A Copper Alliance Member
Copper in the Arts
Issue #30: October '09 - Cont'd
Shaping the Modern Aesthetic: Emmett Culligan Designs
Emmett Culligan in his shop
Photograph by Erica David
There, artist/entrepreneur Emmett Culligan and his team conceive and construct architectural interiors for restaurants, retail stores, banks and casinos, as well as doing custom projects for private homes.
From its small beginnings in 1996, the business has expanded steadily. Now, clients include heavy hitters like P.F. Chang’s Bistro, Yard House restaurants, Hard Rock Café and Cartier.
Emmett Culligan Designs (ECD) specializes in the design, production and installation of utilitarian and decorative cladding, railings and stairs, balconies, awnings, custom and production furniture, fixtures and accessories.
I talked with Culligan in the comfortable office adjoining his studio, a space punctuated by paintings and sculpture that convey both weight and wit. These fine art pieces live side by side with vintage postcards, office equipment and practical art objects like the brass coat rack commissioned by P.F. Chang’s.
Energetic and candid, Culligan recounts his story so far. Trained as a sculptor--he holds a BFA from UC Denver--Culligan was attracted to welding and metalwork from the start. The business he subsequently built is a fusion of creativity and entrepreneurial spirit. It meets the needs of a small niche and he’s been very successful.
Emmett preps a sheet of copper.
“The truth is that there aren’t too many people who can do what we do and make it work," he says. "It’s a mixture of art, business and engineering.”
“There is a lot involved,” Culligan says. “We work with the architect to create the plan, the drawings, everything, then we produce it and travel to the site, wherever it is, then do the installation.”
“It’s an advantage,” he continues, “not to be limited by being local. Whether the client is a casino in Las Vegas or a restaurant a thousand miles away, we are the outsiders that come in and get the job done.”
A current project, which Culligan describes enthusiastically, is the cladding and architectural metalwork for IronStone Bank in Kansas City featuring copper rails and gold leaf on the roof.
When asked how he’s doing so well, even in the current economic downturn, he cites several things: coming from a family of entrepreneurs; absorbing the lesson of Michael Gerber’s seminal 1985 book E Myth, which argues that people with technical or artistic ability usually fail in business because they don’t figure out how to operationalize what they do; and finding a truly great office manager to coordinate operations.
His philosophy is to use his free moments to continue to fine tune every aspect of the process until it’s absolutely efficient. The point, he says, is to minimize mistakes.
“I don’t have a problem putting my ego aside to streamline the business because I have other artistic outlets” (he continues to do his own fine art projects)," says Culligan. “Maybe it’s geeky but it’s actually satisfying to me to work on the details.”
As an example of the importance of details, he cites a recent fiasco in shipping a $20,000 order. Everything was done perfectly except the crates weren’t right and they broke in transit, damaging the work. Now they’ve figured out how to do the crates right every time.
When I ask if there are particular metals he prefers, Culligan grins and says he doesn’t discriminate. He works with steel, bronze, brass and zinc as well as non-metal materials like glass, stone and wood.
Culligan does love working with copper, though, and points out that copper is great because of all its possibilities in terms of patina. He also likes that “it’s futuristic at the same time as being old school.” ECD gets all its copper from ThyssenKrupp, NA.
The same might be said of Culligan himself, since his family of entrepreneurs includes his great grandfather, the depression-era innovator who brought soft water to the masses with the memorable tagline, “Hey, Culligan Man!”
Resources:
Emmet Culligan Design, 3495 Wynkoop St., Denver, CO, (303) 433-1412
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Dick Roberts: From Photography to Metal
Dick Roberts at workPhotograph by Lois Roberts
Since he didn’t have the hand/eye coordination for painting, he ended up spending 40 years as a professional photographer. Then, the world of photography changed, switching to digital.
“Today, anyone with a digital camera and a computer can be a photographer,” says Roberts. So, he looked for another medium in which to express himself.
First, he tried woodworking, but it wasn’t quite challenging enough. Then, he began working with copper, and he hasn’t looked back since, although he now often mixes copper with steel and aluminum. “I started exploring different types of metals,” he says. “The more I got involved in it, the more I got excited about it.”
He felt that it was like magic to take a flat sheet of metal and create something entirely new out of it. This exploration led to all sorts of art pieces in both organic and abstract forms that Roberts sells to various customers. He creates sculptures, fountains, wall art, and more practical pieces like house number signs. While the majority of his work is commissioned, Roberts is always searching for new ideas. When he thinks of something he’d like to make, he doodles.
Roberts received a bachelor’s degree from a visual arts school in photography, but he’s entirely self-taught in metal work. All he had to work with in the beginning were aviation snips and an oxygen and acetylene torch. To educate himself, he read what a lot of other artists shared on the Internet.
“I’ve learned from other people, but they don’t even know me,” he says. “There’s a vast amount of information out there if you go looking for it.” Roberts is grateful for this generosity among artists and is happy to pass along any tips that he has discovered during his own journey.
So, when he tried with difficulty to cut steel by hand, he conducted some online research and discovered the CNC plasma cutter. Now, he designs everything on his computer and cuts out shapes for his art with the cutter. What once took hours to cut by hand now takes closer to 20 minutes.
With the plasma cutter, Roberts can scan a hand-cut leaf, for example, into his computer and cut as many in metal as he needs.
Copper wall sculpture
Photograph by Dick Roberts
For example, after cutting out shapes for a fountain with the plasma cutter, Roberts was still faced with flat copper pieces that had to be shaped into a vessel. “I used a tree stump and pounded them into the shape I wanted,” he says. “I did this by annealing and pounding and then annealing and pounding some more. After I got the shape I wanted, I used a planishing hammer to make them smooth.”
Roberts is aware that some artists believe using a plasma cutter is cheating. But he contends that few artists are working the way metal artists did 100 years ago.
“Most artists are using some sort of mechanical device,” he says, “so it’s just the next step in technology.”
While he likes the idea that he can save his designs on the computer and cut the shapes again whenever he wants, Roberts doesn’t love to repeat work. Like most artists, he prefers to try something new and stretch his skills to see what he can accomplish. Roberts gets his steel and aluminum from a local store called Bob Dean’s Supply, and he gets his copper from Stormcopper.com.
“Copper is a strange metal,” Roberts says. “If you heat it up to red hot but not burn it, it becomes very soft and pliable. But once you start working it again, it becomes hard…. I like the coloring of it and the way you can handle it.”
Resources:
Dick Roberts Studio of Metal Art, Fort Meyers, FL
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Copper in the Arts: EVENTS
- Palm Beach Jewelry, Art, and Antique Show
Feb 15, '13 - Feb 18, '13 - Native Expressions: Dave McGary’s Bronze Realism
Mar 7, '13 - Jun 30, '13 - Evolving Character Head Demonstration with John Coleman
Mar 9, '13 - Mar 9, '13 - More Upcoming Events...
Copper in the Arts: HISTORY
The Legacy of Gregorian Copper
Gregorian Copper Plate
Photograph courtesy of Casa Romantica
This comprehensive copper exhibit, running through November 8, is its own “toast” to the Gregori family whose copper facility became a well-known international business during its three decades of operation in San Clemente. P. R. Gregori, the artist/founder of the company, was educated at the Butler Art Institute in Youngstown, Ohio, and after WW II received hands-on experience at Craftsman Studios at Laguna Beach, California, an artistic commune in the 1920s that evolved into a facility that produced a wealth of copper products in the Arts and Crafts style. This experience inspired Gregori and his brother Fred to start Gregori Copper in 1946. (At the same time Harry McIntosh also left to form Vermont Copper Crafters, which ceased production in 1951 due to the copper shortage during the Korean War.)
The newly formed Gregori Copper company began modestly in the garage of the Gregori brothers' parent's home in Capistrano Beach. In two short years, they were able to move into their permanent facility in San Clemente. Soon, Gregori Copper was shipping copper items all over the U.S. and to Latin America.
While Fred Gregori handled sales, P.R. Gregori not only ran the manufacturing site but was also the artist behind the copperworks. He designed all of the copper products and even made his own tools and dies. Using large sheets of copper in various gauges, Gregori fashioned utilitarian but extremely beautiful items using hand tools and even a spinning lathe. Each object was hand-beaten and finished by an acid bath. Gregori developed a special bluing process that gave each piece a depth of color and then he hand-rubbed them with steel wool, creating either a solid copper finish or a satin finish. To ensure that the copper would retain its color, it was lacquered with a gun sprayer and then baked for 40 minutes.
At the height of Gregori Copper's business, it employed 25 people and garnered annual sales of half a million dollars. In 1968, the company was sold to Sunbell, and the copperworks was eventually moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and continued to produce beaten copper products well into the 80s. P.R. Gregori and his wife moved to New Mexico, but soon returned to California where P.R. opened a dining establishment, Papa Pio's Italian Restaurant, in Dana Point. Sunbelt sold the company twenty years ago to a firm in Lemmon, South Dakota, that produces giftware, using various metals and resins, including delicate jewelry made with copper.
Though P.R. Gregori's legacy can still be found in private collections and some auction houses, the exquisite glory of his work is best captured in this Casa Romantica exhibit, offering a wide range of his wares. It is indeed an intimate look into a Southern California craftsman.
Resources:
Casa Romantica Cultural Center and Gardens, 415 Avenida Granada, San Clemente, CA
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Copper in the Arts: NEWS
Frick Exhibit Features Copper Daguerreotype Photographs - October 03, 2009
Eadweard J. Muybridge (American, 1830-1904). Valley of Yosemite, from Rocky Ford, 1872. Photograph courtesy of The Frick Art Museum
Icons of American Photography presents some of the best work by masters of the medium, like Mathew Brady, William Henry Jackson, Eadweard Muybridge, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Robert Frank, encompassing themes of portraiture, the Western landscape, Pictorialism, documentary photography, and abstraction.
The exhibition explores the technical developments of photography, starting with outstanding examples of daguerreotypes—a sheet of copper coated with light sensitive silver. The daguerreotype gave way to salt, albumen, and then gelatin silver prints. Technologies improved to accommodate larger sizes, easy reproduction of multiple prints from a single negative, and commercially available negative film and print papers. As we move into an increasingly digitized twenty-first century, the lure of the photographer’s magic and the mysteries of making photographic images appear on paper is still strong.
Icons of American Photography chronicles American life seen through the camera’s lens. The earliest days of photography saw a proliferation of portraiture—intimately personal and honest in composition. Advances in photographic processes allowed for a range of expressive qualities that were exploited by photographers with an artistic flair. In a style known as Pictorialism, works such as Hamadryads, 1910, by Anne Brigman (1869–1950) imitated the subject matter of painting.
During the late nineteenth century, the U.S. Congress commissioned photographers to document the American West. Photographs by Timothy O’Sullivan (1840–1882) and William Henry Jackson (1843–1942) are the most celebrated from among this era. Responding to the rapid growth of the twentieth century, many photographers shifted their attention from depictions of the natural world to the urban landscape. The power, energy, and romance of the city inspired varied approaches, from sweeping vistas to tight, close-up details and unusual camera angles.
Exploiting the new medium, numerous photography projects were instituted as part of FDR’s New Deal. The most legendary was that of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) run by Roy Stryker, who hired such important photographers such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Arthur Rothstein. As an art form, photography kept in step with formalist modern styles and an increasing trend toward abstraction. By 1960, photography had attained a prominent place not only among the fine arts, but in popular culture as well, ushering in a new era of image-based communication that has profoundly affected the arts as well as everyday life.
Icons of American Photography: A Century of Photographs from the Cleveland Museum of Art is organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art. The exhibition is curated by Tom Hinson, Curator of Photography and is on view until Jan. 3, 2010.
Resources:
The Frick Art Museum, 7227 Reynolds St., Pittsburgh, PA, (412) 371-0600
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