Next on Craft In America. I don’t live by the Grand Canyon, I have
to find my beauty where I live. There’s a lot to be angry about in this
world. I deal with it by making art. For a lot of people, the closest connection
they have to nature is a piece of wood in their home environment. My work is a direct reflection of the landscape
in which I live. It’s a raw, naked, truthful landscape. Sweeping pastoral vistas. The refuse of city streets. The limbs of a particular tree. The headlines of the morning paper. Artists look to the world around them for
inspiration. How does landscape influence the act of creation? And how do artists translate this influence
into a landscape shaped by their own hands? I think we’re the only animal that seems
to need to ornament ourselves. We seem to need to put things on us, and some
of us need to make things that get put on us. I was drawn to Philadelphia because it was
a old, industrial city with a lot of history. I like the landscape. I like the vistas. I think it’s beautiful even in its decayed
state. It offers daily visual complexity, which I
guess I feed on that. It’s a buffet, it’s a visual buffet for
a visual thinker. This field has been a design laboratory in the middle of a very busy city. These plants will be in the tiara that I’m
creating, called a tiara of useful knowledge. The American Philosophical Society, which
is one of the first institutions in Philadelphia, wanted to promote useful knowledge. That concept of knowing what may be important
in the future, really resonated with me. This is the milkweed plant. The sap is a very sticky substance, that is
useful for adhesive. Bumblebees. I’ve started paying attention to grasses. Switch grass could be used for automotive
fuel. Look at these wonderful things. Some people consider these weeds, the worst
weeds in the world, but I think they’re beautiful. By drawing this leaf, I’m looking at it
very closely, and I’m getting an understanding of the forms. The connections of the leaf to the stem is
always a surprise to me. By looking closely at nature, I have the best
teacher possible. I’m separating each of these leaves. I’ll glue them onto a sheet of silver. I’m gonna some more glue on there, it dries
pretty quickly. I studied art at Western Michigan University,
and one professor suggested, “why don’t you start drawing with a saw, why don’t
you bring your art into your metal?” This stack of drawers is a glimpse of the
journey that I’ve been on as an artist from the early 70s to last week. This was work that I did in the early 1980s. All of these have one rock in the necklace. People started sending me rocks from absolutely
everywhere. This was my first clue at the power of nature. Now I’m going to go to the rolling mill. This is kind of like a printer’s press. Now it’s left a very subtle impression of
the veining. I just have to get the glue and the actual
leaf off, then you have a nice piece of silver that is an echo of the leaf. For about seven years, I produced a fair amount
of volume, and I was getting some coverage in the fashion magazines. Then at a certain point, I decided I needed
to stop, and refuel, and begin thinking about a new body of work. That's when I started a huge amount of research on the history of jewelry. Seeing how it was expressed in different countries and different time periods. Whether it was just a simple floral wreath,
or a skin marking, it has always been with us. I need to look at my color photocopy because
I’m not sure exactly where that stem comes in. Let’s see. Yeah. Soldering, this is the cool part. You have two separate pieces of metal, and
by adding a piece of metal with a lower temperature, you join them. I’ve done all this research, then I decided
I needed to do work that was authentic. It had to be of its place, of its time. So I thought, okay, now I’m going to narrow
it down and it’s got to be within a block of my studio. It’s going to be somewhere within this block. It has to be here, if it’s not here, it’s
not real. Is it tire treads, is it sidewalks, is it
pigeons? What am I going to use, what am I gonna use? I live in a neighborhood with a lot of problems,
so I thought I had to look at that. And then I realized, here it is, it’s always
at my door, every morning when I come in, I find a few laying there, these little plastic
containers for crack cocaine. About that time, I had found a really beautiful
bone necklace. It’s about a thousand years old. It was made by a Native American. The person had the dinner, and carved it and
made an ornament. So, it was a common readily available material. The one that was my common readily available
material were the crack vials. These pieces are the plastic caps of the crack
vials, cast into gold. As I started doing this work, people started
responding to it. Some people are troubled by it, but I have
to bring these issues up, and it’s not going to please everyone. The survey for City Flotsam could get a little depressing, it’s tough stuff. And I asked, what’s beautiful here, I don’t
live by the Grand Canyon, I have to find my beauty where I live. So that’s when I started to look at the
weeds across the way from the studio. So much of my work is the balance of man and
nature, how much we rely upon the plants around us. I'm still in the process of working on the Tiara of Useful Knowledge. I think that making things with your hands
is a human core instinct, a really important part of us. And I think if we pay attention to the tactile
power used in craft, we will come to realize those are probably the best and the purest
values to have. One of the most wonderful things about clay
is you make a three-dimensional object. It’s an actual, tangible thing. I like that solidity in the fact that you
can form these things from your mind. Occasionally, your hands almost feel like
they’re singing, they’ll work in tune with the clay and it takes on a life of its
own without thought. And when that happens it’s almost magical. I’m still playing. You’re not supposed to really be playing
and enjoying yourself so much when you’re 47 years old, but I do. I just enjoy manipulating the clay, and making
these little people and worlds. This is going to be the eyelids. The first time I worked with clay was one
year it had rained a lot, and a hillside had slipped away, and so we saw some clay. My father and I dug it out, and I brought
a bucket of it home. And the first thing I made was a Buddha. And I made surrealistic houses, little fantasy places. My mother’s friends would come over
and buy my pottery, and so that is what got me started. I’ve always been drawn to Mexican pottery,
and Mexican culture. And when I started doing clay, I started doing
trees of life. In Mexico, they were made for weddings. And it was mostly trees of life with Adam
and Eve symbols. And so they would decorate the church with
these. They have their roots in the earth and they’re
reaching up to heaven, so it also shows man’s quest for spirituality in our lives. I feel like all of the nature that’s left
is like the remnants of the tree of life, and we have to appreciate all of it and be grateful for all of it. There’s so many landscapes and so much variety
just in the ten miles from here. I have almost an inexhaustible source of inspiration. The dunes here stretch for about 22 miles,
all the way to the Grand Dune, which is the highest dune on the West Coast. What I especially like about the dunes is
the solitude, I just feel free to wander without a direction. I’ll find a nice hill and meditate there. This is the lupine bush that grows all over
the sand dunes and has flowers that are from purple to white. You can’t compete with nature. You can just try to reflect it and be a part
of it. I, I can’t capture the bird songs in my
pottery. And the sound of the wind, your feet on the
sand. I, I personally don’t think that any artwork
is as beautiful as nature. I can’t do that on a tile. It’s just too infinite. I use under glazes, which are painted on the
green ware, this is pieces that haven’t been fired, it’s just the dried clay. Then I fire those one time and then put a
clear glaze over that, so it’s fired twice. It comes out of the kiln looking like water
on stone. I can remember as a child, coming to Tijuana. You’d see color everywhere, whereas the
culture I came from, people were reticent. So, I use hundreds of colors. The rabbit has gotten here ahead of me. It’s starting to eat the carrots. LAUGHS I’ve been beaten to my crop. I can grow trees from seeds and cuttings in
my yard, but with the trees of life, I can create my own tree. I’ve just sort of gone off from the Mexican
version and added on my own images. This one’s the California burning oak tree of life, because oak trees need fire, so there’s flames and
this represents the water, and then the Chumash symbol for the sun. This is an Adam and Eve tree of life. And here’s the serpent right here. This is the forbidden fruit, it’s broken
open, so it’s just waiting for you to take a taste. I think that if you follow your bliss, if
you follow the things that truly inspire you, it will lead you to a good place. Craft is not always an individual pursuit. Built during the depths of the Great Depression,
Timberline Lodge is the result of contributions from scores of artists. It is a prime example of how craft draws inspiration
from the landscape and can become part of the landscape as well. Timberline Lodge stands today as a national
landmark. But it was borne out of a very basic need:
people wanted a place to ski. I was a skier, of course I had learned to
ski in Montana, 1923, and so I was a pretty, pretty early skier. We used to climb up the trails to Mount Hood,
ski back down, and sometimes we’d do that twice in a day. The Depression came along and President Roosevelt
started the Works Progress Administration. The WPA put people to work building highways,
building tunnels, whatever had to be done. B.J. Griffith was the administrator, and he decided,
well wouldn’t it be a great idea to build a ski lodge, and build it by hand. Well the workers were brought up on a rotation
basis for the WPA. To sign up for relief work, they lost some
of their pride doing it, but that’s what they had to do. They worked all during that winter, in the
snowstorms and the bad weather. The point was to put people to work during
the Great Depression, not only carpenters and stonemasons and engineers, but also craftspeople,
artists as well. They were just as much out of work as everybody
else. Marjorie Hoffman Smith was hired to become
the decorator, and she came up with idea of flora and fauna, pioneer, Indian, Native American
designs, and sort of bringing the outdoors inside. They felt they needed a woman’s advice on
certain interior details, which I think they did. At one time I had as many as 200 people on
my art project. Everything we did was made for use. We didn’t blueprint it. We didn’t have time to, we had people on
relief and we had to keep them busy. We had a few very fine artists. God, I can’t believe that they’re still
here. It brings back memories, some very precious
memories. Marjorie Hoffman Smith commissioned me to
do these panels. They are incised linoleum, colored with various
layers of varnishes. The subject is outdoor camping, in a rather
light-hearted way. I like to do these touches of animals and
creatures who were involved in this, this little guy. There will never be anything like it again,
but I can’t really believe that I’m still here to see it. Timberline Lodge is a national historic landmark. Not only the structure of the lodge, but also
all the furniture and the textiles, all contribute to the historic qualities in the lodge. We consider the arts and crafts just as important
as the stone and the wood and the rock. The restoration began in 1975 with the idea
of replicating the original textiles. Marjorie Hoffman Smith kept all of her watercolor
records. And from those records and black and white
photographs, we figured we could recreate them. We have a little bit of freedom, and craftsmen
like that little bit of freedom, but they're close replicas. Okay, one done. The WPA was sort of a moment in history. The proudest part that I see in all these
years of me doing restoration is that we're the link between those generations. These rooms have been restored in the spirit
of the original. Rawhide lampshade covers, applique textiles. This ongoing restoration’s caused the revival
of a lot of crafts, including, and maybe most especially, in blacksmithing. I’m making a ram’s head fire poker. There aren’t many pieces of iron work in
the lodge, that we haven’t duplicated at least once the hanging lamps hand rails up and down the staircase a lot of the door hardware President Roosevelt came to dedicate the lodge,
on September 28th, 1937. It was a beautiful, beautiful day, and he
looked out, you know, with a great big smile to everyone. He said: Here I am, on the slopes of Mount Hood, where
I’ve always wanted to come. [APPLAUSE] I am here to dedicate Timberline
Lodge. And I do so as a monument to the skill and
faithful performance of workers on the roles of the Works Progress Administration. [APPLAUSE] Times have gone past us pretty much now, but
this will remain as a, as a memento of that wonderful period, when it was still green,
there was still trout in the streams. And it will be certainly a sacred place for
the 20th century. It’s like a cathedral of cactus out there. Saguaros that are the sentinels of the Sonora. It’s a raw, naked place, that speaks of
the truth. It’s a truthful landscape. My work is equally as honest, because it’s
a direct reflection on the landscape in which I live. I try to draw a truthful line, from the desert
right into my heart and right out my engraver. My parents owned a dude ranch from 1946 to
1960. And people from the East would come out and
rope and ride and swim and be part of the desert. So it was quite a great place to grow up. It was a perfect childhood. I remember having a little toy with some scrolly
kind of engraving on it, and just being fascinated by that, by the intricacy of it. So, I’m still fascinated by that. I’m a child that just got older. The key to all the work is the drawing underneath
it. It’s the real estate under all the jewelry. Forty foot saguaros. Thirty thousand foot clouds. All on this three-inch piece of paper. Then I’ll transfer it to the metal, then
I will engrave those lines that I’ve traced through. I have included Western motifs in my work
because I live in that landscape, in that lifestyle but I’m by no means just a Western
artist. During my high school years I was introduced to the psychedelic posters of the 60s, with all the melting lettering that morphed into
people and guitars. I could see that line work coming into my
drawings. I started engraving at the University of Oregon, Eugene. It was very disciplined, A very hard thing
for me to do, a young man, to buckle down and study that, but I was intrigued by it. So I’ll gently heat the piece. Lock this in tight so it won’t move when I’m engraving it. Engravers ball over here, which is basically
a sophisticated rotating vice, but the tools on this bench haven’t changed in four or
five hundred years. Except for the pneumatic engraver. When you’re finally down to the point of
the engraver, then you’re at the razor-sharp decision making. The resistance pushing the engraver allows
you to control your line better. I get a lot of inspiration from the Art Nouveau. This was a style that was prominent at the turn of the century, but it evolved out
of the classical scroll. This would be the classical scroll. That scroll is always even. Art Nouveau took that and just made it a little more fun. They’d start with that curve, but as you
come in, you kinda kick it back, and then vary the line weight… thin… thick… thin. So it makes some dynamics in that curve. I like to leave about a third of a millimeter
outside my engraved line cause it forms a strong silhouette. You basically have three lines determining
the shape. And I picked that up from the Art Nouveau
posters of Alphonse Mucha’s famous ladies with all their hair and the way he outlined
them. That triple line really helps give the shapes a lot of power. I think I gravitated toward the medium of
jewelry because you get to control your own little world and you’re creating this fine
object that people can appreciate. I love working with skeleton themes, so I
do this, a loose version, my version of a Day of the Dead theme, Mexican tradition of
honoring the memories of loved ones who’ve passed and they poke fun at death. Let’s live now. That’s what it’s all about. These bracelets have the special message on
the inside. Affirmations of positivity to wear against
your skin. “The treasure lies within ye,” which was
the cool thing about the pirate in all of us. It’s good to feel free, on whatever ocean
you’re cruising on. My sculpture is completely different thing
than working in the jewelry because I’m working with found objects. I’ve amassed about 35 tons of stuff in my
yard. I call it the Library of Visual Solutions
cause that’s exactly what it is. All the sculpture I do, I choose from this
library of shape. Look at the implied primitive face. These are picks. Now it starts to look like a ribcage. This, I’ll just give it a new life into sculpture, parts or whole pieces. This is my best piece so far. It’s all made out of Caterpillar tractor
parts. I think I’ll keep it. The distinction between art and craft is so
close because you have to know your medium well enough to express your heart to make
art. Well we finally got the finished brooch, and
I’ve set it with this nice piece of green Curacao Lake turquoise, like spring in the
desert. I’ve done the saguaro with the 18 karat green,
the other saguaro in the cliff in the 18 karat pink gold. I made that over the sterling thunderheads. The Sonoran Desert at dusk. This is truly a peaceful place, and truly
paradise. I can crank out that intense work because
I’ve got the contrast of this beautiful peaceful place that sustains my spirit. I’ve got a lot to do here. There’s a spirit in trees that’s very deep, and in order to produce a fine piece of furniture, the spirit of the tree
lives on. And I can give it a second life. Because I can make an object that lives, and
can live forever, possibly. Dad really believed that there are spirits
in the wood that enhance people’s lives, and not everybody can live in the woods, but
they can live with wood, and stay connected to nature and to the divine in that way. George Nakashima is one of the formative designers
of the 20th Century. He was influenced by traditional Japanese
design, by American Shaker design, and country design. So there are influences, but he took these
things and combine them in a way that nobody had ever done before. Well, I guess my dad was primary mentor, although
when I grew up with him, I didn’t think he was anything but Dad, or that he was doing
anything unusual that dads didn’t do. I was born in Spokane, Washington. I’ve lived almost every place else, such
as France, and Japan. And then India. His first training at University of Washington
was in forestry, and after two years he switched to architecture. In 1940 my father made up his mind that he
would do furniture because he could control the process from the beginning to the end. To this day, it’s probably a little more
control than we need to have, cause we actually go out and look at trees. These are all ours? Yeah, these are all your trees. I’m looking forward to cutting them. Sort of. LAUGHS We actually decide right on site how we’re
going to cut them. And, it’s amazing, cause you never know
what’s going to be inside there till you get there. Dad used to take me along to the lumber yard,
and he’d say, “well, when you cut a tree, it’s like cutting diamonds, and we’ll
cut it this way, because the grain’s more beautiful that way.” Wow. Oh wow, look at that. Beautiful. I was in Tokyo, and I met a young lady there and we returned to this country, and we became married. And then war broke out, Pearl Harbor. And one of the results was that we were put into concentration camps about which most Americans didn’t know anything. In the camp, Dad would teach this fellow wood
worker how to design things and the fellow would teach him how to make things, so they
developed inventive ways of using the old Army cots and scrap material. I still have a toy box that he made from me
when I was in camp. Art has to be beautiful. Craft implies, in my father’s definition,
that it should be something that’s practical and useful in life. When Dad first had his show at the American
Craft Museum, it was the first time it was exhibited as if it were works of art. Up until then, it had just been furniture. George is really identified with the concept
of the naturalistic top, laid on top of a very architectural base. It’s both natural and man-made simultaneously. Yeah, I worked with George for 17 years or
so. One of the approaches that George took was
looking for the soul of the tree, means that the woodworker has to not impose his own thoughts
on the tree. The tree is given chance to come forth with
its story, and in that dialogue, convey something to the woodworker. I was pretty much the understudy. He never told me the way to do things, he
would just change a line, wouldn’t tell me why he changed the line. And I can’t count the number of times I
was fired, while dad was alive. It was very good discipline. In 1984, he came across an enormous walnut
log. And he had this dream to make peace altars
for each of the continents of the world. Yeah, that's good. Pretty flat. No twist. No twist. He thought if people had an altar where they
could resolve their differences, that we would be that much closer to world peace. He made the first altar, which was installed
at the Cathedral St. John the Divine in 1986. He was trying to negotiate sending a peace
altar to Russia when he passed away in 1990. The reason we built the shed is that when Dad
passed away, there was a huge stack of lumber sitting out in the rain, and we didn’t had nowhere to put it. So I thought momentarily of maybe selling
it at that point. And then we thought, well you know, that’s
Dad’s last legacy. After the log is cut, it has to air dry for
at least a year to two years, just to stabilize itself. Once they’re dried, I'll select them for each
particular job that we do, and it’s a long process. Mira Nakashima is really the only true heir
to the Nakashima legacy. Mira is now functioning in exactly the same
way that George did… making decisions about how to cut the board… where to put the legs,
where to put the butterflies. She’s the only person who’s designing
in the Nakashima style. Her work is somewhat different than her father’s work. What that means really is the pieces that
are coming out of the studio today are Mira Nakashima pieces. I just sort of picked up the pieces where
Dad let them fall, and have tried to continue his tradition and explore it a little further. In India they believe that beauty is man’s
connection to the Divine. Dad’s whole operation here has been, he
called it his Karma Yoga, his way of being, which is a form of meditation. Some people get it, some people don’t. But I hope that that tradition can continue
somehow because it’s very meaningful, it’s very important in our world today. And if we end up with something that pleases
us, and pleases others, we feel that the destiny of a piece of wood has been fulfilled. Human history is filled with follies. And we keep repeating the same damn mistakes
over and over again. We don’t even wait for a generation to pass
sometimes before we launch into a new mistake. There’s a lot to be angry about in this
world. There are many ways to deal with that anger. I deal with it by making art. There’s a rich and terrific history of artists
protesting war. I feel privileged to be a part of that. I’m often asked why I make teapots. I use a teapot only metaphorically, really. I’m more interested in conveying ideas than
I am tea. In 1980 I first came to Montana. I loved the expansive landscape, but I don’t
know that the landscape really affects the work that I’m working out of a political
landscape, really. I’m getting good reduction. I’ve reduced the oxygen level in the kiln. The flames just come jumping out because they’re
literally seeking oxygen. I’m just putting a little more gas in so
it’ll fire a little quicker. I do about a four-day firing cycle. Drives my wife crazy, you know, I get up every
two hours to check the kiln. I was born in Chicago, shortly after World
War II. I’ve always made things by hand. When I was a kid, I was constantly making
models. My father was an immigration lawyer. We had many gifts from Chinese clients in
our house, and so from a very early age I became very fascinated with the intricate,
with detail, with very tight, meticulous carving. When I was a kid, I remember seeing the very stark
footage of the discovery of the concentration camps. the piles of bodies. It had a very, very strong impact on my life. I’m carving ears. There are two different clays that I layer,
so that what I get in the end is, is something that looks very much like sedimentary rock. It’s part of this on-going project that
I call The Legacy Project. It consists of a pile of ears. The pile keeps changing. And there’s so many different layers of
meaning. You know, the fact that ears have long been
used as a way of counting the dead in war. The other thing about the pile of ears is
I was very much trying to recapture the sense of the pile of shoes, after the Holocaust,
the remains of people that are gone. So they’re ears that are stone deaf. They’re not learning the lessons that are
all around us. You know, I work from a place, and it’s
deep inside me, that, that I’m very passionately angry about. I’m pissed off that there are nuclear weapons,
you know. If an artist can’t say what they really
feel in their art, you know, what the hell is the point? The vessel is really the primary canvas of
ceramics, and the teapot is the most complex of vessels. You can really play with a lot of images,
and juxtapose a lot of different images to build a narrative, urban destruction from
World War II becomes a tea pot. This is the handle… the lid right here,
just kind of lifts out. And this rubble creates a vessel, which connects
with this kind of tilted, broken chimney, which becomes a spout. The teapot was literally invented in Yu Shing
China, about 1500 A.D. Suddenly there was an explosion of creativity. All different forms, from segmented forms,
to natural forms, to geometric forms. I’m inspired by these pots, I’m inspired
by the craftsmanship, the finesse of line, the compositions. But, while I imitate the pots in a technical,
and sometimes aesthetic sense, I’m not making Yu Shing pots. I’m trying to make pots that have a separate
cultural identity, that speak of my times, my country, my concerns. These are going to be for clay tiles, in framed
edition. Press molding is kinda like print making,
really, in ceramic. I like the hand nature of this process. There are ways of mechanically doing this,
where they come out perfect, and they’d be much quicker to produce, but I’d lose
a little bit of that handmade quality. You know, when I was in graduate school, there
was sort of a disdain for craftsmanship, kind of challenging the status quo at the time. People said my work was too small, tight and
precious, and I took it as a compliment. There was a Chinese master who once said that
to make art, you develop an infallible technique, and then place yourself at the mercy of inspiration. And I like that. You know, a work of art can’t rest on technique
alone. There has to be a strong idea, a strong concept
behind that. Oh, a lot of cracking on this. There’s a high degree of loss with this technique. This is a pretty one. Our human species is very amazing. You know, we have these two potentials, between
creation and destruction. If all creative people stopped making art,
I really think we’d perish, as a species. I’m not going to make the ear that saves
the world. I’m not going to make the teapot that saves
the world, but you know, Gandhi said, you drop enough grains into the mightiest machine,
grains of sand, and you’ll stop that machine. So I figure, okay, this is my contribution
to man’s collective creativity. Working with our hands has always been with
us, and it will remain. I try to celebrate this beautiful earth, and
it never ceases to inspire me. You perfect your craft, and then you start
putting your voice into it and your line and your heart The real struggle, I think, is the creative
struggle. It’s got to come from within. You’re the only one who knows your passions. And it’s transferring that feeling to other
people so that they can understand the beauty of the divine.
