A Copper Alliance Member
Copper in the Arts
Copper Gardens: Where Gates and the Outside World Join
A wide set copper gate. Photograph courtesy of David Burns
As a self-taught woodworker and home builder, Burns noticed that working inside a house and remodeling, with tension and stress regularly in the rooms, led to what he calls “tight money” in his now former career. While helping a landscape designer friend by installing gates, pergolas, fences and outbuildings for her, he realized that working outside, playing in the dirt, seemed to actualize “happy money.”
With his wife Annie as a flight attendant, he once traveled to Rome, waiting for her as he sat across from the Pantheon and thought of how his wooden deck project in the works for a job at home would not be around for anyone to see in another century. But glimpsing the Pantheon’s ancient structure stirred him to think of how different his labors would be if he channeled them into something with longevity—and so his deep-rooted penchant for copper began.
“It was comfortable,” Burns says about when he first touched copper with the intention of creating art from it, famous for his specialty gates today. “It just made sense and felt right, correct.”
About 15 years ago, Burns opened Copper Gardens in a shop just a few footfalls away from his home in Rough and Ready, CA. Since then, he has displayed his landscape complements at garden shows around the region, but most of his pieces are custom orders.
An outer window garden structure. Photograph courtesy of David Burns
A former racecar driver and auto repair shop owner, Burns had access to a slew of tools in his copper shop, but has also made his own, along with his own hinges and locks for gates, since none are pre-made.
Burns once built a copper-stretched circular couch in four seven-foot sections for a client with a home in the Abaco Islands in the Bahamas—bamboo and banana palm leaves trailing its expanse.
A somewhat comical anecdote stems from a repeat customer, one of the founding members of The Grateful Dead, Bob Weir, in that people keep accidentally driving into his custom-built gate made by Burns. This means Burns is handling repairs of the gate for Weir more than he’s ever spent time working for any other client.
In addition to his copper gates, Burns also creates custom lighting, fountains, wall pieces, chairs, tables and recently finished two life-size heron replicas. He also teaches his approach to small classes, passing his legacy on.
“It somehow does my heart good to know that somebody, somewhere thought about a future that he or she would never see. I just have such great respect for that,” Burns says about using copper in art. “To me, that’s thinking about others.”
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Gina Michaels: Creating Airy Collage-like Bronze Sculptures
Gina Michaels at work in her studio.Photograph courtesy of Gina Michaels
"They handed me a hammer and chisel, put me in an abandoned limestone quarry and I spent the next five months carving stone,” she recalls. “It was my first experience actually doing nothing but art for weeks."
She went on to acquire her BA in Art and Art History at Oberlin College in Ohio, then moved to New York City where she apprenticed with sculptors Joel Shapiro and Sam Wiener. She lived and worked in New York City for 15 years before relocating to Philadelphia and obtaining a MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. She met and married John Phillips, known for restoring and renovating sculptures. In the late 1990s, they attended a sand-casting party at the studio of Isaac Witkin, a pioneer in the spontaneous use of flowing bronze in sculpture.
“Before the sand-casting party I was a figurative sculptor, creating small bronzes of bodies in movement using the ceramic shell lost-wax process,” says Michaels. “On impulse, I pressed my hands and forearms in the sand. We poured bronze into the mold and, when it hardened, turned it over. I was completely blown away by the result. It was archaic and contemporary, figurative and symbolic. My Impressions series, including the large Jacob's Ladder, has its origin in that initial sand pour."
Michaels converted an old 10,000 square-foot sheet metal shop into a studio on Lena Street in Philadelphia, where she is one of a few women in the country fabricating bronze today.
Hand Plant #11. Bronze sculpture by Gina MichaelsPhotograph courtesy of Gina Michaels
The metal's flow and the "happy accidents" that occur during casting make Michaels' work unique. Sculptural elements are cast flat. "When I need a 3-D curve, I whack the bronze with a heavy mallet until it looks right. Even large hand plants are assembled improvisationally. Rough ideas change before I'm finished. Modern silicon bronze is stronger than traditional bronze and can be welded and juxtaposed for a collage-like effect. Once the welding is complete, hot patina is applied and wax stabilizes the patina and brings out the color and texture."
Michaels has participated in numerous group, public and solo art exhibitions throughout her career. A solo show, "Improvisational Botany: Sculpture and Prints by Gina Michaels," will be held at the Briarbush Nature Center from September 9 to October 30.
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Keith Jacobshagen: A Glowing Distillation of Landscape
Keith Jacobshagen 05.24.2010, oil on copper.A Golden Year series.
Photograph courtesy of Larry Gawel
This influence led Jacobshagen to become one of the the country’s most sought after landscape painters, with his series of signature paintings on copper that capture the emotion, depth and brilliance of the Midwestern sky. Since 1968, he has had sixty-three solo exhibitions, including shows in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. His work is included in many public, corporate, and private collections throughout the country.
When Jacobshagen first began experimenting with painting in the 1960s and 1970s, the sky and earth of Nebraska became his muse. Taking the advice of an older painter friend who suggested that he make as many paintings as he possibly could, Jacobshagen discovered that the only way to capture that vastness in one sitting was to paint on small canvasses, 3 x 5 notecard size.
Over time Jacobshagen expanded those landscape ideas onto larger canvasses, developing a very loyal following. In an exhibit at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha last month, he returned to those small images. This time Jacobshagen produced 365 images of the same location at the same time of day on postcard size plates of copper.
Keith Jacobshagen, 06.17.2010, oil on copper.
A Golden Year series.
Photograph courtesy of Larry Gawel
“I saw the copper as having this great possibility of exhibiting a kind of partnership between what I do as a painter and what the copper does naturally,” he says. “Somehow I sort of understood that if I laid down a layer of paint that was thin and therefore close to transparent or maybe even transparent, that the copper would come through that and would allow the paint itself to appear incandescent without my taking an enormous amount of time to mix it to that effect.”
Hesse McGraw, the curator of the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, says the public’s reaction to Jacobshagen’s work has been positive but very surprising. “Keith’s work is well known in the region,” he says. “People want to rush into the room and often we hear them gasp. An audible indication of that surprise is a pretty wonderful thing.”
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Copper in the Arts: NEWS
The Art of Steampunk by Art Donovan Launched - August 01, 2011
Art Donovan's Steampunk Book
Photograph courtesy of Art Donovan
The Art of Steampunk brings the vision of Steampunk artists from around the world, alive on the page, providing a unique insight into the captivating and dynamic world of a vastly underground genre. The 18 artists featured have had their work displayed at an exhibition at The Museum of History of Science at the University of Oxford in England. This historic show became the most popular and widely attended in the museum's history.
Their artwork consists of everything from brass clocks and watches to light fixtures and jewelry, and every piece demonstrates hours of painstaking work and devotion from its creator. In most cases, the artists themselves are just as unique and colorful as their masterpieces. Those fully embracing the Steampunk ideology have adopted a Victorian alter ego – mad scientists and world explorers – to match the complicated intricacies of their artwork.
