A Copper Alliance Member
Copper in the Arts
Issue #18: October '08 - Cont'd
Lowitz & Company: Tile-Making Goes Bronze
Bronze tiles in various patina finishes
Photograph courtesy of Lowitz. & Co.
“It’s sort of like the idea is in the air,” Lowitz says. “It came to all of us at roughly the same time.”
Then, there seemed to be a hunger in the marketplace for metal tiles, and numerous companies in the metal business began to add tiles to their product lines. Of course, mass production meant lower quality.
Today, Lowitz & Company is one of a very small number of studios that continue to create sand-cast art tiles by hand in bronze. The company also produces door knobs and drawer pulls, and no two pieces are exactly alike. Hand-cast tiles made by companies like Lowitz are solid and heavy. A single 3” x 3” foundry art tile weighs about half a pound and is very sturdy. Many of the mass-produced tiles are hollow on the back, or they’re made primarily of plastic resin with bronze particles. They may look like bronze, but they actually aren’t durable enough to be used on the floor, and they don’t age to a patina finish.
Lowitz’s designs are used on walls and fireplaces, but are primarily used as accent pieces in stone tile floors. The company also produces stone and ceramic tile designs.
“We use the bronze as a counterpoint to the stone,” says Lowitz, “because stone is such a stately material, and bronze is also a noble material. So, they seem to go well together.”
Lowitz & Company continues the tradition of creating sand-cast art tiles by hand in bronze
Photograph courtesy of Lowitz. & Co.
Lowitz thinks hard before adding a new design to the company’s collection. It may take weeks or months before a final decision is made.
“There’s a great line that architect Louis Kahn once said,” Lowitz recalls. “He said something like, ‘I ask the bricks what they want to be, and the bricks say they want to be an arch.’ That’s kind of the way I look at the bronze. What does the bronze want to be? Bronze is heavy and strong and noble, so it wants to have patterns that express that.”
Lowitz prefers designs that take advantage of the character of the metal.
“If I were designing things to be made in nickel silver,” he says, “I would make very different things because nickel silver is shiny---it’s glistening. So, you’d want something that maybe had facets like a diamond so that it would reflect light in a more spectacular way…. Bronze almost has a buttery surface when it’s polished.”
Lowitz maintains a staff of about five, but he creates the company’s designs himself.
“The designs begin and end with me, but it kind of takes a journey through conversations with others,” he says. “We’re a small company, and everybody wears a lot of hats.”
Each of the company’s Foundry Art designs is first carved by hand in sculptor’s wax, which allows for a great deal of detail. Multiple patterns are then made from the original wax model, which is sand cast in bronze. The artisans then use several different proprietary finishing steps to achieve a finish that the company has become known for – something between rustic and refined.
“Among those of us who make bronze tiles, each of us has a different take on it,” says Lowitz. “There are people who are more rustic and people who make them very pristine, but ours have a kind of earthy but refined character. There’s more of a hand-wrought feeling to them, but they’re still quite silky to the touch.”
Lowitz & Company’s tiles are displayed and sold in showrooms across the globe in the U.S., Western Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
Resources:
Lowitz & Company, 4401 N. Ravenswood Ave., Chicago, IL, (773) 784-2628
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Patience Required: Chasing Copper and Silver
Metal artist Alan Jones
Photograph courtesy of Alan Jones
"He didn't think I had the patience to do it," Jones said.
And patience is definitely required. The art of chasing, also known as repousse, is hundreds of years old and very few people still practice the trade anymore. Simply put, chasing involves pushing the metal (silver, copper or brass in most cases) and forming it into patterns using punch tools, thereby creating embellishments on a given work. Jones worked as a chef for a while, but tired of it and went back to his father and asked again. This time, his father said yes.
"That was a big day for me," said Jones, who is a third generation chaser. "He taught me how to do the chasing and we used to sit in our workshop in the garden in England just tapping away."
Born and raised in England and now residing in Dover, New Jersey, Jones caught the eye of Tiffany & Company, who brought him to the States where he was one of only four commercial chasers in the entire country. Jones left Tiffany in 1993 and now freelances for large and small companies, and individual clients. His company, Decorative Metal, is small and unassuming, but hammers out impressive work. It's a testament to his craftsmanship that he's been busy ever since. Jones will chase most anything.
"Antique silver goblets, trophies, tea sets, punch bowls, watering cans, baby cups. I can even do a door handle with a certain motif. I can carve that out of a solid lump of brass."
Not long ago he chased a brass sink to match the pattern on the faucets the clients already had in their home.
His most recent job? "I just did a piece for Harley-Davidson,” says Jones. “I like to be diverse in what I do. This piece was an aluminum air filter cover for a motorcycle, with a skull with flames coming out of it and pointing a gun straight at you. It was great and the customer was thrilled to bits."
Additionally Jones has chased kitchen range hoods, backsplashes and metal tiles. Virtually anything of metal can be chased with a design which adds value to the object. Though silver is his main metal, Jones also uses copper. "It's such a rich material," he says. "I really fancy doing a copper bath. It’s the big canvas I’m looking for."
But more often than not, he's working on minute movements. He chased a copper plate of a home, commissioned by the owner which was made with 14-gauge copper sheet. "If the material is too thin you can't punch it out," he says. The punch simply breaks through. He leaves the finishing of the copper, either a sealer, patina or accelerator, to his clients.
He makes most of his own tools and has nearly 1,000 different punches, of which 30 to 40 are the most consistently used. Most common of all is a tool called the snarling iron, an elongated “S” curved piece of metal. One end is held by a vice, and the other end allows the vessel, like a goblet, to be placed over the opposite end of the snarling iron. Then Jones taps the iron near the vice, which in turn reverberates down the length of the iron.
“It makes the snarling iron recoil and creates a dent on the inside, recording it to the outside. From that larger dent, you can make a flower, scroll, whatever,” he says. Though Jones happily works in his workshop out of his home ("I’ve got a lovely workshop, the grounds are nice and deer walk by," he says) the big inspiration comes from the London Silver Vaults on Chancery Lane in London. The vaults, open to the public, house 42 different shops, mainly of silver. "When I’m at the vaults, I’m amazed by the quality of the chasing done a 100, 200 years ago. Everything is in perfect proportion."
Jones’ wife, Ysela Caceres, is also a chaser, and in fact she's the head chaser at Tiffany. She regularly works on the Super Bowl trophy, something Jones himself used to do when he was with Tiffany. He's proud of all his works, but the tea set he did for President Bush, and the eight inch high solid cast gold camels he produced for the Queen, (Her Majesty presented the camels to a sheik) rank near the top.
"The more difficult something is, the more I like it. I prefer a challenge," he said.
Resources:
Alan Jones, Decorative Metal, Dover, NJ, (973) 328-0175
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Copper in the Arts: HISTORY
Thing 1, Thing 2, Bronzed Anew: The Dr. Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Garden
Bronzed Theodor Geisel (aka, Dr. Seuss)
with The Cat in the Hat
Photograph by Paul David
And the tradition continues!
The Dr. Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Garden, in Springfield, Massachusetts, part of the Springfield Museum, proudly contains a bronze and copper tribute to these immortal characters in this town where Theodor Seuss Geisel, aka, Dr. Seuss, was born. These wonderful stories delight children of all ages. The memorial garden, with five bronze sculptures, is designed with three big groupings at the corner of the Quadrangle green near the Springfield Library. Sculptor Lark Grey Dimond Cates, Geisel’s stepdaughter, sculpted these bronze tributes to Dr. Seuss. including a bronze Theodor Geisel at his desk with the Cat in the Hat by his side, Horton Court, with a 14-foot Horton the Elephant stepping out of an open book with Thing One, Thing Two, Sam-I-Am, Sally and her brother, and the big hearted moose, Thidwick. The third group is The Storyteller: a Seussian storytelling chair backed by a 10-foot tall book with the text to “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!”
“We chose bronze due to its timeless quality that brings out a character in sculpture that you don’t find with other materials,” says Joseph Carvalho, President of the Springfield Museums Association. “If the patina is bronzed correctly it has nuances brought out with the light of every season. Each time you look at a particular sculpture it has a different feel to it, especially outdoor sculptures. Since we added the sculpture park our attendance has grown to 150,000 people a year.”
Cates was the overall project manager and, according to Carvalho, put her total soul into this project by creating the bronze sculptures.
Geisel's Lorax, captured in bronze
Photograph by Paul David
Cates designed the pieces, created the small models that were proofed by her mother, Audrey, enlarged and then sculptured them.
“Ken worked with me for six and a half years on this wonderful project,” she says. “I also had two enlargers because every statue is life-size, and I worked with three foundries – Art Research and Technology, in Lancaster, PA, Valley Bronze, in Joseph, Oregon, and the San Diego Naval Training Center that had a foundry at that time. High quality bronze was used in each statue.”
According to Cates, they also installed a life-cast in the library at Dartmouth College, where he graduated that also contains an oil portrait of Geisel. The life-cast is actually his right hand holding a colored pencil, and Seussian landscape, as if he was penning his last words – ‘Oh, The Places You’ll Go” - his last book.
“We have Yertle the Turtle sulking in his pond, and the Lorax in his tree reminding us that we all have to take care of this planet. It’s about 45 by 45 inches – the size of the portrait,” Lark explains. “So, there are actually two Dr. Seuss’s and Cat in the Hat Sculptures. I enjoy that it’s there so I can visit him.”
Resources:
A brief video walkthrough of the sculpture garden.
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Dr. Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Garden, 21 Edwards St., Springfield, MA, (413) 263-6800
Copper in the Arts: NEWS
Rodin Retrospective the Frist - September 12, 2008
The Thinker, by Auguste Rodin
In his teens, Rodin attended the government school for craft and design, where he learned to draw plaster casts of ancient sculpture and to model in clay. Although he sought admission to the prestigious École des Beaux Arts, he was rejected three times. Rodin’s struggle for recognition dominated his early career. During the 1860s Rodin submitted his work to the annual juried Paris Salon exhibitions—the most important shows of their day—but suffered a series of rejections. In 1877 his work was finally admitted to the Salon. Significant early works, such as Mask of the Man with the Broken Nose, and Bust of Jean-Baptiste Rodin, Rodin’s earliest portrait and first known sculpture of his father, are included in the exhibition.
During Rodin’s time, the most highly regarded sculptures were projects created for public places, because they were thought to have universal rather than personal meaning. Rodin received his first public commission in 1880 to create a sculptural entrance for a new museum of decorative arts in Paris, which ultimately was never built. The Gates of Hell featured hundreds of figures modeled in low to high relief and in the round. The imagery was inspired by Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, which was part of The Divine Comedy—an epic poem written about 1308 that depicted the author’s fictional journey through Hell and Purgatory to Paradise. Rodin’s environment of tormented souls represents not only the underworld but also the suffering of humankind in general.
At the peak of his career, Rodin was regarded by some as the greatest sculptor since Michelangelo. He devised his own expressive language, conveying the vitality of the human spirit through a vigorous modeling technique that emphasized his personal response to the subject. Linking the French academic tradition, which idealized the human form, with the experimental ethos of modernism, Rodin frequently achieved a dynamic interplay between stasis and movement. In many of his sculptures tension is created by contrasting highly refined aspects of human anatomy and areas of unfinished clay or marble, an approach he admired in certain of Michelangelo’s works. Rodin’s reputation as the leading sculptor of his time led to such major commissions as The Gates of Hell, Burghers of Calais, and Monument to Honoré de Balzac.
“A Magnificent Obsession enables visitors to explore his genius in far greater depth, to understand the sources and concepts that inspired Rodin’s passionate outlook on life, which may in turn inspire us as it has so many people around the world,” says Mark Scala, chief curator at the Frist Center.
Resources:
Frist Center for the Visual Arts, 919 Broadway, Nashville, TN, (615) 244-3340
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