. i ended up deciding to go into music, and i got my bachelor's of music in piano.in the meantime, my dad passed away and i inherited the shop. at first i wasn't sureif i was going to keep it or not, and i held onto it until i graduated school, and theni took some repair courses, and it was amazing.
i fell in love with it. the shop's still openin new jersey. hopefully i'll be able to make a go of it after i finish school here. modern violin making is really very good,but there is still a prejudice in the playing community that you can't get any better thanthe old instruments. part of why players like old instruments is because the instrumentshave history, and especially the great instruments, like a player can say, well, it went to thisvirtuoso and it went to that virtuoso and now i get to play it. and so i think thatplayers probably really like the ancestry and that they feel connected to the past worldof music if they have a great old instrument. there is some research going on about whatmakes instruments good instruments, and there's
a group of people using an mri machine ona violin to take a scan, and then they have made movies where you are watching it as thecamera moves through the instrument. you can see the thicknesses of the plates and howthey vary and you can see like when the corners come in and you can see the sound posts andyou can see all of these things. it's really interesting. you know, the placement of the f-holes isreally important. the size of the f-holes is really important. you can actually takethis, this section here and with the wood that's cut away, it enables the, the woodto flex, and this is probably the most important part of the sounding point of the instrument.
if they don't have a background in violinor stringed instruments, we give them lessons, because we feel that they need to have atleast a rudimentary ability to play the instrument for them to be good makers. in our modern world, people don't think aboutwhere things come from. people don't think about how they're made. people don't thinkabout even where their food comes from, and it's so nice to be able to make somethingand, and know that i made it from the beginning to end, and like, this is where it came fromand this is how i got there, and i think there's a lot of value in that. it gives you a senseof accomplishment. violin making for all these little things,i think you have to be just intuitive, you
know, and just kind of take things on, onthe, the way you feel about them. i had no idea how difficult it was beforei started school. you know, you start with a chunk of wood. in the end you end up witha violin. i mean that's, that's amazing! how, how does that work? i mean, it's almost likemagic.