Couranteer in the Works.

I’ve been working away on bags for the last few weeks, This Couranteer being one of the last few in this batch. I’m a about a week and a half’s worth of work in on this one. Once I get to this point it all comes together pretty quickly. Relatively speaking

As I work away I’m thinking about all that has changed with the way I make these. I dye all this leather by hand. It is a three day process that has to take place before I even start making anything out of it.

There isn’t really anyway to recycle leather. I can’t melt it down, or kneed it back into a mound and start again. Once I start cutting the leather down every step I take is one I’m committed to. If the knife slips a little while I’m cutting out the edge of the body of a bag I can’t call my customer and ask if it’s okay to deliver a Couranteer that’s 13.5” wide instead of 14”. If the knife slips I have to start over. Hopefully it’s early on in the process. Rather than a few weeks in.

The knife has slipped more times that I’d like to admit. When it happens there is a whole grieving process. At first I can’t believe it happened. Then I try to convince myself that it’s fixable. Finally comes acceptance and I start over.

Ten years in I’m cutting out the parts slower than I ever have. I’ve done this hundreds of times at this point. Yet still in my head I’m double checking every step I’m taking. I have an itemized list in front of me with each little step written out. I check it as I go. Like an anxious novice looking over a recipe.

The knife makes a cut following along a groove I’ve made to demarcate the borders of the body panel. This first pass with the knife makes the trench deeper. The next pass with the knife will make the trench deep enough to hold the knife to the line. The third cut will pass the knife all the way through the leather. Slowly. Slowly progress is made. One pass at a time.

It has become a mantra I recite to my students in class. Go slow. Pay attention to what your hands are doing. Get each step right. It all adds up. Go slow to go fast.

The body panels are cut out and I’ve moved on to the pockets and gussets that will make the sides of the bag. This is what I’ve done for weeks now. This level of concentration requires all other work to stop in the studio.

As I cut and shape I’m thinking about the future of these bags. Three different weights of leather. Hardware. Strap leather. The commitment to dyeing all that leather. The concentration required. Thousands of spent dollars sitting around me waiting to be made into a bag. This system works when I’m doing nothing but bag making. When I’m doing anything else it’s thousands of spent dollars sitting around not doing anything. Slowly drying out and becoming stiffer and harder to work with.

I honestly don’t know where the future lays with these. I’m proud of my designs. I’ve never had to be pushy with selling them because there really isn’t anything else out there quite like what I make, If you want a nice bag there are lots of options. If you want one like what I make there really aren’t.

At the same time they are so resource intensive that I can’t really experiment with them. In every other area of my practice I’m making progress. Advancing my style. These haven’t changed.

In these few weeks of bag making I’ve done little else. All my other work is on hold while I do them. It’s coming down to math between sticking with what’s comfortable and safe in the past and what holds promise and potential for the future. I wish I could do both but it is becoming increasingly obvious to me that I can’t. There aren’t enough hours.

On any other decision the math is easy. I move forward. It’s what I’ve always done. These are different. I use these bags every day. I get stopped on the street and asked about them. I still catch myself looking across to studio at the display models thinking “Damn. I made that.”

But to stay on that path means giving up the one that I’m headed down. I just don’t think I’m the kind of person that can stay in one place like that.

It would be nice to end this with a clean ending. I don’t have one though. As I work through this bag I’m working through what to do about them. Slowly. With patience. Committed to each step. Watching my hands, checking the plan, thinking of the finished picture, trying to not let the knife slip.

Some of my most recent work featuring some of my oldest work. Cyanotypes and toned cyanotypes.

In a box, in the rarely used closet, in the extra bedroom that has become the kid's den, there is a binder filled with negatives.

A few weeks ago I dug the binder out and started scanning its contents. All the photographs I'd taken going all the way back to the summer of 2001.

It is interesting the things which are significant to me in them now. The cars on the streets. The way people dressed. All this work I did, but never did anything with. I can remember how I felt taking them. It is a visceral feeling, looking off onto my old horizons. Forgotten and found in a box in the back of a closet.

I'm slowly scanning my way through the binder. Uploading them into the digital era. I don't know what I'm going to do with them yet. I love the idea of making something with these old negatives. It feels like picking up lost threads. Coming full circle to finish that which I wasn't able to finish back then.

As I sit here, scanner purring away, I'm thinking about how value changes over time. Maybe it is because I'm in my midlife crisis era, or because I've got a little distance from the gaping maw of Instagram, but I'm thinking about how temporary many of the artifacts we would leave behind are.

Having been promoting myself on Instagram for almost a decade a remarkable amount of my history is there. All it would take is a shift in ownership, or terms of service, and that would all be gone.

I've got backups, sure, but no one is going to find my old photo editing apps in the back of a closet.

Nostalgia can be dangerous, wishing for a return to a place that never was, but it can also be the roots that keep us from washing away in the stream of time.

As I load another strip of negatives into the carrier for scanning I'm thinking about the Spotify playlists that won't be thumbed through in the back of dusty record shops by future generations. The clothes we wear for a season and then discard not lining the rack of vintage shops. Our collective digital memories sitting in an abandoned server farms. All of these things we'd leave behind washed away in the current.

My latest Leather Like Pottery collection is coming out this Saturday. I continue to enjoy working in this form. The simple shapes allow for a lot of experimentation with dyeing and coloring this surface. This is the first time I’ve tried using leather paint on an item I’ve produced. At first I was worried the opaqueness of the paint wouldn’t work with the hand dyed nature of my work, but I think I found a way for it to all come together.

A Second Narrative

One hot day in the middle of a summer two decades ago I received my art degree in the mail. When it arrived I was either away at work, a bar job I got while in college, or was asleep, because I was in my twenties and worked at a bar. I didn't go to my graduation.

A few weeks prior I'd had my final critique with my photography professor and mentor. The meeting was supposed to be a review of the work I'd done during the independent study course I'd taken that year. What followed was a three hour meeting in which we didn't really talk about the art I'd made. Instead Masumi asked me what I was planning for my future and repeatedly told me "Go to grad school. Don't do anything else. Don't stop along the way. You need to go to grad school."

I had another important conversation that week. I told my boss that I loved working for him, loved my job, but even with all the hours I was working and all the cutting back I'd done I couldn't afford to pay my rent. I told him I wanted to keep working for him if he could help me figure out a way to stay. He made me a bartender.

So I didn't go to grad school. I became a bartender. I don't remember giving up on my dreams. I just took one little step away from them, one day at a time, each necessary.

At some point I convinced myself that this was what being a grown up was like. Art was something I used to do. It wasn't a career. Careers are serious, hard, and require sacrifice. So I sacrificed.

It took me ten years to reach my limit. Working at a restaurant when I was in my twenties felt exciting and adult. Working the same job in my thirties, when I wanted to own a house and start a family, felt different. I was tired of missing New Years, Mother's Day, Saturday nights, Sunday mornings. I'd had my head down for so long, taking one necessary step at a time, that when I finally looked up I realized I didn't know where I was going.

So I quit.

I started Wright & Rede. A place where I could be creative, but sell things. Serious things that people could use. Adult things. Not art. Practical things.

In doing so I had to learn social media. How to promote and market myself. I started documenting my work. Business stuff. Not art. I was selling a product.

But sometimes, when I had my camera out, the light would hit just right or I'd be driving my son home from preschool and we'd stop at a park. I'd bring my camera with me just in case there were some pictures I could take to help define my brand. Definitely not for making art.

Then another decade passed and now I'm making art. To be clear, I wasn't making art. I stopped, but now I was making art again. Which I wasn't doing before. Definitely.

And then.

Last night I was looking through all of those pictures. The ones I took because the light was nice. The ones I shot when I had my camera out. The ones to show my kids what I used to use when I made art.

There, hidden in with all the pictures I'd taken telling my narrative of Wright & Rede, was a second narrative. A story about a parent. Someone who stopped to watch the sunrise. Celebrated the bitter sweet moments of watching his children grow up. Knowing that these were moments we'd never be able to return to. Memories we were living in. Pictures where the light was just right, the composition was perfect, and it all came together with how it made me feel. When combined it made something more than the sum of its parts. Art.

I am an artist. I always have been.

Looking back now I can see an unbroken chain of pictures. Taken when my guard was down. When I thought they didn't matter. Just because. Capturing this fleeting feeling I have. To savor life, all the little quiet moments, because they are always slipping away and I can never have them back.

It has taken me twenty years to understand what Masumi was trying to tell me. Don't stop. Take it seriously. Take the next step, but in the right direction.

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Part two

Sowing Seeds in the Dark

How do you know when an idea has run its course?

For me it just fizzles out one day. The last set of images I made for this collection worked that way. As I took them from between the blotter sheets I was drying them between I could see the spark had gone out. I think I knew it while I was making them.

An idea runs it's course. They grow from little seeds, blossom, ripen, and then die off, hopefully leaving a few new seeds behind.

For now I'm done thinking about developing these images. When I started this project I had an idea of mostly white images with ghostly hints of leaves. What I ended up with was different and I think more satisfying.

I made a few pieces that have that ghostly quality.

What I really fell in love with was what happens when I toned them. You can't tell when you look at the images but the way the light hits the paper as it comes through the window makes a subtle gradient.

If I soak the paper in washing soda the image fades. The lightest areas going first. The darkest areas come along much slower. Its possible to pull the images out in the middle of this split. The highlights running away from the shadows. Suddenly the gradient is there.

A second exposure of blue over the top of this gradient brings out the potential of the idea. Two images, both faint and barely there, but combined to make something new.

They look like pastel drawings. Not cyanotypes.

I've done my best to photograph them but I already know they are going to be difficult to capture. They are very quiet images. Reflections of the time in which I made them.

It's midmorning on a quiet Sunday and I'm in my basement workshop coating paper. The neon yellow liquid pools in little gullies as I slowly brush it back and forth across the surface of the paper.

It is quiet. The kids are out and I've got the house to myself. The lights are off to keep the paper I'm coating with light sensitive chemistry from reacting while I'm still working on it.

This paper is a prayer. Cyanotypes require rich, warm, yellow sunlight. Something the winter grey skies of Cleveland haven't provided much of. I just want to make something. So I'm coating paper.

I am an evangelist of limitations. My best work comes from not having everything I want and having to figure out how to make the most of what I have.

What I have is the wan wash of light coming in through the glass block window over my workbench. So I ask myself what can I do to take advantage of this weak light.

In the bright light of summer sun a cyanotype will expose properly at around twenty minutes for me. Here in my basement, with my eyes fully adjusted to the dark, the light still looks dim. How long would it take to get enough light on the paper down here to make an image?

So as I pack the still drying paper into the old coal room, it's sole window covered to block outside light, I leave one sheet sitting out on my work bench. I set a few ginkgo leaves on it to see if I can capture anything.

The next morning I lift one of the leaves to see if the paper has started to change. Nothing. So I rearrange all of the leaves and leave it sitting out. I repeat the process the next morning and again every morning for the next week.

As I work I can see the faintest hints of where a leaf was sitting. Every time I move a leaf to a new spot the now uncovered paper begins to expose. Slowly erasing the memory of the leaf that once sat there. But it's slow. So slow. Three or four days after I moved the first set of leaves I can still make out a faint outline of where they sat on that first day.

When I finally wash the print, to see what the developed image will look like, two weeks have gone by. As the paper sinks down into the water I can see a cloud of inky blue lift away from its surface leaving almost nothing behind. But not quite nothing. A ghost of an image. Like a memory.

It occurs to me then that I've discovered something to explore. I thought I was working on an idea about making an image with very little light. What I realize is that I'm actually making an image with a great deal of time. Two full weeks of my life, the slow gentle days of winter, recorded on the surface of this paper.

My workbench is now covered in sheets of paper, quiescent as they turn first green then a tarnished navy. As the images slowly develop so does my understanding of this body of work.

I'm thinking about patience. The patience required to wait a few more days lest I wash it too early an end up with nothing. The patience of doing what I can with the light I have while I wait for brighter days. Being patient with my creativity, my ideas yowling in the corners of my mind, waiting to be let out.

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This work is also about longing. The images look like memories of what you'd see laying in the shade of a tree, looking up at the bright sun as it passes through the translucent green canopy above. A faded memory eroded by the colorless days of February.

I am developing the idea as I develop the pictures. Some of them I'm toning, turning the blue images to brown, and then coating them to expose again. Capturing more time. Building up layers of days and memories. Records of who I was when I started each image and all the days that came after.

Every morning I greet them, slowly ripening under the pale light of a single basement window. Throughout the day I have to resist the urge to sneak down there and prod the leaves. Busy work for idle hands as I try to adjust what doesn't need adjusting.

Patience.

These too will be ready in time.

I remember the smell of it the most. Growing up a child of antique dealers I spent a lot of time in barns. Cloistered stacks of mismatched chairs. Bent cardboard boxes of plates wrapped in newspaper. Glass and brass doorknobs bereft of station catching sunlight from dirty dormer windows.

There is a smell to it. Dust, yes, but also wet stone and old carpet and the buttery, aged smell of old paper. Minwax. Solvents. All bundled up in a smell that says old and surplus and sacred.

There is a bit of sacrilege in these spaces. Items of personal value, deprived of their person, and left to gather dust. As a child walking down the narrow aisles I felt towered over. Their previous owners looking down at me, telling me not to bump anything, to not touch.

I have a steamer trunk in my studio from one of those barns in my childhood. It holds oil, paper, mat board, and the beginnings of work that will someday exist as not just ideas in my head.

The inside of the trunk is still lined with the fabric it came with. A blue on white floral pattern that now serves as the substrate for a topographic map of stains, and patina. The warp and weft of time wrinkled fabric making mountain ranges across its surface.

There is magic here too. In this interplay between man made intention and the chaos of time and circumstance. The pattern on its own is interesting, but it is the intersection of it and the stains that have come to inhabit it that make it singular.

I think I look for this in my own work. The uneven distribution of dye when rubbed into the surface of leather. The estuaries and tidemarks of wet chemistry brushed on heavy paper. Opportunities for collaboration with chance to make something greater than I could have on my own. Work that speaks of my carefully patterned intention and the mottled and frayed edges of the life that brought me here. The humility of ideas tarnished by reality but the more beautiful for their imperfections.

A small bit of that childhood magic found in hushed and dusty spaces.

A year ago on a sleet colored day in January, I was standing in my studio watching from the window as cold wind made waves in the winter browned lawns outside, and I was feeling lost.

At that point I'd been in business for ten years. Ten years of craftsmanship. Ten years of subverting that by sneaking a little art in there. A few less than ten years of realizing that was what I was doing, and a few years less than even that of realizing that's what I should have been doing to begin with.

I could feel the path I'd planned out for the year slipping away beneath my feet. It wasn't a bad plan. I was going to do a ten year retrospective. I'd pare down all the good idea's of the past decade and make little collections featuring each of them.

Old ingredients make for bad dishes.

The problem was that the work that had gotten me there wasn't the work that was going to get me to where I needed to go. The long arc of progress doesn't bend you back around to where you started.

In February I gave up on that plan.

The next few months were about making messy, intuitive work and then seeing if I could reign it back in. I didn't allow bad ideas. If I made something weird, ugly, or too far out from the work I was comfortable in making, I forced myself to finish it. It worked. Mistakes became seeds. Seed grew into ideas.

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I messed up a lot. I remember a particularly bad day when I accidentally cemented a leather tray to the wooden form I'd used to shape it. I gave up on the piece and tried to at least rescue the form, and in doing so cut a big gouge out of the wood, ruining the form.

At the same time I was churring out cyanotypes. From from the moment the midwestern sun finally peeked out in May through the deep red embers of October I made more work in a season than I have since college. My plan was to make a lot of work. I didn't care if it was good work. Just to make work and see what happened. I came up with three big concepts for collections that summer. None of them made it to fruition.

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I taught myself how to make leather bowls. The first bowl I made was a beauty. The next six months of bowls never lived up to that first one. All of them marked with lessons about what not to do along the way. Patience they whispered at me. This is an old art. Go slower.

By September I was sitting in my studio making beautiful bowls, trying not to think about how I didn't know what people would use them for. I wasn't making standard brown wallets. I'd stopped talking about the satchels and briefcases I'd spent years developing. You can't even eat out of them, these bowls.

In October I decided that the bowls were used to hold a person's memories. Memories of the person they were when they got it, and dreams of the person they're going to become. I haven't told anyone that until now. But it's what I think about when I watch people pick them up, feeling them to see if it's the right container for all that they were and all that they will be.

In November I poked my head out from the teetering stacks of images I'd made and realized I'd nothing to show for it. A bunch of half finished ideas. In the waning days of November I made one last collection. An entire body of work in just one week. It was about uncertainty, and anxiety, and the chaos of being a parent, and worrying about the future, and interruptions, and changing plans, and all the noise and static and frustrations, and in all that mess finding something beautiful. Something beautiful not despite all the chaos around it, but because of it. I think it's the best work I've ever made.

In December I broke records. I brought my work out into the world for people to pick up and see in person. They all picked up the bowls. No one asked what they were for. They took them home. The weird funky trays went too. The cyanotypes went faster than anything else. I tried not to get tongue tied trying to explain that I had made them too. That both types of art were mine. That I was allowed to make them. That I was sorry they couldn't eat them, or seek shelter under them, or anything practical.

I just smiled. They made me feel something when I made them.

On my table there was quite literally no room for all the work I'd made in the past ten years. I didn't bring any bags to show people. I didn't have my standard brown line up of practical goods. Yet still. I broke records.

Now it is January again. It is still grey. The wind is picking up. I'm still looking out the window. But I am not the same person. Armed with uncertainty and the knowledge that what I'm doing is of value I'm heading out on a new path.

The driveway is a composite of crushed snow and rusty nails waiting for my tires.

It's been a long week. A week of grumpy roofers, who I did not ask to replace my roof in the snow in January, but who are replacing my roof, in the snow, in January.

She is an old house. She is loving and warm, though her joints ache more than they used to when the weather turns cold. I did not give her this old roof. For the decade I've lived under her she has kept me more dry than worried. But age finds cracks in time.

October's is-that-a-weird-shadow, turns into a that-definitely-wasn't-there-before spot, to hand wringing quick patches, to an cacophony of leaf blower wielding roofers hammering their lamentations into the downy fluff of January.

I did not ask my roof to leak. I did not ask the roofer's to come in the cold and the snow. Yet here we are.

But even in this there is magic. As I stand in the mocking snow my eyes fall on a new, dry roof. The labor for this roof paid for with labor of my own.

My job is a form of magic. I have dreams and ideas, electrons bouncing around in my head, which I take out and put form to. My half remembered childhood creek beds, transmute into the pungent ammonia/grass froth of a living indigo vat staining leather an inky blue. Which then gets molded into an object of art a weary traveler might rest their tired keys in, and for a moment think of the beach, or rain, or who they were when they bought it, filled with a little spark of half remembered childhoods of their own.

From one form to another, those electrons hop, passing from my mind, to the hands of another, to eventually the roof over my head, born from a dream I had once while I slept under it.

While I could stand here seeing the frustration, the cost, the worry of this roof, I instead make a choice. I choose to see magic. When I walk from the garage to the house I look up at my dreams made manifest, covered in a light dusting of snow.

In this too there is magic.

It starts out grey and wet. A fall morning in what should be winter. As the day sloughs off its hours the air becomes visible. It is forty five degrees out, but it's that wet cold that gets into your bones which is somehow colder than the dry air of winter.

The day is a Wednesday, but it doesn't really matter. We are in that border time between Christmas and New Year's when the kids are home, the morning is slept past, and things get done in their own time.

The fog has become a presence outside the window. The kind that makes you want to go outside and stand in it just to feel what it's like when it touches your skin. I decide it's time for a walk so we bundle into several layers of not too warm clothes. Enough to keep the wet out but let the air in.

The woods we walk in are old but manmade. A nod to the nature that stood here once. Yet the trees are tall and wet, making their own rain in big fat drops that plunk down on duff below.

The three of us together are all in our own worlds. I'm ambling along listening to the air, the closeness of a train going by, my eyes scanning the tree branches for a hawk or an eagle to impress the kids with. Drinking in the empty space that is so often occupied by the motion and noise of parenting. My daughter, the youngest, is running ahead. Loud and animated, she wants to show us all the spots she explored during her summer camp here. For once to be the one with experience and secret knowledge. My son walks between the two of us. Shifting back and forth between the child he still is and the adult he will become. Sometimes he runs ahead with his sister, joining in the commotion. Sometimes he lags behind, thoughtful and observing. Serious for someone just days past his ninth birthday. As I look at him I can see hints of the man he will become. Fascinated by the world around him. I hope he remembers days like this. To buoy him when the world gets heavy. If I can give him anything it is these moments.

It's hard to keep them in this world. My daughter's legs begin to tire with her emotions. Soon we aren't going fast enough, or too slow, or not looking at the right things, or her brother is too far ahead and not waiting for her. I stop and ask her what she can smell right now. Then what she can feel touching her skin. With that I've brought her back in among the trees.

As we walk my attention is split. I'm watching for wet rocks and issuing warnings about leaning too far over to look at the running water. I'm also thinking about this border time between holidays when not much gets done. I'm well acquainted with the space between times. The expanse of responsibilities required in parenting is populated by long stretches of time where you can't do whatever you want but you have to do something. Time spent between being who you want to be and who you need to be.

Like the undefining fog we walk in, this place in time is unfocused. We walk until we feel done. When our hands become wet and cold we head back into the dry warmth of home.

In its lack of definition the fog has given rise to a quiet magic. A place where the trees foreboding loom, headlights glow in fuzzy yellow orbs, and the calls of excited children get mixed in with the cries of birds. In this undefined time we get a chance to shed our outlines and be just a little bit of nothing at all. It is here in this place that I leave memories for my children to find when they are lost on their way to defining who they will become. A quiet magic, made on an indistinct Wednesday that could have not mattered that much at all.

It snowed last night. I woke up to a wet pack of snow two inches deep. When it came down it brought most of the fall leaves with it.

It was a little sad. Bittersweet. I sat there looking out the window thinking about how soon I won't be able to hear the wind in the leaves anymore. Just the dry whistle of winter wind in the bare branches.

With the leaves buried under snow and the grey skies of Cleveland winter it will be time soon to put away to cyanotype materials. Any ambitions will have to rest until spring brings reliable sunshine back.

This could be a source of frustration, but I enjoy it. The second half of fall is like watching a friend pack their moving boxes. Every moment is savored, recorded, stored away.

For an anxious person like myself it's a chance to enjoy what is around me. I spend so much time living in the future in my head getting to stop and take a moment to smell the wet leaves is a respite to my running thoughts.

I think this is part of the reason why I make the work that I do. Good art is about saying the things we don't have words for yet. My cyanotypes are recordings of that fleeting moment when chance, and weather, and time, and personality come together and make something beautiful that will soon pass. Quiet magic gleaned from the edges of suburban lawns.

The direction my cyanotype work has been going.

I started out doing very minimal and classic images. Leaves on blue backgrounds. As I’ve gotten my feet under me over the past couple of years I’ve started to feel the need to branch out.

I still love those simple leaf pictures, but I also feel like a lot of people are already doing that well. I wanted to say something a little different with my work.

It’s so hard to set out in a different direction and not end up making work that is different for the sake of being different.

I think I’ve found some fertile ground here. My new work is created using simple geometric shapes cut from paper of varying opacity. This causes the chemistry under them to expose to sunlight at different speeds, resulting in different shades of blue. When I take it a step further and bleach and tone the cyanotype I’m able to further separate those differences. Some levels of blue will turn brown while others are left blue.

For example in the above image those blue shadows that outline the shapes can’t be seen in the original before I toned it. I pulled the paper from the bleach before that part faded. So they stayed blue when I toned them.

I also like how I’m creating meaning and interest from some otherwise meaningless bits of paper. As I look more at the work I’m making I’m starting to see landscapes and smoke covered suns. There is something there considering I was making these under a haze of wildfire smoke.

Behold the gnarliest piece of leather I’ve ever tried to work with.

When you buy leather you order it by the side, or roughly half a cow. What you get doesn’t come in nice uniform sheets. You get something roughly cow shaped and all the trials and tribulations that cow has been through are going to show up on the hide.

As you can imagine, not all parts of the hide are equal. There is nice tight grain that is smooth and dyes beautifully along the back and flank.

Then there is this. This comes from what would be the front under neck area. It is usually considered waste leather. It is spongy with loose grain. It has scars and bug bites. It is wrinkled and folded.

I’m very diligent about not wasting anything. Thicker leather scraps get cut down into punch pads or cutting mats to protect my tools. Thinner leather gets used as liner or filler in handles or I’ll make a case out of it to protect my tools when I’m not using them.

This part of this hide though I’ve never been able to use. It won’t lay flat so I can’t use it as a work surface. That loose grain means it won’t hold up as a tool cover.

The thing about it though is that I find it really interesting. All though wrinkles and folds and changing density in grain does weird things as it tries to soak up dye.

To me this is like burled chestnut. For a long time highly figured wood was seen as waste. All those curls and whorls make for very poor chair legs. As we got better at cutting and refining wood suddenly that gnarly piece of firewood had a new kind of value.

So here is what I’m trying. I want to see what happens when I take all that nasty messed up leather and then stretch it over a form and smooth it out.

It’s different. And weird. And if it works I’m going to love it. In all honesty I think its going to fail. But I won’t know until I’ve tried.

The title of this piece is Waving at Strangers.

For a few years now I've been in the habit of going on a nightly walk. I'm generally an anxious person. My walks give me a chance to direct my attention towards something other than my racing thoughts and try to settle myself down a little before I go to bed.

These walks became especially important during the pandemic. I need a lot of space and quiet to maintain my sanity. Being stuck at home with two small children, my wife, and all the humming mental noise that goes along with a global event like Covid had me feeling claustrophobic. My walks became a way to stretch my world out a little and get a some breathing room.

Encountering other people on these nightly walks led to new questions about pandemic etiquette. Should I be wearing a mask? Is it okay to cross paths? How much distance do we need from each other? Things were so uncertain.

Generally crossing the street, or stepping off the sidewalk out into the street, to pass someone became a normal part of my evening stroll. I remember how alienating this felt. These were the days when the only new faces I was seeing were on screens. Facetime and Zoom were lifelines but they also felt so artificial. Here on my walks it was coming up again. A reminder that we are all isolated, even from the strangers we pass on the street.

That's not the part that sticks out to me though. It's what happened as we passed each other. A wave. A few words shouted across the street. Every single person I passed had a little something to say, a smile to trade, a brief moment of connection. An unspoken acknowledgement of the shared feeling of being isolated and afraid, but also a chance to smile at someone else. A chance to recognize that we are alone but in this together.

That feeling is what this image is of. A leaf waving confidently at the top, little cracks running through the world below. Or maybe it is a light, a flame, standing up alone in the emptiness. Or maybe it's me. Alone, and worried, and trying to calm myself down walking around my neighborhood at night, waving at strangers.

Capturing the seasons in my work

Winter Sun

This week felt like spring. It was warm enough yesterday that while walking home from picking up my son at school we were able to shuck our jackets.

I love the return of spring air. It is like my sense of smell gets switched back on. Wet grass. Wetter mud. The warm smell of sunshine in the air. A little hint of diesel from the bus stop up the street. It's like that scene in the Wizard of Oz when the door opens and suddenly everything is in color. It was a bittersweet moment though because it is still only February.

I've been trying to capture more of that sense of seasonality in my work. That taste of warmer weather has me jonesing for green leaves and the smell of rain, setting cyanotypes out to expose, their printing frames warming in the sun. I think I was looking for a sense of the seasons when I started doing my annual indigo dyeing every spring. The same with my October residency.

February can feel devoid of seasonal cues, but that's not true. February is about light. The days start getting longer. It's around this time of year that the sun is up late enough that it sets while I'm making dinner. I can see it just out my kitchen window while I'm cooking. It skims along the bottoms of the clouds and catches the tips of the maple tree branches in my backyard as it goes.

I've been seeing this show up in my work with these wet molded vessels. For so long I’ve been looking at my work straight on. A wallet in my hand. Art up on a wall. These new shapes though are made to be viewed at an angle. That's how I catch myself looking at them. With the light cutting across them creating shadows.

Molding them also creates this gradation in color as the leather bends around the curve of whatever I've molded them into. I think this works really well with my hand dyeing technique.

I have pages of sketches in my notebook of trays and bowls right now. I don't know how I'll find the time to try out everything I've got down. I'm trying to sneak in one or two every day around the rest of the work I'm doing in my studio. I hoping to have enough to launch a small collection of them in March.

In the meantime I'm wrapping up a couple more bags this week. Over the weekend I'm bringing another batch of cyanotypes up to the printer's for reproduction. I'm hoping to finally get a few of them up on the website later this month as well.

First Week In Feb

January was spent squeezing in projects around making bags.

As far as bags go I'm well into making this Mercer I'm working on. I'd say I'm about half way through this one.

This past week I cut all the big parts out from un-dyed, vegetable tanned leather. I spent a day dyeing, slicking down the backs, and then oiling everything. Then the wet leather has to dry for 48 hours before I cut the panels down to the actual shapes I'll use to make the bags.

I snuck in a little Millstream drop earlier in the month. I was doing a lot of planning and book keeping and I just needed a break from looking at a computer screen. I’ve wanted to try doing some in chestnut and teal. It was good to take a break and work with my hands.

My experiments this week have been around learning to make these wet molded trays.

I see a lot of potential in them. I think the skills I’ve picked up in hand dyeing will really shine with a display surface like these. I've also been looking into some other forms my leather working can take. People only need so many wallets.

So I'm hoping to either translate these into some form of home good or maybe just take the plunge and make actual art objects out of them. I'm not really sure yet but I've got a lot of ideas scribbled down.

I'm just finishing up my annual planning here at the studio. It's hard to get this kind of thing done because while I'm doing it it feels like a waste of time. Once it's done though having a plan for the year ends up being incredibly beneficial.

This year needs a plan more than most. I feel like I'm all over the place with what I'm trying to do.

Right now I feel like I am running two different businesses and not giving either their due. I make leather goods. I make cyanotypes. There is a bit of a middle ground but most of the time I feel like I'm trying to push forward on two fronts.

I've known since I start down that path that it was going to lead to some big changes in the way I do business and what my business looks like. I also knew there were going to have to be some sacrifices, some of which I wouldn't be comfortable with.

This year's planning has involved a lot of asking myself about what things I'm doing that are successful but I no longer want to invest my time or energy into. Learning to see something as successful but not worth continuing has been a hard lesson.

Getting it down on paper feels like a big step. The choice has been made, a direction picked. Already I can feel myself letting go of the things that I have to let go of.

Anyway. Big changes are coming to Wright & Rede this year as I transition away from trying to be a little factory and continue evolve my artistic practice.

Look for a new release of prints from my October residency later this month. I am also working on a whole new line of wet molded leather vessels that I'm hoping to launch in March.

At the start of the new year I like to set aside time to look at where I've been and then decide on where I'm trying to go.

A structure I've been using for the last few years is something called the Three Words. I'm not sure where I learned this or if I adapted it from something else, but here is how it works.

At the start of the year you pick three words. These words will be the guiding force behind all of your decisions for the rest of the year. When in the coming year you aren't sure about what next step you should be taking, or want to check in and see if you're still heading in the direction you intended, all you have to do is remember your three words.

Some guidelines. The words have to be verbs. It has to be something you can do. If you just write down "resilience" or "authentic" you can't really do too much with that.

For example in 2020 my three were: Finish, Exchange, Externalize.

Finish because I had a bunch of good ideas I felt I wasn't following through on. So whenever I started something new I asked if I had finished the last thing I was working on.

Exchange because I wanted to make more of an effort to get other people's art into my life. An exchange of ideas and influences. I wanted to make sure I wasn't getting myself into a little influence bubble. So I started trading art with people.

Externalize. Up until 2020 a shameful amount of important work related stuff existed only in my head. This was the year I started writing down how I do everything, made templates of all of my work, and started to make systems for planning out my year. I now have a system for recording how I'll launch a campaign, record good ideas I don't have time for, track my growth, things like that.

I'll spend a month or so coming up with the words. It's something I keep in the back of my mind, and while I'm thinking about things I would have changed about last year or I'm hoping to have happen this year, I'll jot down a word or two.

At the end of the month I'll look through all the words I wrote down and either combine common ideas or see if I can make them more specific.

It might not seem like a huge idea, but the simple act of making this one decision now will make all of the other decisions for the rest of the year that much easier.

Let me know in the comments what your three words might be.

As I sit here looking up at this print of blowing leaves and listening to it rain it occurs to me that the time for making this idea has come and gone.

I made this image by placing sensitized paper out under a tree as the leaves were falling. Some collected on the paper. Some just landed there for a moment and then blew away, leaving a ghost of their shadow behind.

I had hoped to develop of whole body of work around this idea. I like the high key image and I like the sense of movement that it has. But now the leaves are wet and have all fallen from the trees. Every day the sun gets a little dimmer and the days a little shorter.

When the sunshine returns in strength and frequency again it will be spring. There will be buds, and petals, and blossoms to work with then. But to make this falling leaf picture I've got in my head I will have to wait until the opposite side of the seasons. A year between now and then.

It might sound frustrating but I love it. I like the idea of there being seasons to my work. It's creates a sense of urgency. I have to get out there and record the fall leaves while I can. It puts me in the time and place that I'm in.

Time to Switch Gears

My First Week Back

The more things change the more they stay the same.

I spent the first day of my week back just cleaning up my studio. After every big project I like to take a little time to put everything back away.

I find that in putting away the detritus of my last project I'm better able to draw it to a close in my head as well. There is a time for moving on to other things. I get nothing done when I try to split my focus in too many ways.

The next morning I walked in and pulled out a big roll of leather to start cutting down. I had it out on my cutting mat and was marking out the shapes I needed to cut out when it hit me.

I could smell the leather.

Most people don't realize I can't smell leather any more. I'm around it all the time. I'm desensitized to it. So when people walk into my studio and breathe that leather smell in I just smile and nod.

Standing there though I got a good whiff.

"Oh! That's what they are talking about."

It's a good experience to have. Sometimes you spend so much time working on a thing that you forget how it feels to encounter it for the first time. I don't want to lose the perspective of experiencing my work as an outsider.

Two days after that I messed up all the work I'd done that week.

I was making some Traveler's cases. I must have been in a hurry when I was making the template I was using. After days of dyeing, drying, cutting, and stitching I snapped the first one closed and it was crooked. I went back and checked the template and sure enough one of the marks for a snap was slightly out of line.

I'd used this to mark all the work I'd done that week.

It dawned on me then what I high bar I've set for myself. I not only have to make these beautiful things, but they have to hold up to being used. For ten years I've been pushing through on momentum alone. But this break has given me a chance to step back and look at what I'm doing.

I took a moment to grieve a week's worth of wasted effort. Then I sat down and carefully crafted a new template.

I've just finished the first one with the new template. It fits together the way it should.