Nate Sheaffer - Neon Sculptor / Author

Ten years ago, my life changed forever. Early in 1999, I lost my glassblowing business to offshore competition, followed eight months later by the suicide of my closest brother – my own Y2K meltdown. Losing the brother, some who knew him would say, was every bit as inevitable as having the company disappear in the ever-flattening world of labor distribution. In odd and very different ways, both losses eventually improved my life, also inserting an interesting speed bump, rather – a detour – in my creative life.

I’d been working myself sick – meeting deadlines for production neon sign orders and managing two dozen employees did nothing for my health, which I had been neglecting ever since graduating college. The first half dozen years, I pulled many more all-nighters bending glass than I’d ever done studying. The company grew into something so unrecognizable from the small sculpture studio and boutique glass shop I’d started thirteen years earlier, morphing into a hungry, ugly albatross with monthly overhead twice the size of the first year’s gross revenues – so much more a greedy burden than creative passion. Four months after shutting down production, friends told me I looked ten years younger. I certainly felt at least ten years less burdened.

The loss of the brother, well…what can I say in less than a hundred million words that might adequately convey my sense of loss? I grew up idolizing him the way younger siblings often do. Eventually, we worked together; in fact, he was employee number one when time came to hire someone, and so the two things – neon company and brother – are inextricably tangled in both glorious memory and flaming demise.

Garth was my brother’s name, and when he died, my creative energies turned to writing about him and the many adventures we shared. The cathartic aspects of the process – getting it all out, onto paper – put his life and death into a kind of manageable perspective allowing me to remember without breaking down every day into a puddle of sorrow.

During ten years, learning to express feelings and ideas on paper, a gnawing gap widened in my soul’s creative core, quite literally in the motor memory of my creative soul. Before the losses, I’d spent thirteen years making things with my hands, creating neon and steel sculptures, neon signs, animated displays, advertising prototypes – things. I value the creative process governing writing – constructing sentences and developing plots and characters – but my arms and hands ache to make things.

Not long after Garth died, I moved out of a space specifically designed to enable creation of sculpture. Then I moved again into another home with no workspace whatsoever, and then again and then once more this past year, making it difficult for me to even imagine assembling any of the dozens of sculptures for which I’ve carried drawings and parts longer than a decade. This spring, I put it out of my head that I needed to have a bona fide shop to create sculpture; lack of a perfect work environment had become my best excuse.

Though no one but myself had been keeping me from working, I actually said, aloud, inside a small storage shed, “You’re allowed to do this again.” In the corner, the only witness, a black and white illustration of a woman stared at me through ten years of dirt and grime. She was the last thing Garth created – an image he’d incorporated into a neon wall hanging modeled after the graphic on his favorite t-shirt. Her odd smile looked angry through the decade of schmutz; angry that I’d let her neon tubing become broken and paid her no attention since Garth died.

I organized the shed and began assembling neon and aluminum bits and pieces into my first thing in a long, long time. Between taking care of my children full-time and writing, I spent the next month working in two-hour bursts – every third day or so – until the magic moment arrived when I plugged the piece into a drop cord draped seventy-five feet across the yard to the shed.

In terms of the sculpture itself, the result was what I expected; one or two elements not exactly as intended, but mostly it represented a fully fleshed-out version of my ten-year-old sketch. What caught me off guard was how allowing myself to create (even in a less-than-ideal space) flipped a maniacal switch whose contacts had rusted years ago. Within days, I repaired Garth’s last neon piece, hung it in my home, and began a daily routine of gathering and sorting materials for the next projects.

It’s been a difficult, long decade, living with the idea of creating sculpture relegated to memory and imagination and now, suddenly – thankfully, it’s just as difficult to imagine stopping.

The most remarkable of remarkable things I witnessed during a month spent in China was culture clash – very old and very new – coexisting and competing for road space. Young and old, physically one or two generations removed, expose a gap wider than Jimi Hendricks and The Christie Minstrels – in many ways it’s the land time forgot.

We are analog beings. Analog is the smooth steady sensation on our hands, through our eyes, and in our ears, it’s unlimited in detail and richness.  Analog is the space in which we create things; it’s where we get our hands dirty. Our senses are not nearly acute enough to capture the immense detail of our analog world.

Digital is like touching a hair brush of ones and zeros, it’s like looking at an image full of holes or listening to harsh staccato tones.  Move the bristles close enough to each other and potentially it’s a good surface simulation. As we experience every day, those 1’s and 0’s eventually reach the edge of our senses. Digital detail is limited to what our senses need to perceive the facsimile of analog richness.

Digital gave us efficiencies and the ability to move and edit large numbers. Large portable numbers give us the ability to manipulate a simulated world. What we know is that digital technology is fast, inexpensive and accessible. As generations die, we further bake digital into our culture.  When fully baked, what then?

We all know quality when we see it.  We know what it feels like, and how it sounds, tastes and looks. Quality is not a simulation, it’s analog. Digital quality is a facsimile – albeit a good one – of real analog quality. What we experience as quality is the realness of fine detailed conception. Quality is the best humans can create.

Creativity is analog. There is no such thing as digital creativity.  Accept it, then understand there are critical points at the Analog to Digital conversion and vice versa.  In audio they’re called D/A Converters and they’re found in ever CD player and computer.  Lousy D/A converters mean you’ve lost sound fidelity. Want a quality photo print?  The D/A conversion from light to pixels or back from computer to ink on paper is the most crucial.  Everything else is just editing numbers, and yes there is good and bad editing but don’t forget the priorities are at either end.

My point is that the richness you and I perceive as quality, just like my experience in China, can be like old and new competing for road space. I recently viewed a presentation where an advertising opinion leader characterized the new definition of quality to a room full of students as: fast, accessible, and cheap.  As generations die this will get further baked into culture but, in reality, it’s more or less a digital simulation of what’s good enough and has nothing to do with real quality.

My point is illustrated in this beautiful video “UP THERE” about the precarious profession of hand painting billboards.

The Music: “Window” and “Twentytwoforteen” written by James Lavalle and performed by Album Leaf Courtesy of SUBPOP Records.

I smile and cringe at the same time when I hear the aphorism “back in the day” – at least when it’s used in a serious conversation.  Typically, it’s a punch line.

In the late 80’s the Apple Mac II taught us to set typography. Immediately anyone could set type.  We didn’t hardly notice when the stat camera darkroom was reclaimed for storage, or when you’re local type house became a Mailbox Etc. or a Postal Instant Press (similar to Kinko’s).  Creative destruction is no longer a concept but a lifestyle.

(in the photo: director Jake Wiens)

You no longer have 10,000 hours to become a supremely accomplished anything. Additionally, those superbly mastered skills that worked to differentiate your business, have distorted into obscure techniques for specialized fine artists. Thus, before you can cash in on those professional skills, they’re no longer in demand.  My peers surely remember the fine black and white prints on Agfa Portrega-Rapid Photo Paper processed in Bovira as a fond distant memory. “Damn, just when I was starting to get good.”

A Detroit auto-worker replaced by robots will mutter, “no shit”, when they hear a creative professional complain about digital this or CS4 that causing a downward creative demand.  Craftsmanship has taken many tough hits in the form of the newest creative tools.

Can the 10,0000 hour skill of a professional compete with the 500 hour skill of 1000 amateurs?  The new creative democracy yields plenty of broken hearts, but let’s looks beyond that to what the tools allow the ubiquitous creative minds to achieve.

No time to whine.  What I’m suggesting is that there has been no other period when a highly accomplished professional from one field could apply their expertise to another, and do it solo.  There are enough specialized skills automated by hardware and software to allow knowledge to cross disciplines, and then push those skills out to the masses like Rupert Murdoch.

Here’s a duel case study.  I found Jake Wiens’ video about Valo inline skates on a Vimeo Channel.  It’s one film director, producer and on-air personality distributing his content about Jon Julio: pro skater, graphic designer, skate designer, web designer, and CEO / Owner.   - Bruce DeBoer

Valo Inline Skates: valo-brand.com

Jake Wiens Vimeo Channel: http://vimeo.com/jakewiens

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Henri found surrealism in his painting early in life. The miraculous jump came at age 28, when he stumbled upon a 35mm Leica camera after being inspired by Marin Munkasci’s photograph of African American boys playing at the beach. [For those who are unfamiliar, the Leica was the camera of choice in photojournalism for nearly half a century designed for durability, light weight, speed and flexibility.] From that point on we’d know Cartier-Bresson as one of the worlds greatest photographers.

Henri was held by the Nazis as prisoner of war in 1940. Three years later he became an escapee after three tries, followed by 2 years of underground activity helping prisoners and other escapees.

At the end of the war, in addition to photographing a newly liberated Paris and traveling extensively,  Henri produced a documentary, “The Return”.  Henri’s most notable collaboration however, materialize in ’47 when he, Robert Capa, George Rodger, David Seymour and William Vandivert founded Magnum Photos which remains one of the premier photo agencies.

His first book of 126 photos titled,  “Images à la Sauvette” was published in 1952.  Translated to “The Decisive Moment”, the book’s title would help distill Cartier-Bresson’s work into words for generations of young photographers.

Cartier-Bresson returned to his original creative outlet around 1968, removing himself from the mainstream of Photography to devote more time to drawing and painting.  As he’d explained, the camera is another tool for intuition and spontaneity.

Cartier-Bresson’s work defines photography.  It’s not made or manipulated; it’s taken – formed out of a nearly involuntary snap of emotional judgment when composition and humanity meet in the frame.  There is a purity of communication in those frames; more than a moment captured, it’s a intuited moment felt by both subject and photographer.

Henri’s original moment in photography happened as he viewed this photo by Munkacsi.

“The only thing which completely was an amazement to me and brought me to photography was the work of Munkacsi. When I saw the photograph of Munkacsi of the black kids running in a wave I couldn’t believe such a thing could be caught with the camera. I said damn it, I took my camera and went out into the street.”

His frustration with surrealist painting – he destroyed most of his early works – was relieved through photography.  Cartier-Bresson is quoted by the Washington Post in 1957:

“Photography is not like painting. It is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative,” he said. “Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.”

That moment of decisiveness, according to Cartier-Bresson, can’t be taught. Its sensitivity, you have it or you don’t.

To my eye, the work of Cartier-Bresson is the essence of simplicity, geometry, tone, and emotion; composition, design, and intuition.   Never too detailed, it raises as many questions as answered.  It’s nostalgic the moment after capture.

“The simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression… . In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little human detail can become a leitmotif.” — Henri Cartier-Bresson

Henri Cartier-Bresson’s work can be found at Magnum Photos.

Part II of this video HERE.

Additional Links:
Cartier-Bresson Foundation

NPR Story on Henri Cartier-Bresson

Quotes were obtained from Wikipedia

Google search “craft” and you’ll get crafts for kids near the top position.  No one disagrees that quilting, basket weaving, balloon animal making, flower pressing, bead working, or corn doll making are crafts – of course they are.  There is, however, an age old dispute distinguishing art from craft.   Craft often gets the bad rap, especially from self fashioned fine artists.  Do we dare call Picasso or Pollack craftsmen?  How about David Burne, Santiago Calatrava, or Steve Jobs?

Craftsmen have guilds.  Master Craftsmen apprentice, gain skill and make money – or, at least they once did.  The industrial revolution reduced many craftsmen to hobbyists, but that doesn’t change their awesome skill, only the income stream.  If a craftsman no longer makes money do they involuntarily turn artist?

Social validators maintain that craft and art separate via intent:  function or personal expression, profit or pure aesthetic.  Make reproductions of art work, no matter how fine, they become product – the reproduction is transformed into craft that performs as art – confusing to say the least if you accept the premise.  A Ming vase was designed to hold flowers, made rare by antiquity, magically becomes a work of art.  When the two are bundled together as in “arts and crafts”, does kitsch over take the result by virtue of its label?

I occasionally ponder contemporary art that I simply don’t “get”.  Feel the emotional void?  The artist’s supplied blurb doesn’t help generate an emotional connection; it succeeds only at revealing the creator’s intent.  Do artists keep the work’s significance obscure so they can dictate interpretation, or are they miserable failures at their craft?  Chances are good they’d claim to be ahead of their time or too insightful for mass consumption.

Creativity is an ingenious mix of the familiar with the unexpected.  Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee, in their book, On Intelligence, describe remarkable creativity as using uncommon past analogies to make uncommon future predictions.  In other words, we combine previous experiences, knowledge, or thought patterns in imaginative ways to create new patterns that solve problems or shape artistic expression.  We solve new problems using what we know worked and combine life experience with our understanding of the current challenge.  Success creates new solutions that are pressed into service as past analogies the next time we’re challenged, hence skills are built.

With artistic endeavors, if too much “new” is introduced, it ceases to resonate with an audience.  It’s as if we pull our audience along with a delicate string.  Pull too hard and the connection breaks; too slack and attention is lost.  Proceeding with a broken string makes for self indulgent artistic expression.  True innovation breaks convention and violates predictions, but if shared unsuccessfully with fellow humans, otherwise significant creativity is either uniquely useless or massively self-indulgent. Craft is the connecting string.

To be skilled at a craft is not craftiness: i.e. adept in the use of subtlety and guile. The craftily skilled are not artistic fakers.  Craft is what we see, hear, read, taste and feel about creativity.  It’s the “Do” share of creativity.  Craft is the vehicle of personal expression and innovation. Craft is what we hone in order to push our imagination out to the masses.

From Kitsch to Avant-Guard, craft is what connects us to the artist; it’s the difference between satisfying a challenge and indecipherable theories.  High craftsmanship is rooted in human skill, expertise, dexterity, ability, and technique; machines can’t demonstrate craftsmanship.  If machines produce high quality objects, it’s the result of fine machining by the innovative humans who created the process.  Did you make an aesthetic decision in your crafting process?  Then the outcome is art, aka – human expression.  No decision?  Then you’re a machine or an exceptionally good plagiarist.

Craft gets polished through building on patterns of a skill pyramid: simple early skills topped by highly developed sophisticated abilities honed through repetition.  Once learned, the exceptionally gifted own the power to penetrate the sensations of others.  They inspire awe and excitement.  Their skill opens our emotional and intellectual receptors – we hunger and covet.   Our souls play emotional hosts to admiration, envy, and eagerness to take part in the fine art or creative innovation demonstrated through extraordinary craft: an enrichment of the human spirit.

With audience receptors unlocked, artists and innovators are released to share their creativity.  Creators at their skill peak report feeling emotion flow from each note of music played or every nuanced dance movement performed.  Each fine stroke of a brush or every architectural detail designed makes a meaningful human connection.  Remarkable craft is present in both the height of artistic expression and purposeful innovation.  Fine craftsmanship is the mouthpiece of creativity.

The objects we call Art or Craft are members of a continual spectrum under the creativity banner.  Odds-on, the most purposeful and predictable will be labeled “crafts”, while the most abstract and useless will not.  Where do we put the fulcrum in this teeter-totter?  Intuition may tell us, but it matters little unless you’re a government bureaucrat required to levy import duty, or an art dealer primed to cash in on the next Rembrandt.

It may also be a matter of context.  Display objects heretofore perceived as crafts in an art museum, they cease to be useful and therefore perceived as art by virtue of surroundings.  A rare Ming vase is no longer useful behind bulletproof glass.  New York’s Museum of Modern Art is a renowned venue for the exhibition of artworks that were – or are – mass produced and purposeful.  There seems to be no rule for which we can’t find an exception.

Why are “art objects” valued higher or fine artists held with greater esteem than those perceived as Crafts or Craftsmen?  Exclusivity and purity I suspect.  For the same reason art increases in value post mortem, objects perceived as crafts appear to be more easily reproducible.  They often have a product-like appearance such as an unlimited edition photograph or a Charles Eames Chair.

What’s more, Artists claim a purity that is unaffected by profit or committee approval.  Artistic “sell-outs” lose a piece of their soul [so I hear].  While profit motives can be problematic for artistic expression, I don’t believe it is the fulcrum of the creativity teeter-totter.  Countless great artists and innovators respond to commission, and the galleries are full of art for profit.

Those who spawn what we label “art” or “craft” use the same creative essentials.  Self designated artist or craftsman, approach personal expressions or innovations from different perspectives but achieve parallel results.  Intensity of emotion, imagination, function or intent dictates the resulting perception.  Uncommon creative passion is delivered through worthy craft; it’s the essential skill for successful transfer to an audience.