Deep Craft – Page 62 – Ethos of Making

The Week in Bloom

Wild Cherry (Prunus avium)

Since I was a teenager I’ve always ridden nimble, road racing bikes and my attention has been on speed and navigating the road to avoid flats. Inspired by our rural environs and the Rivendell ethos, I’ve recently swapped out my racing machines in favor of a sturdier, Surly Long Haul Trucker, outfitted by Mike Varley of Black Mountain Cycles. The easier gearing, fatter tires and loose-footed pedals enable me to shift my attention to the surrounding landscape, and I find myself making frequent stops as I cruise the country roads connecting villages, farms and waterways. Here are some roadside blossoms seen over the past week on my regular, 10 mile loop ride between Freestone and Occidental, varying in elevation from about 145′ to 667′ above sea level: Continue reading “The Week in Bloom”

Fools Parade and The Blessing of the Fleet

Occidental Fools Parade, Occidental, CA

Two contrasting annual traditions merge seamlessly with the season in West Sonoma County. The Occidental Fools Parade continues to grow exponentially since its inception six years ago. Everyone is invited to participate, and people of all ages bring instruments and march in elaborate costume around Occidental’s tiny square. The event feels spontaneous and contemporary, yet resonates with a deeper familiarity, as though people are blooming in sync with the orchard trees surrounding the town, unable to suppress a display of vernal exuberance.

Blessing of the Fleet, Bodega Bay, CA

With origins in the Mediterranean centuries ago, sea ports around the world commence the fishing season with a blessing of the fleet, usually involving text from Psalm 104, verses 24-41 & Psalm 107, verses 23-32. In Bodega Bay, salmon boats are decked out and paraded out of the harbor to receive their blessing on Bodega Bay, at the edge of the Gulf of the Farralones, one of richest habitats for marine life along the Pacific Coast.

I will continue to document local seasonal celebrations, traditions andÂ cultural ephemera as an extension of my phenological inquiries.

Small is Beautiful, Revisited

The cardinal virtues of temperance, prudence, fortitude, and justice

I recently reread E.F. Schumacher’s classic Small is Beautiful (originally published by Blond and Riggs Ltd., London, 1973). I first read this book as part of my training with the US Peace Corps almost 20 years ago when I was an ‘appropriate technology’ agent in West Africa, and it had a huge impact on my thinking at the time. However idealistic its precept, the concepts of decentralized economies, resource conservation and the eradication of global poverty rang true, and resonate even more on the heals of recent, global economic meltdown. Schumacher closes his argument by reinvigorating the concept of the four cardinal virtues, originally posited by Plato. Here is the last paragraph of Small is Beautiful:

“Justice relates to truth, fortitude to goodness, and temporentia to beauty; while prudence, in a sense, comprises all three. The type of realism which behaves as if the good, the true, and the beautiful were too vague and subjective to be adopted as the highest aims of social or individual life, or were the automatic spin-off of the successful pursuit of wealth and power, has been aptly called ‘crackpot-realism’. Everywhere people ask: ‘What can I actually do?’ The answer is as simple as it is disconcerting: we can, each of us, work to put our own inner house in order. The guidance we need for this work cannot be found in science or technology, the value of which utterly depends on the ends they serve; but it can still be found in the traditional wisdom of mankind.”

Comparative Menus

menu of bronze patina finishes, Artworks Foundry, Berkeley, CA

To me, making is best the more closely it resembles cooking, and a day of making-related meetings is best when it orbits around eating. Our day began yesterday dropping off the completed and finally-approved creatures for our Sunnyside Menagerie Project at Artworks Foundry in Berkeley, where they will be cast in bronze using the ancient lost wax technique.

silica-ceramic slurry stirring vat

The foundry’s artisans will build rubber molds of the sculptures to produce multiple wax positives. I will then apply final detailing to the waxes, which will have new molds constructed around them, specially designed to allow the melted wax to escape as it is displaced by molten bronze. The final bronzes will then be cleaned up and patinated using a combination of chemical treatments to achieve the balance of protection, surface patterning and coloration appropriate to the site. For thousands of years, bronzes were either left raw or were initially buried, gaining patina by interacting with environmental elements, achieving their surface and color patterning slowly over time. I would prefer to leave the bronze raw, but the salinity of the air in San Francisco may act too quickly on its surface, leaving it dull and greenish.

menu at Vik’s Chaat House in Berkeley, CA

Ene and I stopped at our favorite restaurant for lunch a few blocks from the foundry before crossing the Bay for an afternoon presentation for the San Francisco Arts Commission. Vik’s Chaat House serves beautifully prepared, unpretentious Indian ‘street food’, ordered a la carte and eaten off of paper plates with (biodegradable) plastic sporks. I used to eat at Vik’s two or three times a week when I had a shop in West Berkeley, but enjoy reserving it for our occassional forays into town even more, and find it a necessary compliment to country life.

Trivium

Allegory of the Seven Liberal Arts, Marten de Vos, 1590, oil on oak panel

I am one of those with the affliction of getting words and songs stuck in my head, sometimes for days or weeks and longer on end. I had the song Midnight at the Oasis repeating in my head duringÂ most of my twenties and am only recently able to think about it without its becoming re-lodged. I have yet to learn a reliable technique for dislodging songs, but thought it might help if there were something like a call-in radio program that played only songs stuck in peoples’ heads, see if there were any common traits, and then just do my best to avoid listening to them in the first place.

With words it’s easier. I simply look them up and deconstruct their meaning and etymology, which often reveals something hidden I was actually looking for. This happened yesterday when I overheard the word trivial spoken while a group of people were looking at the work of Anni Rapinoja at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The word was being used dismissively, but I agreed, the work was indeed trivial, but seen from a different perspective, this could be an asset, something to strive for.

The word ‘trivial’ derives from the Latin trivialis, commonplace, ordinary. A related word is trivium, which refers to the lower three of the Seven Liberal Arts- grammar, logic and rhetoric; the upper four, the quadrivium being arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy. I believe craft is in a unique position to exalt the trivial by drawing our attention to the most ordinary, commonplace aspects of everyday life, which are frequently overlooked in pursuit of loftier ideals.

Anni Rapinoja

Trained as a botanist, Anni Rapinoja lives on a remote island off the coast of Finland, where she makes beautiful, functional objects from seasonally foraged, natural materials like pussy willow, used to make the shoes and purse pictured above. Rapinoja considers her work as an extension of her environmental activism, drawing us closer to nature by wittily revealing the temporality of things and their material footprint. Alongside her matching coat and hat made from woven, unprocessed reeds, these items are included in the show, Irreverent: Contemporary Nordic Craft Art, currently on view at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

Estero Americano Floods

I rode my bike to scout the Estero Americano over the weekend, the body of water dividing Western Marin and Sonoma counties. Almost exactly a year ago I made my first post on this weblog after a paddle on the Estero to explore the availability of sea grasses like bulrush for a furniture-making experiment. I’ve done some research over the past year into native basketry using these materials, and am ready for another round of experimentation. Following a winter with low precipiation, I was pleased to find the Estero flooded and will make another exploratory paddle this week.

Pomo basket