Swarf & Chips. The random flotsam of a metalsmith’s mind.

This one isn’t metal related, except that it was a conversation with one of my jewelry students that brought it to mind.  She’s a Welsh expat living in the Bay area.  I spent a year in College in London, as well as living in southern England as a child.  I’ve backpacked in Wales, so we got to talking about places we’d both been.

What struck me about the conversation was the mental size that Wales (and the rest of the UK) have in our two heads, versus the mental size that the US has in our experiences.  It’s an old joke that Europeans don’t have any sense of the vastness of America, so this isn’t truly a new observation.  I spent part of a flight back to the US once, “editing” the travel plans of an Irish couple who originally planned to land at NYC, rent a car, and drive down to Disney World, and then on to the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, then Yellowstone, across the top through Chicago, Niagara falls, and back to New York.  All in 10 days.

What struck me about our conversation about northern Wales was that we were talking about places we’d both been, more-or-less on foot.  No cars.  Just trains and walking.  The UK that we experienced on foot was human scaled, and distances loomed large, both in time and effort.  The US, by contrast is almost exclusively experienced via car.  Distances are measured more in terms of time spent stuck in traffic, rather than miles.  Yeah, Santa Barbara may be 90 miles from downtown LA, but depending on the time and traffic, it can be anywhere from an hour and change, to half a day away.

I have a vivid memory of being on approach to Heathrow a few years back, looking out my window, seeing Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight clearly visible in the morning light, and being stunned that I could be on approach to London, and be able to see the south coast.  When flying into my hometown in the States, I know exactly how far away the landmarks are, they don’t seem that far away.  Yet they are.  It was a shock to realize the radical differences in scale between the UK and US.    When I was going to school in London, I had a friend who lived on the Dorset coast, near Portsmouth.  It took most of a day to get down there via trains.  To my American sense of scale, that said that it should have been several hundred miles away.  It’s actually about 90.  Equally, when I set out for my backpacking holiday in Wales, I spent a day, changing trains several times to get from London to Harlech, which said to me that it should have been a great distance away.  A thousand miles at least.  It’s actually a smidge over 200.

These are not entirely new, or unremarked upon observations.  What the conversation brought up for me this time was to stop and wonder about the future of distance, and what that portends for both Europe and the US.  Moving forward, in the long term, (decades, not weeks.) individual auto travel seems destined to fade away.  To be replaced by what is uncertain, but it seems certain to reimpose a greater sense of distance on the US.  What then will that do to our mental map of our country?  What will it do to the political, social and economic life of the country?  America as a concept, especially in the west, is rooted almost in agressive denial of distance.  What happens when distance comes roaring back?  Who will we be when it’s suddenly a big deal to get from Santa Barbara to San Jose, nevermind San Jose to Syracuse?

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We all know the old art-school saw about “there are two kinds of artists…”  For those who’ve missed this hoary old goat, the two kinds would be those who are interested in the finished product, and don’t much care how they get there, and those for whom the making is far more interesting than the end product.  In short, “destination” people, and “journey” people. This dichotomy is repeated so often that it’s accepted as gospel, without much thought as to whether there might be other ways of working, or other mindsets of equal validity.

I had a conversation the other week with a good friend of mine, regarding a craftsman of our mutual acquaintance, and his mental approach to his work.  The details are unimportant.  What matters is the upshot:  it caused an idea to crystallize in my fevered brain.

There is at least one more type, and one more motivation for making art/craft:  gnosis.

There may well be more valid reasons, but gnosis (greek for knowledge) is the one that came to me last week.

Our friend collects tools.  No sin, I’m more guilty of that than most.  He doesn’t seem to use them much either.  What he does do is study them.  He wants to understand them, to know the how’s and why’s of their use.  For him, it’s not actually about making things at all, although he does; it’s about understanding the inner mysteries of the tools themselves.  It’s about being initiated into the realm of “those who know” just what, exactly a Stanley #55 plane is, what it’s for, and why it’s different than a Stanley #45 plane.  These are subjects steeped in arcane lore, and mystic knowledge.  It’s that element of secret knowledge that attracts him, and so many like him to the more obscure corners of the crafts world.  It’s about becoming one of the “Tool Illuminati”.  For him, the pieces he makes are not so much finished goals, or even pieces made as an excuse to use the tools.  They’re examples of his mastery of the arcana of a given tool.  A physical proof of his initiation into the mysteries of his craft.

Think back to all the craftspeople you’ve known.  I’m sure there must be a few of them who suddenly seem less like “journey” people, and are now looking to you like Tool Illuminati.

I’m not sure where to go with this bit of knowledge, or even if there is anywhere to go with it.  I seek only to spread the illumination of the idea.

Cheers-

Brian

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I wonder if anybody has ever pondered the influence of music on metalsmithing?

I was in the middle of doing some filing on a large project last night, and noticed, not for the first time, that the rhythm of my filing matched the beat of the music on my iPod.  That’s hardly a unique observation, but it caused me to wonder about all the other musical references in metalwork, especially raising.

Raising is an incredibly rhythmic thing.  It’s also a performance art on occasion, especially when several smiths are working together in one room:  their hammer blows naturally fall into a rhythm.  Not a static drone, but a dynamic beat, with each smith aware of the timing and force of the others.  Frequently there’s a sense of almost communication in the ringing of the hammers.  The group energy definitely makes it easier to carry on the work, like a group marching together:  it’s easy to get lost in the rhythm, and carried along by it.  I’ve always found it an oddly joyous noise, at least when everybody’s working well.  It’s a very good indicator of the mental state of the group.  This sort of experience is becoming more and more rare, as there are fewer places where groups of silversmiths might work together.  Even the language of silversmithing refers to music: stanzas &  rounds, for example.

We’ve all had the experience of working to the beat of whatever music we’re listening to at a given time.  Almost every working shop I’ve ever been in has had a music of some sort going.  We all seem to do it.  Wonder what influence it’s had?
In my case, the answer is obvious:  I have several pieces that are direct reactions to song lyrics.  Things I dreamed up while working on something else, listening to music.
One of the things I miss most from college are boring lecture classes.  Really.  An hour or more, bored silly, stuck with a pen and paper in front of me.  Some of my best designs of that period started out as doodles in the margins of my class notes.  It’s a very good way to free your mind of distractions, and let you just draw.  You’re stuck there, you can’t go anywhere, or do much of anything else, so it’s easy to disconnect the mind and let the pen create, without the stress of worrying about dinner, or the next meeting, or whatever.
In a weird sort of way, a lot of bench work is like that too:  it takes a certain part of your mind to handle the repetitive task, like filing, but it frees the rest of your mind to think.  To listen to the music, and ponder.   To design in your head, while you’re working.  I can’t be the only one who works that way.  I wonder how the music that we all listen to has influenced our pieces?

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Plexiglass graver organizer

So I have a GraverMach power engraver.  I also have a fair number of engraving tools for it.  They all come in quick change mounts, which is great, except that the little round holders that GRS sells don’t organize them that well.  They don’t really grip the shanks, and they tend to dump all the tools if the holder should get tipped over, which seems to happen frequently. It’s also not the easiest to tell which tool is which, or to keep them in order with the little round holders

I got a little annoyed by this, and resolved to fix it.  About a year ago.

The fix was relatively straightforward: take a slab of plexiglass, drill a bunch of holes into it, and make a saddle so that the slab would stand upright on the back of my GraverMach, where I could both see it, (and the tools it contained) and was unlikely to set anything on top of it.  (Not a trivial consideration around here.)

The drawback was the simple annoyance of drilling a whole bunch of accurately spaced little holes.  Not difficult, but a pain in the tail to lay out and drill.  So I’d been putting it off.  And then I met a friend who introduced me to his little friend….the laser cutter.

Oh boy, I am enjoying this thing.  Tom, many thanks, and I promise to stop abusing it sometime very soon.  (For the record, and in all seriousness, Tom’s been a minor saint in putting up with me ‘clearing the decks’ of a variety of projects that had been floating around in my ‘to do’ list.  For this, I do both humbly apologize, and publicly thank him.)

So, the recipe is pretty simple:  take a slab of 3/8″ plexiglass, and drill a bunch of holes into it, make some tilted uprights to go on the back, and a little crosspiece to go across the back to give it something to stand up on, and away you go.

I’m not including the laser pattern here because the one I used turned out not-quite-right.  It worked, but it wasn’t perfect.  The slab was 6″ tall, and about 6″ wide.  The holes are .25″, and are .625″ apart, both vertically and horizontally.  The rows are offset vertically by .375″, so that there is greater separation between tool bits as you reach into them.  I could have packed them in tighter, but remember, you’re reaching into a small forest of razor blades to fish one out.  Perhaps having them farther apart is a good thing, no?

I measured the width of the top of the GraverMach with a ruler, and thought it was 5.25″ wide.  It turns out it isn’t.  It’s actually 5.175″ wide.  The goal was to have a slip-fit of the side pieces down the side of the GraverMach, but with the bad measurement, there’s a little slop.  Just what I deserve for assuming a measurement.  Trust, but verify.  Just because 5.25 makes sense to me, doesn’t mean it did to them.

It doesn’t really matter, but the imprecision annoys me.  There’s a little piece of 1/8 plexi cut out of a different sheet that connects the two side pieces, to support them, and to give the slab a base to stand up on.

In use, I’ve found that it’s best to take a deburring (or countersinking) bit, and chamfer both sides of the holes, so that the rubber ring that holds the QC shanks into the handpiece has an easy way to get started going through the plexi.  If I had a very shallow angled bit, I’d use that on the rear sides of the holes.  The rubber ring is 3/8″ from the face of the QC shank, so that the rubber ring just clears the plexi on the back side when the tools are seated.  This was the point of using 3/8″ stock, and is a good thing, as it holds the bits securely.  Unfortunately, it also makes it a little hard to get them to slide out smoothly.  A long, shallow taper to the back side of the hole will (eventually) solve this problem.

Another trick you will notice from the photograph is that the shanks themselves are painted in various colors.  GRS has finally started making colored little plastic collars to slip over the tools, but unfortunately, they come coupled with the little round holders.  As I’m not about to pay full freight for a bunch of little colored rings, I use paint pens.  The paint pens don’t stick all that well, especially on tools that get used a lot, but they’re good enough.  I’ve known some people to use colored dental rubber bands for the same function.  If I had a source of those, I’d give it a whirl.  The idea is pretty simple:  green shanks are round bottomed, blues are knives, yellow are ongilettes and so on.  Just makes it easier to tell at a glance which ones are which.  All the knives are racked in the same vertical column, all the ongilettes in another, and so forth.

This may or may not be of use to anyone, but feel free to take the idea and run with it.  If you make money, I want 10%.  Just saying. 

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November 9, 1989.

As I’ve said, I normally try to keep this blog focused on things that are at least tangentially related to metalsmithing, but for the second time in the past few months, not today.

November 9, 1989. The day the wall came down.
I just felt the impulse to go back and correct the preceding sentence to say “the Berlin wall”, but if you’d lived through the years leading up to it, there was no question about which wall was “the wall”.  There was only one.  That thin grey ribbon slashing through a dark grey town.
They say Berlin’s pretty in the spring, but every time I’ve been there, it’s been dark and raining.  Seemed appropriate somehow.  A grey concrete city, and a sodden grey blanket of sky.

Mostly what I remember from 20 years ago is sitting in the living room of a college friend.  He was a grad student working on his PhD, and had gone back to school after a stint in the Air Force.  He’d been a watch stander in a nuclear missile silo.
I remember sitting there in Jamie’s living room, watching that damned wall come down, live on CNN.  Neither one of us thought we’d ever live to see it come down, nevermind peacefully.  If you’d told me, even a week earlier that the wall would be down by Thanksgiving, I would have considered you a madman.  The wall, and the cold war it represented, were immutable facts of life.  They would continue until the end of the world, one way or the other.
Jamie and I both knew far too much about nuclear weapons and their effects, for our various reasons, to have harbored any hope that civilization would survive anything more than a limited war, and the prospects for ‘limited’ never seem too good once the rubicon of the launch codes has been crossed.

We sat there, watching, drinking what turned out to be far too much wine, and we reveled, stunned, in the knowledge that for the first time in our lives, the birds weren’t going to fly tonight.  The sun would not rise in the north, and the missiles would stay sleeping in their tubes.  There was a sense that a vast weight had just been lifted from our shoulders, a weight we hadn’t noticed until it was gone.  It’s a sense of relief that is difficult to express to those who didn’t live through it.  Those who lived through those years know instinctively what I mean, and those who didn’t probably never will understand.  If you ever wonder at the some of the exuberant nuttiness of the early 1990’s, chalk it up to relief.  We suddenly realized that we were actually going to live to see the next few years.  In the mid ’80’s, I wouldn’t have bet on it.  In fact, I didn’t bet on it.  I was living in the middle of one of the biggest bulls-eyes on the east coast, and I knew, even as a pre-teen, that there was no way I was going to get far enough away to survive.  So my plan, in the event that the balloon went up, was to head downtown to DCSC, which was the biggest defense supply warehouse on the east coast, and incidentally, next to the Lockheed plant where the B-1 Bomber was built.  Obviously a high value, first strike target.  At the age of about 10, I knew I couldn’t possibly survive that war, my only realistic option was to try to die quickly.  Hell of a way to grow up, planning how best to die.

That was the weight that came off our shoulders that afternoon.  That’s what I remember: the sense of weightless hope, for the first time in what suddenly seemed like a long, grey stretch of Berlin years.

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Wolf Tools in their native habitat

Do you have a can (or four) of Kate Wolf’s wax carving tools?

Do you teach?  Do you need to make sure you have as many tools at the end of the night as you did at the beginning?  Do you have a laser cutter?  (Well why not??)  If so, this post’s for you.

The short form is that I picked up several sets of Wolf wax tools for the studio.  They’re great tools.  The only problem with them is that they come packed in a very nice plastic can.  All 18 of them.  They’re expensive, and I’d like to make sure we continue to have all 18 in each can.  So we count them at the end of every class as we clean up.  Manually counting all 18 of them, four different times, is a real pain.

The obvious solution was to add some sort disk with 18 holes to slot the tools into onto the top of the can.   Not having a laser cutter in my back pocket, my original plan had been to camp out at school one Saturday, and drill a whole gross of holes, one at a time, individually located on each disk.  Not exactly what I really wanted to be doing with a Saturday.  Having been recently introduced to someone who has access to a laser cutter, this went from a “most of a morning” pain that I’ve been avoiding for a month, to about 3 minutes of cutting, and another 5 minutes of gluing.  (Thank you Tom!)

Oh boy, I do love laser cutters.  I’ve been experimenting with using it to cut cloisonee too.  More on that later.

The two disks, as cut, and glued together.

The actual idea is simple:  cut two disks out of 1/8″ plexiglass, have the laser cut all the holes for the tools, as well as a pair of holes for alignment pins to help line it up during gluing.  Once it’s cut, stick 1/8″ rods though the holes, and glue the large disk to the small disk.  One disk is smaller than the other, so that it drops down into the can, while the larger one sits on top of the mouth of the can, to hold it at the top.  A little super glue to glue the disk to the can top, and you’re done.  Cut with the right tool, it turns into a trivial little thing, rather than the pain that threatened to eat my morning.

One of our cans of tools, now easily inspected.

I’m going to attach a PDF with the artwork that I used to drive the laser.  If you have a laser or CNC system of your own that can use it, feel free.

wolfguide

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The first Earthrise ever seen by human eyes.

Normally, I try to keep my musings here at least tangentially related to metalsmithing, in some respect.  Not today.

40 years ago today, two men stood upon the surface of the moon.  For the first time in all of history, our species stood on another world.  To borrow a quote from Michael Chrichton:

If you were to say to a physicist in 1899 that in 1999, a hundred years later, moving images would be transmitted into homes all over the world from satellites in the sky; that bombs of unimaginable power would threaten the species; that antibiotics would abolish infectious disease but that disease would fight back… that humankind would travel to the moon, and then lose interest…if you said all this, the physicist would almost certainly pronounce you mad.

Was it just me, or did the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11 seem less like a celebration, and more like a wake?

A remembrance of glories passed away, never to return.

In the fifteenth century, giant Chinese fleets made up of hundreds of the largest, most technologically advanced ships on Earth roamed as far west as Africa, exploring all the lands along the Indian Ocean.  Then after 6 or 7 record shattering voyages, the ships were called home.  Burned at the order of a new Imperial Court uninterested in exploration beyond the limits of its own narrow vision.  The shipyards were destroyed, and sailing beyond China in multi-masted ships was declared a capital offense.  Imagine how different the world would be if the Chinese had continued to explore, rather than turning inward, saying ‘everything we want is better found here, at home’.

I sometimes wonder if the emotions of those Chinese explorers as they watched their ships burn were at all similar to mine about the six or seven voyages of Apollo.  We touched the sky, and then got bored.  I can’t think of a more damning indictment.  We got bored.

Fortunately for humanity, if not America, the Chinese are once again interested in expansion and exploration, and seem unlikely to repeat their mistake of 500 years ago.  This time, when they go, they will stay.  And we’ll be down here, looking up.

When your children ask you for the moon and the stars, what will you tell them?

—About the photo—

Unless you’ve been to my website, no, you haven’t seen that one before.  The two most famous Earthrise photos are from Apollos 8 & 11.  Both were taken in color, one a mere 30 seconds or so after this one.  This one was the first Earthrise ever seen or photographed by a human eye.  The mission tapes indicate that as the crew of Apollo 8 rounded the lunar farside, someone (opinions vary) happened to look out the window, and saw Earth rising beyond the lunar horizon.  The next words spoken were roughly “oh my god, quick, throw me a camera!”  Unfortunately, the first camera they found was loaded with black and white film, so the first Earthrise photo is black and white.  The more familiar one from Apollo 8 was taken about 30 seconds later, once they found the camera that had color film, and with Earth far higher above the horizon.  I’ve always loved the moody, emergent quality of this first-ever Earthrise.

Several years ago, I had an opportunity to collaborate on a series of large-scale exhibition prints of images from Apollo.  We arranged with NASA’s Johnson Space Center to have ultra-high resolution scans made of the original films, and then printed the retouched and enhanced versions 4 feet on a side.   The imaging office at NASA JSC was incredibly accommodating, and there’s now one helpful person there with a wall photo that no one else at NASA has.  I had the original B&W Earthrise scanned, along with the color one from a few seconds later.  Earth has moved relative to the moon, but the contours of the Earth itself are unchanged, so I used the color data from the second image to add color back into the image of the Earth in the first image.  The moon itself is ash-can grey regardless, so no color was added there.  The Apollo images are stunning.  Looking at them, you’d think they were black and white, until you see the color of some human artifact, and realize the photo is actually in color.  It’s just the moon is totally grey, most of the time.  The bit of land you can see on Earth is the curve of western Africa.  Terrestrial North is off to the right.

About the stars:  the original images don’t show stars, because the camera exposures were too short for them to show up.  The stars visible in this image first appeared as very slight variations in the background black while I was doing the image enhancements.  I boosted them to full visibility from there.  They may be dust on the film, or the faint record of real stars, but whatever they are, they’re in the image data I received from NASA.

I have a framed copy of this image, four feet on a side, on the wall of my living room.

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I know the title of my next series of pieces.  I just have no idea what they look like.

A bit of background.  Surprisingly, I’m something of a geek.  I’ve always enjoyed the movie Blade Runner.  Borders just had a half off sale on all their blue-ray disks.  They happened to have the ‘Final Cut’ version of Blade Runner.  It’s a 5 disk blue-ray collection, that has “the final cut”, Ridley Scott’s “Absolute, final, ultimate, we-promise, no-more, revision” from 2007, along with the 1992 “Director’s cut” (the previous “final, last cut”), and both the international and American releases from 1982, along with the legendary “workprint” copy from 1982.  And two more disks of out-takes, alternates, deleted scenes, and commentary.  Hours of it.  The important thing is that they went back to the original negatives, and completely remastered it in hi-def.  There are some movies where high resolution is pointless.  And then there’s Blade Runner.

I showed it to my friends at movie night last week.  It was so sharp and crisp it stunned them into silence.  It may have looked this good 27 years ago in  the first week on the big screen, but I guarantee it hasn’t looked this good since.

None of this really matters, except by way of explaining where my head’s been for the past week or so.  (watching the various different versions, along with the explanations, and outtakes.)

At the end, there’s the scene where the last replicant is sitting on a roof, talking to Deckard (Harrison Ford’s character) while the replicant slowly dies.  (They have a built-in 4 year lifespan.  His time was up.)  It’s pouring rain, and the replicant says:

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.  Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.  I watched cee beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser Gate.  All of those moments, all of those memories, will be lost in time…  Like tears in the rain.

It’s one hell of an image, and he’s right.  When we die, all of the things we’ve seen and experienced, all that we’ve been and done, just…. go.

How do you save some little fragments of a life?  Maybe if I were a painter or a writer, I’d have an easy answer, but I’m not.  I’m a metalsmith.  I make small pieces of wearable metal.  How do you encapsulate a moment?  I have some ideas, but I suspect this is something that’s going to have to percolate for a while.

The next series will be called “Tears in the Rain”.  A series of experiments trying to figure out how to capture a moment of life.

Now if only I had some idea what they looked like…  It’s much easier coming up with the concept than it is figuring out how to execute it in a tangible form.

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An interesting point came up in class last week.  In various of my recent blog posts, I’ve made comments about silversmithing and jewelry skills that can’t be learned from books, they have to be passed along through physical repetition and training.

Lest someone mistake me for an anti-intellectual, I’ve got more books on metalsmithing and jewelry than anybody I know.  (and I read them too.)  Hundreds of them.  I’m a sucker for new books.  I figure there’s always some tidbit I didn’t know, or picture I haven’t seen.

The point here is that what does it say when the guy with all the books is the one saying you can’t learn it all from books?

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