WHY: I like to work with my hands, and personally, I prefer to have things that are made by hand.
A Model for a chair made by the Eameses
I don't like the fact that these days, most objects are designed on a computer and then made by robots or on an assembly line. There is a kind of an emptiness in this.
To avoid it, I try to choose things that someone definitely touched, re-worked and thought about. Objects, houses, gardens that have been treated this way have a quality or presence that can be felt even after the maker is gone.
So I have a kind of superstition about hand made objects and places themselves having spirits.
Well designed mass production is great. It's makes the world livable. And the designer's presence can be felt in the best stuff, like Eames chairs or Noguchi lamps.
But it is not the same as things they made with their own hands.
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BIO: I'M FROM NEW HAVEN. I was a carpenter for a while after getting kicked out of the Putney School in Vermont.
This is a double landing staircase I put into an 1840's laborer's house with 7 foot ceilings. This is the view from the kitchen.
This is the view from the living room with the stairs to the basement I put in underneath. I had to try to match the weird vernacular, and to cut away a lot of the floor from the room above to provide adequate headroom for people descending the stairs.
I went to three art schools in New York: The Studio School, SVA, The MFA Program at Hunter College.
The old Hunter MFA building in the 90's. I made tiles for the Double Happiness in the ceramic studio there.
To make money, I was a bar designer and owner in lower Manhattan: Orchard Bar, Double Happiness, Wyanoka, Palais Royale. My partners and I eventually sold them all.
The entrance to Double Happiness, 173 Mott St. The entrance to Wyanoka, which was separate, but connected to DH by an internal staircase, was to the left of the "Indian Head."
In school I was inclined towards post-structuralism, and conceptual art. I made dummies of myself, hid nearby, and moved the dummy like a puppet with remote control. I tried to engage people in conversation with the dummy. I also made terrariums as landscape paintings. I actually ended up using these to light Orchard Bar.
I also have a collaboration with painter Melinda Hackett called MDMH or Androgyneity Project. I make sculptures from her paintings and vice versa. So the work becomes a kind of hybrid. There is a different website for that.
This is shelf with small models from MDMH. The upper shelf has bronzes with black patina. The lower shelf has ceramics.
An IPhone picture of a Melinda Hackett drawing.
None the less, I've continued drawing and "sculpting" in the style of the studio school.
This site is about that.