Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Grandfather was a Blacksmith


Almost every smith will say that from time to time a visitor will announce, “My grandfather was a blacksmith.”  Eventually, that event will become less common.  Blacksmith numbers are not what they were a century ago.

One of the friends, Scott Miller, who often helps me can confidently claim his grandfather, Jim Lewis, was a blacksmith.  He has the proof of it.  A history of his hometown, Lebo, Kansas, contains a photograph of the grandfather and great-grandfather standing by the door where they burned the cattle brands of their rancher clients.  The old building stood from the 1880’s until 1951 when it was replaced by a Quonset hut, which became widely available for civilian use after WWII. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quonset_hut

Scott has a good eye for design, a devotion to technical competence and the strength to pull it together so one more branch is forming on the blacksmithing craft tree and someday there will be others who can say, “My grandfather was a blacksmith.”






Saturday, May 18, 2013

Groove, Slit, Slot, Hole


Even if we are familiar with the language we are often not precise in picking our descriptive words.

A groove is a long, narrow indentation. Such as a furrow, trench or the spiral groove of a phonograph record. There is no “all the way through” connotation. It walks the boundary between a line and a hole. Think of the mark left by the blacksmith’s veining chisel.

A slit is a long narrow cut with an “all the way through” connotation.

The insect emerges from a cocoon through a slit. The scissors cut a slit in the paper. The knife slit the throat. The notion is that there is a lot of length and virtually no width. When the blacksmith’s slitting chisel pierces a bar it creates a slit.

A slot is a wide slit - longer than it's wide, which is designed for something to pass through. Often the shape of a long rectangle like a coin slot, a letter slot, or a ballot box slot. A blacksmith’s slot punch knocks out a rectangular slug.

http://www.blacksmithsjournal.com/archives/issue_153.php

It can get more complicated. Essentially, I have described several kinds of “holes”. A hole is a hollow space in either a surface or a solid. So, a hole can be a cavity or an aperture (fenestration) depending upon the “all the way through” nature of it.

Often holes imply a roundness aspect more than a linear aspect. Paper and leather hole punches remove circular drops. Most blacksmithing hole punches make round or square holes. But the majority of square holes start as round holes and are drifted square.

This site gives a nice pictoral and text description of punching round holes. http://ironoakfarm.blogspot.com/2010/07/fiery-friday-punching-hole-in-steel.html


I’ve been making a lot of square holes this week while building the pieces for a railing grille with a lot of passthroughs so I began musing about the general nature of these negative spaces.

http://www.persimmonforge.com/

Saturday, May 11, 2013

Besler's Iris


When I’m working on a sculpture project it seems to help me if I imagine some story or theme related to the ironwork.  In this case, a delightful couple from Louisiana wanted a depiction of “Iris” which could be displayed on the wall in a given space.

First,  there were some technical decisions to be made.  I decided to concentrate on the German bearded rhizomatous plant variety as it is the one we see most commonly.  Next, I decided to create elements which were close to life size and representational and I chose the space orientation and decided to avoid framing to let the flowers “live free.”  

With those guidelines I did some image research looking to see how other artists, sculptors, painters, photographers and scientific illustrators had rendered their subjects.  Although Vincent van Gogh’s “Irises” immediately came to mind, I specifically was recalling some images of the scientific illustration type I had once seen.  What I discovered that looked familiar were images recorded by Basilius Besler.

“His work, “Hortus Eystettensis” (Garden of Eichstätt), is man’s earliest documentation of a specific garden and over 1,000 varieties of flowers were depicted in 367 exquisitely engraved and colored plates. In the early 1600s, the Prince Bishop of Eichstätt in Germany created what was probably the first comprehensive botanical garden devoted to flowering plants.”  A quote from http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hortus_Eystettensis

That extraordinary work set a new standard for scientific illustration and it seemed to point me to the rest of my challenge.  I have forged and fabricated iris from my earliest blacksmithing days.  The entrance to my home still displays an iris hand rail and an iris wall sconce.  They are no longer representative of what I think of as good work but they are a reminder of where I began. Now I wanted to rethink iris in iron and try to achieve a new artistic interpretation.

I began by studying some flowering plant botany again and then specifically iris pollination.  Sometimes I think I forget that flowers are all about reproduction of the species and it is a happy coincidence that they are so visually appealing to us human beings.  Iris need to attract insect pollinators.
The iris flower is of interest as an example of the relation between flowering plants and pollinating insects. The shape of the flower and the position of the pollen-receiving and stigmatic surfaces on the outer petals form a landing-stage for a flying insect, which in probing for nectar, will first come into contact with the perianth, then with the stigmatic stamens in one whorled surface which is borne on an ovary formed of three carpels. The shelf-like transverse projection on the inner whorled underside of the stamens is beneath the overarching style arm below the stigma, so that the insect comes in contact with its pollen-covered surface only after passing the stigma; in backing out of the flower it will come in contact only with the non-receptive lower face of the stigma. Thus, an insect bearing pollen from one flower will, in entering a second, deposit the pollen on the stigma; in backing out of a flower, the pollen which it bears will not be rubbed off on the stigma of the same flower.” A quote from  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_(plant)

So in the final formulation of the plan for my new iris motif I would try to represent the reproductive anatomy more attentively and in overall form imitate the scientific illustration style of Besler.  The final note to this story is that 2013 is the 400th anniversary of the publication of “Hortus Eystettensis” so this piece I consider a tribute to Besler - “Besler’s Iris”.

The owners sent me a photo of the iris in their home.




Some of Besler’s other illustrations can be seen here: