we move every three years. The first three times we moved, though, it was in the same borough, we were just changing neighborhoods, which reduced the trauma slightly. The biggest move was three years ago, when we moved to Providence. Now we are gearing up for the biggest one yet, a move away from the coast for the first time as a couple, as well as a move away from being childless and into parenthood.

It is safe to say that I feel awash in a turbulent sea of change.

There is another move that is happening, a move from being a maker to being a teacher (and, perish the thought, an administrator). I love teaching. It really is what I do best, I think. My father is a teacher, and has been since I can remember. My mother is a teacher and has been since before I was born. Recently, in an effort to place the names of some of the long-lost high school folk who have been friending me on facebook, I brought back from my folks’ house my high school senior year yearbook. Because I am a narcissist, I read a lot of the things that people had written. Lot of the run-of-the-mill “Stay in touch” and “Drama Class Rocks!” Probably not too different from your yearbook. Probably the hairdos were taller in mine than in yours. I would bet that there were a lot more mullets. But the things that people wrote are the same across the country, I bet.

One thing I did notice, though, was that a lot of people said something like “you’re a great teacher.” This struck me, as I do not remember teaching anyone anything in high school. Except maybe how to roll a joint. I don’t remember knowing enough about anything to think that I should be a teacher. I wanted to be a rock-and-roll roadie at the time. So it is a bit of a mystery, but it struck a chord with me because I do aspire to be a good teacher. I am looking forward to having the opportunity to meet and work with the students in Syracuse.

Before I can start that life, though, I have to pack up my studio. I am almost done. I know that I will not really have an opportunity to make things on the level that I have been for quite some time. This has been tough for me to parse. I know I am moving into so many things that are going to be so good, but dismantling my workbench took a great deal of will. It was anticlimactic, of course. Four screws and four bolts and it was leaning against the wall, ready to go on the truck. There was no crashing of the pipe organ, no thunderstorms or rains of frogs. Externally the moment after was the same as the one before. But it was the act that officially indicated that I was no longer an active part of the studio. I have had a great time in this studio, the people are all people that I respect and admire and above all like very much. Dismantling my bench was a statement that I am no longer one of them, I now (for the moment) merely store my stuff among them.

Oof.

Below is a photo of the bench leaning against the wall behind the stacks of boxes of studio stuff. Tools, hardware, bits of wood, clamps. The box of hammers does not seem any dumber than the box of saws, no matter what colloquial wisdom indicates. The studio books are just as heavy as non-studio books. I have kept out a small collection of tools that will get me by should I have a small quick project, but all the rest are sleeping soundly in their boxes, waiting to see the sun and breathe the air and make shavings and dust in their new home.

I know I should be thinking about this as preparation for a great and good change. I know that I should be looking forward to what promises to be an exciting new time, professionally and personally. But just now, for these weeks before we get up there, I do not seem to be able to shake the melancholy. I am awash in memories, stuck looking back. And I am going to allow that for now. I do not have any choice. It is right to mourn for a time the passing of good things just as it is right to be thankful for the good things that are to come.

storage systems

i love books. I always have. I love the heft of them and the smell of them and the theatrical act of opening one, whether it is for the first time or the 20th. The books to which I return regularly have what a friend called the “patina of Zeke” on them, dogears at the good parts, phrases underlined, worn covers. “Life on the Mississippi,” “The Dramatic Imagination,” “The Hobo’s Hornbook,” these are markers in my life and repositories of ideas or turns of phrase or images that are important to me.

When I started out as a set designer in New York I was not (to put it mildly) internet savvy. I still am not, maybe, but it is arresting to me what a difference twelve years can make. I did not even have an email address at the time, which seems outlandish to me now. And for years, every show that I designed would send me off to the New York Public Library and the Strand. I bought two or three books per show, and checked out several more, the big coffee table books with lots of photos in them, to use as research. Books about the wild west, and about the Louvre, and English Georgian houses. Figure drawing references. “How to Paint” this or that. As my library grew, moving became more difficult, but Karen and I both are comforted when surrounded by our books. In our last apartment, I built 150 linear feet of shelves for our books, which was not enough, as it turned out. We have a lot of books.

In preparation for our move, I have spent tonight going through the big books, pulling out ones that I have not opened in years to donate to the RISD library. I spoke to the head of the Library who said that any books that do not go onto the shelves will be sold to buy more books or other media. Many of these are volumes I have not opened since we moved here, and maybe not for years before that, and so I know that the appropriate thing to do is to turn them over to an institution that will use them, to a place where they will be opened and read which is what they are for, after all.

I have pulled out 88 volumes so far, most of them big picture books. It has been a hard process. Some of them are inscribed from friends along the way, some of whom have fallen out of my life, and seeing their handwriting congratulating me on an opening night or graduating from college or a birthday brought wistful smiles and floods of memories. Here they are, all bagged up and ready to move to their new home:

Books remain a favorite method of mine for storing knowledge and memory. Having now been on the creative team charged with producing a book, and having written and laid out and published my thesis, I have more of an appreciation for what a book is, not just what it says, for books as designed objects, which has given me another layer of appreciation. Cheyenna and I were talking about the need for each generation to produce documentation of some kind, especially, as with the Hobo Hornbook, the need for documenting the thoughts and history of the working class. In an age when so much that is written from person to person is done in a media that does not lend itself to being kept in a cigar box in the attic or pasted into a scrap book to be found and archived by descendants, it is hard for us to see what that documentation will be.

I am learning a lot about storing knowledge these last couple of years. I am learning (though I still have the clumsy absence of fluency that fades with practice when learning a new language) to read the knowledge that is stored in objects that are not books. I am learning to read the adz-marks on an old beam, or to decipher the logic in the way a line is rove through a block and around a pin, or to decipher the collective trial and error that led to a saw’s teeth being set in a particular way. I am learning to read the rings of a tree or the wear on an old tool or the construction of a piece of antique furniture. Pulling all of those books off of shelves and putting them in bags brought into sudden sharp focus all of the other methods of reading of which I am becoming aware. These other storage systems are gaining a credibility in my life that they did not have before, and it took the act of sitting down with books as objects, as “containers for memory” as Bachelard would say it, to bring that into sharp focus.

I will miss these old friends. I will probably regret giving them up. But I will know that they are moving to a new life, and that they will be cared for well.

to be of use

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who stand in the line and haul in their places,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.


The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

-Marge Piercy

back to the shop

we had quite a weekend this Memorial Day. Birthday celebration, wedding shower, and baby shower, a swirl of events. Since we both had family in town, we made the choice to forgo other activities like yoga in order to spend time with them, and I am glad we did. Karen used the word “homesick” to describe my feelings for the South, which struck me as particularly apt. I am also homesick for family. It is never easy to be surrounded by family, and can often be stressful, but the eddies of love and support were well worth the jetsam of long-held grudges and personal issues.

This does mean, thought that I was not in the studio for three days, which began to weigh on me by Sunday, yesterday. I got so twitchy that as Karen was unwrapping gifts, I was cutting the wrapping paper into squares and folding cranes out of it, just so that I had something to do. Though there are some who enjoy the craft of creating events, and there are many who enjoy experiencing them, I get more joy from making things, and my hands eventually decided that if I wasn’t going to use them to make anything, they would make something themselves.

This is not meant to indicate that I am not grateful for all of the work that everyone put into the weekend. It was astounding and lovely. But it was also good to get back into the studio today and to make a little sawdust.

My sister and her fiancé have trained their lovely hound Harriet that there is an invisible fence buried in their yard. She is getting pretty good about knowing where it is and about playing in the yard unchaperoned. Across their front walk they have strung an old dog leash, and she knows now that when it is there, the fence is on, but that when it is not she can pass through. Smart dog.

We were sitting at dinner and my sister was telling us about this and she asked if I had any ideas about a gate that they could use that would look better than an old leash strung across the front walk. Boy, did I?!? Put me directly in mind of Walter Rose, of course: “I would fain doff my hat before such a gate, for it speaks of the craftsman, a carpenter whose work is the expression of his life…” Gate building was, at one time, a very specific task, done in the way that carpenters had done it for hundreds of years, each component of the gate designed by generations of experience in a way that a pressed steel gate, such as you may see today, is not.

I began to think and to scheme about making a gate. Not a full on gate, not a huge farm gate, but a little ornamental piece that would be a symbol of a gate as well as an indicator to Harriet that the fence was on. I determined to use hand tools as much as possible, and to not get over-fussy with it, because as Rose says, “the carpentry of the countryside ought not to savor too much of the jointer’s bench.”

What a pleasant way to return to the workbench after a three day hiatus. I had made sure when I left that all of the planes and chisels were mirror-polished and sharper than razors, and walked in to a swept studio and an empty bench pregnant with possibilities. I had some Douglas Fir left from other projects, and laid into it. Fir gives such beautiful long curling shavings when planed by hand, and the smell that it lets off is intoxicating. I cut the joints and went over to the hardware cabinet to choose the nails. I still have a lot of the nails that I made a couple of years ago, and thought it would be fun and fitting to use clinch nails to hold the gate together.

Clinching nails is a practice that is for the most part gone, but it once was standard practice for a lot of applications. Doors, for example. Dickens begins A Christmas Carol by telling us that “Marley was as dead as a door-nail,” and goes on to remark in passing that he does not know what in particular is so dead about a door-nail. Well, anyone familiar with carpentry certainly does. Exterior doors (and gates) were often nailed together up until the last century, and because the nails were hand-forged and untempered, they were soft. So a hole was drilled, the nail was hammered home, and then “clinched” or bent over on the back side. So installed, it would never come out again, and so was “dead.” Doors made in this way have lasted hundreds of years in some cases, far out-living modern hollow-core doors that you buy at big box stores.

Of course clinching nails is now an exercise in nostalgia. But then, as Garrison Keillor says, nostalgia is my sin. And it is appropriate to clinch-nail a gate together. And I had all of these nails anyway, so it seemed like a good choice. And it is fun, so there.

So I made up the gate and the posts, and a little latch on the other side with a counterweight made of a big chunk of steel that I had around the shop. The hinge is one that I made as an experiment a couple of years ago, and is not terribly good as hinges go, but entirely serviceable. Better that it be used than sit in a drawer until it gets thrown out, after all.

Lugged all of this up to Sharon, Mass, where they live and went to hammer it into the ground. The rocky ground. Very rocky ground. There is always something, and this time the something was that. Rather than pound them 12” – 18” into the dirt, I was only able to get them to go in about 9”. Which is not far enough in my book, and makes the gate too high besides. So I am going to have to revisit this, maybe with a pick-mattock.

For now, though, the gate is there, with a little ornamental jowl cut in like on the gates that Rose shows in his book. A great project to get my hands working again, though, and it is always a joy to make something for people I love.

Here is a photo of the gate:

And a photo of the hinge which is also clinch nailed on:

Here is the other end and the counter-weighted latch. There is, I am sure, a better design, but this is what I came up with, and it works well enough:

This nice little project was the penultimate piece that will be made in the studio. The next (and last) piece will be a birdbath for our new house in Syracuse, after which I will start the bittersweet project of packing the studio to move.

rites of spring

Spring has finally arrived. It has been getting very warm and then very cold and then very warm again over the past weeks, but that is not the indicator I look to. I look to the trees to tell me about rebirth and new life. And they have been. Over the last couple of weeks the tips of their branches have been deep red with tiny buds, portents of what was to come. And then last week the smallest of green leaves began to unfold.

On Tuesday, we had some driving around to do on a grey rainy day, and it was then that I realized that Spring is here. Grey and chilly, with a soaking rain, the kind that makes you want to stay inside and read all day, the kind that magnifies bright colors, somehow, and makes them stand out. And that is what happened, of course, with the leaves. They are all that callow spring green, the kind that you can only make by adding just a touch of sap green to a lot of hansa yellow light, if you are trying to make it on a pallet, that electric spring green that is full of hope and promise and that thinks it will never, ever fade into the world-weary heavy green of late summer, though we know it will. The trees know this, too, but are tight-lipped, enjoying the optimism of the new leaves and sighing with joy as the wind catches them and waves their branches, yoga for an eighty year old maple.

Up Hope Street is Lipitt Park, which is a riot of trees all showing off their new spring attire. In the grey rain it was just stunning, making me stop the car and hold the camera out the window, shielding it from the rain with my hat. Of course, in the photo the colors get lost, I can not photograph magic like this with something as paltry as a point and shoot, but you maybe get the idea.

Then yesterday I made the drive (lot of driving lately. Maybe this is something I should examine) out to Syracuse again. All the way through the mountains Ii drove under a flat-bottomed roof of cumulonimbus clouds, the kind that are piled high like grey whipped cream with flat bottoms like they are sitting on a pane of glass, pregnant with rain, though I saw very little rain on the trip. As I got higher in the mountains, of course, I drove backward through spring, back to the very first little buds on the trees, and then as I came down the other side I got to watch everything unfold in fast- motion, the car a speeded up camera recording what a friend called “the white-hot electric sex” of spring.

On the other side of the mountain, the clouds started to part a little. The blue dome never looks so blue as when see through grey clouds, and the spots of sunshine hitting the ground seemed that much warmer and joyous for the grey up above. By the time I stopped at a turnout by the Erie Canal, there was enough sun that I could eat my sandwich at a picnic table made of grey recycled plastic without a jacket on, warm and happy and comforted by the history flowing on the other side of the chain link fence. As I sat there in the sun a CSX freight train rolled ponderously by on the other side of the Canal, the same company that sponsors our NPR station, and I smiled as I thought about their claim that they move a ton of freight three hundred miles on a gallon of fuel. It made me think of home, where Karen and our unborn son are, and about the season of birth and renewal and joy in my own life.

Canals and trains, and sunshine and spring. Better than Christmas.

in memory

i met Sasha Clapper in 1977 when I was four. I don’t remember a lot about it, but I have a distinct memory of my mom and his mom sitting in the living room of the rented ranch house on Polo Road in Winston-Salem, talking about who-knows-what, and Sasha and I playing with matchbox cars or something around the foot of the chair that his mom was sitting in. From that moment, we spent more time together than apart. His family lived on Crepe Myrtle Circle at the time, which was close to my parent’s house, and we walked over there many and many a time. Eventually I was old enough that I could walk there by myself, crossing Polo Road being a rite of passage that I did not appreciate at the time. I sure do now.

There were four of us: Sasha Clapper, Daniel Berry, Christy Johnson, and me. We all lived near each other, our parents were friends, and we all played together and went to the pool together and went to each other’s birthday parties. We all had other friends, of course, but the four of us were a unit, a group of friends that hung out all the time at least until we were twelve or so.

My dad had built a sandbox behind our house and a treehouse and a fondly remembered silver-spray painted rocket ship. Many and many were the adventures we had, running around the woods that seemed limitless to a five- or six- or seven-year-old but which in hindsight were likely not more than a half acre deep. Sasha had a treehouse too, and we spent a fair amount of time there as well. As I shake my head around and see what falls out, I have found a memory of being in his treehouse and him quoting Olivia Newton John singing to me “Do you know what I mean?” explaining “ I like to use song lyrics to say what I want to say when I can.”

Thirty years later, I do the same thing. To this day, I quote and quote and quote. Twain and Lincoln and Star Wars. Not so much Olivia Newton John, but that must be where it comes from. I thought him so sophisticated and wise to know the words of pop songs. He listened to Casey Casem, and knew who the hot pop singers were, a talent I still do not have. He used to be able to identify songs from the radio and the people who sang them, which always mystified me. For years I would try to remember to listen to the radio so that I could hear the same magical things, promising myself that I would tune into the oracle so I, too, could deliver the message. Every week I would forget, always lagging behind Sasha.

He was born on January 22 1973, four months before me (I was born May 22 of the same year). Somehow, those four months made so much difference to me, and made me feel inferior in age and knowledge. Again, I still fight this, wishing to be older and more experienced than I am. I am slowly learning to embrace the things I don’t know, but as a child and young adult I strove to be more knowledgeable, older, more experienced, even lying in order to appear that way.

Memories filter in, wheeling around like dance partners in a fevered dream: After Empire Strikes Back came out, there was a mail order offer from Mattel. Two proofs of purchase and a couple of dollars would get you a Boba Fett figurine. This at a time when no one knew anything about Boba Fett, and when he had all of the sexiness that mystique brings. Sasha sent away and got the figure when his backpack still shot a missile out of it. By the time I got mine from the Rose’s department store, the missile (which had been judged a swallowing hazard to young children) was firmly glued in place. Sasha’s had long been lost, of course, out in the yard, and the figurine’s empty backpack was a testament to the coolness of his version of the figure.

We had Cub Scout meetings in his backyard. His mom was the troop leader, I think. I remember filling soup cans with water and freezing them, and then using big nails and hammers to punch patterns of holes in them, so that when the ice melted away, we could put candles in them and they would be like the colonial punched tin lanterns we saw at the local museum. I think Sasha made it to Boy scouts, though he might have dropped out at Webelos. I never even made it that far, my interest waning early.

At some point, I think about when I was six or so, his family moved to Washington D. C., an unimaginably exotic locale. I have no idea to this day why they moved, though I reckon his father got a job there doing something. We went to visit them once, from which I have two memories: One is complicated, but it has to do with him having his fingers in a door frame by the hinges and me trying to shut the door and squeezing his fingers and him screaming like a fire engine and me just trying to shut the door and not understanding that I was causing the pain. The other has to do with assembling a model airplane and painting it and feeling so sophisticated because he did not want to paint it like the photo on the box, so we didn’t. Eventually, they moved back, into a house on Tangle Ln. This was where he lived until we lost touch, where his father told us about landing planes on an aircraft carrier in the Viet Nam war and we ran mission after mission in the woods behind his house.

When we were a little older, I would go spend the night at his house on a weekend and we would do mind-blowingly rebellious things, like watching Saturday Night Live. I never did this at home, not being allowed to stay up that late, but he knew all of the players: Eddie Murphy and Billy Crystal. Gilbert Gotfried. Martin Short. This is the last time I watched this show, not really understanding a lot of the jokes but laughing when he did, excited about staying up so late with no repercussions. After Saturday Night Live, the kung fu movies came on, which we struggled to stay awake for, understanding that they were excellent without knowing why. Vivid Technicolor memories of “monkey form” and “drunken soldier form” still wander through my thoughts now and then.

When he and I entered eighth grade in 1986, North Carolina was rated 50th in the nation as far as public schools went. He and I were both in what then were called “gifted and talented” classes, thought the official nomer for us changed many times in our academic careers.

Eventually, we went off to high school. He went to the North Carolina Governor’s School for Science and Math. He had that easy savvy that allowed the “smart” kids to get ahead quickly in North Carolina in the early eighties, as did I. I remember when I realized I had to study in college and how foreign a concept that was for me. Sasha got thrown out of Governor’s School for manufacturing LSD in his dorm room and selling it. After that we fell out of each other’s lives. I heard stories now and then, but did not really follow his life that much. I was getting into theater, and that took too much of my time. I was too selfish to notice that I was turning away from a lot of the things that maybe should have been important.

We occasionally found each other here and there for the next couple of decades. He came to my wedding. He wandered through New York when I lived there. I heard news from my folks here and there, a couple of kids, a move to Alaska. When he came through New York that time, we had a couple of beers. He was a member of chapter 320 of the Laborer’s Union of North America, digging ditches in the summer, and saving money so that he could travel in the winter. We went to my brother-in-law’s birthday party where there was a belly dancer. Someone took a photo of him sitting on a bench smiling. That was the last I heard of him, maybe in 2003 or 04.

Last night my dad called me and told me that a friend of the family had called and left a message that Sasha had been killed in a motorcycle accident in Portland, Oregon. Since then a facebook friend sent me a link to an article in the paper saying that Sasha Clapper, age 36, died in a motorcycle crash at 1.15 am. The person who called 911 said that it appeared the motorcycle was speeding.

The thing is that I have not known him well for twenty years, really. He may have been a saint. He may have been the opposite. I would not know. Here is what I know: He had two kids. He was a person making his way in the world like the rest of us. He is gone, and that is irreparable. This is where I think a lot about how I regret losing touch with someone who was once so important to me. And where I hope he is resting easy, wherever he is. Here is an obituary by someone who has known him more recently:

Sasha McCarthy Clapper1/22/1973-4/25/2009
Sasha McCarthy Clapper died early Saturday, April 25th, 2009, from injuries sustained in a motorcycle accident.Sasha was born on January 22nd, 1973, in Columbia, South Carolina and raised in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He attended the North Carolina School of Math and Science and Reed College prior to dedicating his life to adventure. Sasha traveled widely, visiting nearly every continent and all the islands in between. He cross-country skied to the North Pole and rode a camel in the Sahara Desert in full motorcycle leathers. However he considered Portland his home, and had recently returned there after seven years in Alaska. Sasha was passionate about the environment and was currently pursuing an engineering degree in renewable energy at the Oregon Institute of Technology. He loved bicycles, motorcycles, windmills, fireworks, neck tattoos and rock’n’roll (especially ZZ Top). “His mental state was totally related to the working condition of his vehicles,” says girlfriend Sophia La Valley. Sasha was known to express righteous indignation whenever a bar—no matter how fancy—did not stock Old Crow bourbon; he idolized the humble potato—calling it the quintessential food, spoke endlessly of his two treasured daughters, and took darn good care of his friends. The heavily-tattooed vegetarian heartthrob was adored far and wide by both men and women. His big heart, goofy grin and maniacal chuckle will be desperately missed.Sasha is survived by his parents, Jim and Debbie Clapper of Nashville, Tennessee; a brother, Evan Clapper of Moab, Utah; two daughters, Aria Watkins of Carolina Beach, North Carolina and Stella Speakman of York Beach, Maine; his girlfriend, Sophia La Valley of Portland; and several thousand close friends.A private memorial service will be held on Wednesday, April 29th, followed by an open reception and celebration of Sasha’s life from 5-8 p.m. at Plan B, 1305 S.E. 8th Avenue, Portland. In lieu of flowers, contributions may be sent to the Community Cycling Center, 1700 N.E. Alberta St., Portland, 97211. Tax I.D.: # 931127186. Condolences may be sent to 3826 Brighton Road, Nashville, Tennessee, 27205.

craft part ii

spent some time last night with an artisan who works in a very different medium than I do. Mike Brusso is somewhat shorter than me, late twenties to early thirties, with black hair that stands straight up off of his head. Above an unshaven chin is a pair of thick black glasses, similar to the ones that I wear. He was wearing a black t-shirt that had a picture of a circle on it, under which it said “You know, for kids,” a reference to a Cohen brothers movie called “Hudsucker Proxy.” On his neck, above the t-shirt collar, on the right side is a tattoo of an upside-down horseshoe with a banner that says “Trying.” On the left is a tattoo of an old style butterfly. The right knuckles are tattooed with the word “coca” and the left knuckles with “cola.”

Mike Brusso is, as you may have guessed, a tattoo artist. I was there to “get some work done.”

As a craft, tattooing fascinates me. It is equal parts artistry and technical understanding. It takes the skills of a graphic artist, illustrator, painter and sculptor, but also requires a historical knowledge as well as the ability to maintain and use tools, and to understand the different qualities of the inks and how they will age. Every tattoo artist understands these things (and many more) to varying degrees and practices them to varying degrees. Obviously, there is just as much range of skill and ability in the world of tattooing as there is in every other craft. I was recently in a tattoo studio I happened to be near and, poking through the portfolio just for kicks, was appalled at what I saw. It is certainly possible for a tattooer to be insensitive to the shape of the body, disrespectful of imagery, and garish and thoughtless with regard to color. Those are folk to shy away from.

Brusso is on the other end of that spectrum.

Many of you are familiar with the process of receiving a tattoo. Some of the following may be over-explanatory for you, bear with me. The work that I was getting done was around a tattoo I already have, a banner that bears my favorite Mark Twain quote. I was getting a traditional style swallow holding the banner in its beak, that would balance out the swallow on my left shoulder, and then some flowers, et c. to fill out around the banner. Nothing too huge, but something that I have been wanting to get, and a way for me to document having lived in Providence for a couple of years. The thing that made this complicated was the fact that the new swallow had to balance an existing one on the other side of my body.

If it seems strange for me to say that a tattoo artist has to have the skills of a sculptor, consider the human body. It is an incredibly complex assemblage of planes and angles, intersecting curves and forms. We think of the human body as symmetrical, which, to a certain extent, it is. When you get down to it, though, it is not rigidly symmetrical in the way that a manufactured object can be. There is an art school project in which you take a photo of your face, cut it in half, trace half of it on tracing paper, and flip it over. The point, of course, is to demonstrate the assymetricality of the human face. The result looks an awful lot like a person, but there is something that is a little bit off, a little wrong, because it is too rigidly symmetrical. The rest of the body is like that too. We stand in ways and use our bodies in ways that make subtle but very present differences between our right and left sides.

Mike printed out what is called a stencil (which transfers the design onto the skin) and cut it out. He wet my shoulder with soapy water, applied the stencil, and stepped back, looking from shoulder to shoulder to check the placement. He squinted, and then reached forward and pushed down on my left shoulder, stepping back and squinting again. It was like watching the sushi chef in my previous post examine the hunk of tuna. I was watching an artisan at work.

“You stand with your left shoulder higher than your right,” he said. I did not know this. “Stand normally.” I tried. He shook his head and wiped off the stencil. With his right index finger he located the very front of the ball at the top of my left humerus, then located the front of the top of my right humerus with the other hand, sighting back and forth. He re-applied the stencil. I was in his shoes recently, laying out pieces of jewelry on a slice of long leaf pine, moving shapes around and flipping them so that the grain would be shown at its best.
It took seven tries to get the placement right. A little up, a little down, a little more forward. Time well spent, as once the decision is made, it is made. Like cutting into a piece of tuna, or making the first cut into a piece of wood. As long as it is just drawn lines it can be changed and changed, but once the needle is involved, it is there for good. Each time he would look at it, squint a little (a trick that my undergrad painting teacher taught me that I still use), and move left and right to see how things balanced.

Finally it was placed to his satisfaction. It was interesting to watch this process as the client instead of the maker. I am used to this kind of contemplation from the maker’s end, of course, but to see it from the other side made me appreciate the end product that much more. This was not something copied out of a book and slapped on the skin, inked in and forgotten. Even though this was not some glamorous tattoo on a rock star or in front of a TV camera or shown in a magazine it is still a tattoo. It is his work. It needed to be right.

I have written before about Bill Beadle. He has passed now, but he was one of those people who taught me things when I was too young to know I was being taught. We were working together on a set piece once years ago, I was probably fifteen or sixteen, and I wanted to get finished with it so that I could go outside and smoke cigarettes with the cool kids. I slapped a piece of plywood onto the scenic unit and said “there, that’s good enough.” “For who?” he asked. “No one will ever see this, it doesn’t matter.” “No one may see it,” he said, “but you will know that it is there.” It is an exchange that has stayed with me. Even when I do take shortcuts, even now twenty years later, I remember him saying that to me.

Once the stencil was properly placed, Mike drew in some flowers and the banner and we got started. The first thing that gets done in most tattoos (especially if they are “old-timey” which all of mine are) is the linework. A fine black outline goes around all of the shapes. This part tends not to hurt too much because you are so pumped about the process and full of beer and adrenaline. Fascinating to watch. The tattoo machine hums and the needle moves in and out of the skin, leaving a fine black line of ink and a slightly raised welt. Some ink pools on top of the skin, and gets wiped away with a paper towel, leaving the sharp line behind, the beginning of a piece that will be, as one of my favorite tattoo artists has on his business card “with you for life.”

The linework took about 40 minutes and looked like this when it was finished.

Now it was time for the shading. Brusso took up another machine that had been loaded with a shading needle, which looks like a bundle of three or five or (for a really big area) seven needles. This is where knowledge of the tools comes into play, knowing which needles are appropriate, and which tattoo machines handle which types of needles the best. Mike Drexler, who did the RISD pin up tattoo on my leg, actually has a side business making tattoo machines. These are custom machines made by hand and sold directly to clients. Not unlike what I do. We have had a couple of really interesting conversations about making tools, about enabling artists and makers to ply their trade with the fruits of our labor.

The first shading is black ink, and the basic idea is that the tattoo should look finished after the shading is done. Here is a photo after the shading on my piece was finished. Looks pretty good…

Now for the color. We were moving into hour 2 of the sitting, and now the adrenaline is wearing off. The piece starts to burn a little, and the continued passes with the needles start to really hurt. This is really the only scenario in my life that I get this physically close to another man, Brusso is leaning into my shoulder and turning me back and forth as he applies red and blue ink to the new parts of the scroll and pink and yellow to the flowers. There is an extreme intimacy to this act, a direct physical and emotional connection between the artist and the client. It is a connection inspired by trust, and by art, and (cheesy though it sounds) pain.

This is not a long “sit” as tattoos go. This is a small piece and a relatively easy part of the body. Lots of flesh, comparatively little discomfort. Those big back pieces you see in magazines, those can be two or three or four sittings of five or seven hours each. That is some pretty extreme discomfort, especially as the reciprocating needle moves over the places where there is nothing between skin and bone (like the vertebrae). What I experienced last night at Federal Hill Tattoo was several points below putting my finger into a table saw. Maybe closer to a burn you get from spilling scalding water on your arm. Pretty uncomfortable, but totally bearable.

As he worked, Mike and I talked about tattoos and tattoing, about art and history. He stopped at one point to pull down a couple of books of collections of old type faces taken from 19th century printed documents, as well as a reprint of an early 20th century Sears and Roebuck catalog. He showed me all of the filigree that adorned the banners and letters, and talked about how the early tattoo artists added that kind of ornament to their work because it was what they saw all around them all the time. Much the same kind of impulse that drives my design choices, a response to what I see around me. Now that kind of ornament is de riguer in tattoos, though the source is often forgotten. Like those horrible raised-panel doors in cheap kitchens, doors made of MDF that have a “panel” routed into them, even though there is not structural necessity. The aesthetic persists, but because the original reasons for the aesthetic are forgotten they seem hollow, inapplicable. Even to the uninitiated, they seem somehow “off.”

By the end of the session, I was ready to be done. This is my story with tattoos, generally. Right at the end of the session, exhausted and with raw burning skin, I just want to have a beer and not have needles jabbed into me. Then a few months or a year later I am raring to go again. The memory of the pain fades and the joy that I feel about the work grows. I love all of my tattoos. They are markers of events, of places, of important things in my life: my wife, boats I have sailed, places I have lived. When our son is born, I am sure we will both get tattoos that commemorate that event as well.

Here is a photo of the tattoo taken this morning. It is a fitting frame for the quote, and I think it came out really well. I feel fortunate to be the recipient of such artisanry and craftsmanship, and grateful to have three hours last night with someone who respects and loves history as I do, and who reveres craft and artisanry as I do.