I just read through the thread quickly and one thing is clear, Monte has posted even more very appealing pictures.
One thing that is not clear is whether the choice of who goes to Portland is still open.
Whether it is or not this thread has made another thing clear to me, there are a lot of very talented and (I'm sure) equally interesting people on this forum and we really don't know one another. With that in mind I wrote a belated introduction. I've been associated with a lot of you guys for (4?) years and rarely bothered to say anything about myself. So, this is me, I don't think it will sway anyone's opinion on who should go to Portland so just read it when you get a chance and write one of your own so we don't have to wonder who you are.
It's just text now. I plan to populate it with pictures.
John Economaki is looking for "someone who designs their own work, someone who can recognize the non-obvious possibilities of a new tool and articulate them". My take on this is to emphasize the diversity in my background, inspired by Per letting me in on some of his early adventures, and also by Tinker?s tales.
Who am I? And, "Why is your gallery full of weird stuff?"
What have I done? And, "You made that?"
I'm a guy who would rather be poor than bored so I work freelance in the film and commercial business making props, models, and rigs. Old school stuff, I'd make a lot more money if computers were still as slow and expensive as they were when I started.
I'm a guy who can see things others can't, as in attention to detail. Probably comes from years of overcompensation trying to get by without the eyeglasses I was supposed to wear as a kid.
I'm a guy who asks questions and notices things like (from pre-kindergarten) "Why isn't Santa Claus in the Bible?" And, "You're never 'not doing anything'". Question authority is my slogan. Never say, "trust me" to me.
In college I chose to major in art because I could draw well. It was a good thing I did because I would have flunked out that first year without the A's in art classes. I heard that there was a BFA program where they took you more seriously than the BA students so I put up a display of my drawings to get in. Most of the teachers simply gave their approval but one of them said, "You've got talent but you obviously know nothing about art". I was thunderstruck and angry but he was right. I knew so little about art that I didn't even know I knew nothing. But that was great motivation and in a few years I was the first art student to ever be nominated for a university wide academic fellowship. I didn't get that but did get a BFA in drawing and photography and went on to get an MFA in photography and sculpture.
An aside about photography. I thought it would be good to have photographs to assist in life studies for drawing and painting so I decided to go get a camera from wherever they made them. I've always been interested in the East more than Europe so I went to Tokyo and bought a Nikomat with a 55 Micro and a 28. Okay, I didn't just jump up and go exactly, and I wasn't rich, it only cost $115 round trip because my father was working under contract for Pan Am designing portable missile launching systems for the Army. He had been designing launch pads for NASA but after the guys walked on the Moon they told him "Thanks for your help and don't let the door hit you on the way out". I turned 20 in Tokyo and had my first legal beer, a Kirin. Actually I don't know if it was legal but they didn't card me.
As I was finishing my MFA I was advised to try to get accepted into the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program. I did, was, and moved to NYC.
Moving my stuff to NY was my introduction to woodworking. I had to move it in my pickup truck so I needed a cover for the bed. I realized that at roof height it wouldn?t be large enough to hold all the necessary stuff my sweetie and I would need to move so I designed and built a telescoping cover so I could bring it back down to parking garage height when unloaded. While chopping out a recess for another piece to fit into my friend (a carpenter) said, you can't chop mortises with a screwdriver?. At that point I not only didn't have the proper tools I didn't even know I was making a mortise, but I finished the job with the screwdriver before he got back with the chisel.
The Whitney ISP was a great means for a southern boy to make NY home and I got to meet a bunch of really talented people. The best part of the program was the visiting artist's lecture series, and of those the most impressive was Susan Sontag. I decided to stay in New York but I could only find the right ratio of space/cost/safety and other amenities on Staten Island.
I worked in a commercial art gallery for a year and discovered the real art world was way different than the way it appeared from the ivory tower and decided I did not want to be involved with it. Serendipitously I came to work for a crazy rich guy who was starting a nonprofit art foundation and wanted to create a place for art that did match my ideal. He thought every deserving artist should have a museum dedicated to his work. He was the dreamer and I became the one of the doers. That was a very heady time! At one point the foundation was spending a million dollars a month acquiring art, land, and building museums.
Prior to starting the foundation my boss had been operating commercial galleries for years but the last artist to exhibit in his NYC space had filled the entire gallery with 2 feet of dirt and they liked it so much they decide to leave it. Still there more than 30 years later. But, early on they discovered a problem. The artist didn't like it when the dirt dried out so he had it watered regularly with predictable consequences. It became my job to figure out how to keep the walls from rotting.
That process taught me a lesson, that what I really liked about making art was the problem solving process. I wasn't really into self expression and I didn't need to do it. I just needed to avoid boredom and that was easy at the foundation. In the midst of installing 500 two meter long, two inch diameter solid brass bars in a gallery the 3 Mile Island nuclear power plant started to meltdown. I mention it to set the time frame and because by then my father had transitioned into designing piping systems for nuclear power plants (not that one).
Avoiding boredom was no problem at the foundation as long as the money held out. I set up three successive woodworking shops and two photography studios and designed and built a climate controlled storage facility (within a warehouse). When the money slowed down I avoided boredom by buying an abandoned house for $10,000 cash from the VA. It was worth every penny (imagine chartreuse indoor/outdoor carpet tiles stuck to the cracked plaster bedroom ceiling) so I immediately embarked on a gut rehab including all the utilities. Set up my own shop on the ground floor around an old Walker Turner table saw. Shortly after that was squared away I read about John Economaki testing a Paralock fence on a Walker Turner saw and bought one. Between doing carpentry for my house and cabinet making and picture framing for the foundation I managed to accumulate a good set of woodworking skills.
One special woodworking experience came after my boss had become very interested in Sufism. He had sponsored a troupe of whirling dervishes to visit the US and after that wanted to convert one of the foundation's spaces into a mosque. He brought a couple of carpenters over from a museum in Istanbul and I was assigned to reconfigure the shop for them and get whatever machines they wanted and find the wood they needed to build the mihr?b and minbar. These guys were the most awesome woodworkers I've ever seen. Working without plans and using a single metric folding ruler they broke in two so they could share, they built two beautiful and elaborate structures out of mahogany, padouk, and ebony. When molding was being installed with finishing nails a visitor (awestruck at the quality of the work) asked why he was using an ordinary mail in stead of a dowel. The carpenter held up a nail and said "steel dowel".
While learning how to restore my house was plenty interesting things became increasing less so at work as the foundation settled into maturity program-wise and my tasks began to seem more routine. To combat that I started commuting on a bicycle (exciting in NYC) while I considered some other line of honest work. While riding I would often see film productions set up on the streets and one week I kept riding past work being done on a truck featured in the movie FX. The plot involved a guy who made special effects for films and he was deploying effects from his truck as he was pursed by the bad guys. Every day real special effects guys were rigging the truck for shooting and I realized I would never be satisfied working in any single craft.
Again serendipitously, within a year, without any effort on my part I was rigging models to move (by no apparent means) for a Bud Bowl half-time event. I started as a model maker and continue to make them but rigging was more interesting and allowed me to work on some interesting movies. "Star Trek V" was a pretty bad movie but it was fun to do miniature special effects when miniature in relation to the Starship Enterprise meant doing healthy sized stuff. I built a Starship landing bay 12 feet by 24 feet in which to crash land the Shuttle Craft. Then lucked into having my design for the model launcher chosen and built a 20 foot long slingshot rail using three industrial sized garage door springs and a 2 ton winch. The model of the Shuttle was 5 feet long and weighed 80 pounds after reinforcing.
I got to crash a space ship again on "Judge Dredd". This time I designed and built a 250 gallon 250 psi rated air canon with a 10" butterfly valve actuated by a 3" pneumatic cylinder controlled by a programable timer. The butterfly valve delivered air into a machined 8? pipe that sleeved into an aluminum tube built into the model. We had to add about 500 pounds to the model to overwhelm it's unfortunate aerodynamic tendencies.
On "Eraser" I designed and built a pyro proof scale model (six feet long) of a jet engine for the "throw the chair into the engine so it catches on fire" scene. Then I assembled a portable wind tunnel built around a 440 cubic inch V8 airboat motor brought up from Florida.
I learned the most from working on the ride film version (at Universal Studios theme parks) of "Back to the Future". On that project I got to work in the machine and welding shops for nearly 6 months while a mechanical T-rex was being engineered and built. My main contribution was figuring out how to get three axis of motion out of a single linear actuator so glacier calving looked more realistic.
I've made a variety of models for commercials, from a Burger King restaurant to the Great Pyramid of Cheops to the St. Louis Arch, as well as and a giant ice cream cone and lots of early 20th century NYC style buildings. Making a five foot diameter good old fashioned style flying saucer was a nice woodworking challenge. As Mirko has pointed out, it's hard to find time to document stuff when you're on an impossible deadline.
But computers continued to get faster and cheaper so the need for that kind of model making and rigging fell way off. Those 500 brass rods I'd installed in '79? where/are still there but about ten years ago a fire in the same building sent tons of water across the floor and the boards warped. The rods had to be removed for the floor to be replaced and when it was done I was hired to reinstall them. I met the artist again and we discussed how computer aided pre-visualization could help him evolve his projects which was again serendipitous because right after I finished the installation I herniated a disk and all I could do without pain was sit so I started doing CAD for the artist and as I recovered became production manager for several projects including the one posted above on page 3.
The photos I've posted above not my art work though a lot of my thought and hand work went into the production of these sculptures.
Through recommendations I've done custom cabinetry and built-in stuff and continue to put the finishing touches on my house. Surprisingly the model making work has picked up again, maybe there is a retro thing going on.
There are a lot of interesting people on this forum but we know very little about any of them, except Tinker. If you read this far please consider writing up your own story and posting it for us to read.
I saw it the other day for the first time and laughed my rear off. Sounds like he could take an anger management class or two...
