A Copper Alliance Member
Copper in the Arts
Issue #56: December '11 - Cont'd
Richard’s Gill: Emotion and Form Through Copper
Richard Gill with his title sculpture Victory in
his series Signs of Our Time.
Photograph courtesy of Richard Gill
As a jazz musician looking for work in the 1960s when rock and roll began to take America by storm, he found a job as a truck driver in a metal fabrication shop in the San Francisco Bay area. One day, he glimpsed a cut piece of steel dropped on the floor, and it quickly gave him an unexpected inspiration of what would eventually become wings.
He got to work, and after constructing a large bird out of the steel, Gill showed the sudden sculpture to a neighbor well-schooled in art. Her raving reaction prompted him to consider other possibilities in metal.
But it was only when he first delved into experimenting with sheets of copper that Gill knew he'd found his medium.
"Copper is a precious metal to me," Gill says. "I won't use anything else. I've tried to use other materials, but I just have this love of copper. I like the look and feel of it, and it does exactly what I want it to do."
Today in his Nevada County, California studio, Gill often finds himself fusing sculptures of people born from old Western inspirations.
"I like that period, and the copper matches it," he says. “It’s not that easy to work with, but when making people, the bends are softer, and you can make it look like fabric.”
Room for One More, part of Richard Gill's
Signs of Our Time series.
Photograph courtesy of Richard Gill
For Gill, a face is the last piece he welds to life. He begins with the feet, working his way upward.
“I can get the feeling of the person,” Gill says, focusing often on cowboys, musicians, and those whose faces have had time to wear, as aged people are often his characters.
A decade in the making, his series Signs of Our Times combines figures shaped with faces and forms indicative of hard lives they’ve lived in America today.
He juxtaposes the telling sculptures with performance poetry he’s written to speak and stand on its own, much like the sculptures do. Gill travels around the region to bring the series to life whenever a request comes in for his hard-hitting and expressive routine giving attention to themes like homelessness and war.
“I look at somebody walking down the street or sitting on a bench somewhere, and to me, that person is a character, intriguing me,” Gill says, knowing each has a story he wants to tell. “It’s in stop time, sort of like a photograph. I want my viewer to know what that piece is and how he feels.”
Resources:
Richard Gill, Nevada City, CA
Back to Top
Lost and Found in Copper
Banana leaf copper sculpture.Photograph courtesy of Anne Jordan
“I’ve always been a bit creative, but it wasn’t until I came upon copper that my creativity really took off,” says Jordan.
The artist from northern Virginia had quit her job to stay home with her kids and, about four years ago, began tinkering with copper tooling and embossing on thin copper foil. “My neighbor gave me a laundry basket full of copper scraps left over from a roofing job,” says Jordan. “That copper sat around for more than a year because it was so thick I couldn’t figure out how to use it!”
Fortunately, she took a local coppersmithing class and learned the basics of cutting, annealing, hammering, and forming copper. Her talents also grew last year when she met fellow copper artist Ed Sharp of DRC Studios, who taught her how to braze-weld copper.
“That opened up a whole new 3-dimensional avenue for me,” says Jordan.
She soon found herself creating everything from wall art and garden art, to bowls, trays, woven copper pieces and more. Her work is on display year-round at The Artists’ Undertaking Gallery in Occoquan, Virginia.
“I haven’t settled on one specialty area yet, and I’m not sure where exactly I’m headed, but I’m having a great time along the way,” says Jordan.
Jordan loves experimenting and problem-solving with copper, especially appreciating the never-ending forms, textures, colors, and surprises the metal throws her way. Armed with a few of her favorite tools (a hatchet and her grandfather’s old hammer), she pounds copper on the sidewalk for a unique pebbled texture. Tin snips are used to cut out the shape. The process also involves sanding; annealing the copper with a Mapp gas torch; chasing/repousse; coloring or finishing with a torch or chemicals like liver of sulfur or her compost pile for mottled browns; applying steel wool or a rotary tool for highlights; sealing it with beeswax or a clear-coat spray and, finally, brazing, if needed.
Blue Heron Copper sculpture
Photograph courtesy of Anne Jordan
“When I'm working with copper I can be in the studio for hours and it seems only like minutes,” she continues. “The mistakes I make often turn out to be better than the perfect plan I had in mind. I think it’s this forgiveness that fully ignited my creativity. I had fun and success making a simple copper dish from the first moment I touched a piece of copper in class. I didn’t have to study and practice for years before completing something I was happy with, certainly a bonus for a busy mom.”
Jordan loves the flexibility and artistic freedom copper brings to her work, with each piece as unique as the medium itself.
“As someone who loves nature’s colors and textures, physical activity, and doesn’t mind getting dirty, copper is the perfect medium,” she adds. “There is also something special about hammering out a shape in metal. It’s hard to describe, you just have to do it.”
Resources:
Anne K. Jordan, 13400 Peachwood Ct, Fairfax VA, 22033. (703) 318-3237
Back to Top
Layers on Copper: The Cloisonné Jewelry of Julie Glassman
Arizona Dessert Landscape enamel pendant.
Photograph courtesy of Julie Glassman
“I was always obsessed with jewelry, even when I was wee little,” she recalls. “My mother and both my grandmothers always wore jewelry and at family functions I asked if I could get into their jewelry boxes.”
Her copper journey started one summer as a teen when all the other kids were off at summer camp.
“The next town over a woman offered jewelry classes in her basement,” so she signed up. Her first task was to make a twisted copper bracelet. “I knew I wanted to make jewelry for the rest of my life. Soldering was just magical to me,” she admits. Her mom enrolled her into a jewelry class in high school. She went on to graduate from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City with a degree in jewelry and gems.
Glassman decided to learn the ancient Byzantine technique of cloisonné enameling, which she continues to do from her home studio in Western Colorado. She has several jewelry lines which are enamel on silver, but Glassman also has a successful enamel line on copper substrate. Glassman’s cloisonné is seven to 10 layers, even up to 15 layers painted on a metal substrate; silver, gold or copper. “It’s liquid enamel, like a painting and this is fired on copper.” She still uses silver, but copper keeps her cost down. She will fire a layer of opaque white enamel on copper, let it cool, then she will do line work with enamel pencil, then fires that, then fills in with liquid enamel, and fires it once more.
Evil Eye Pendant
Photograph courtesy of Julie Glassman
Having worked with many different metals, copper has a unique place. “Copper is such a forgiving metal,” she admits. “You can heat copper to death and work it to death, it takes a beating, that’s what I love about it -- it’s a magical metal.”
She sources her materials and her copper from two main sources; Rio Grande in Albuquerque, and Naja in Denver. She typically buys one square foot sheet, usually 16 and 22 gauge, as well as copper wire. Though she generates approximately 30 percent of her sales on-line, the bulk of her sales are derived by selling at a variety of shows in places like Tempe, Arizona; Jackson Hole, Wyoming; and close by in Denver. From arts and crafts shows to music festivals, and art fairs (she typically does between 15 and 20 shows every year) she goes where the people are and it allows her to connect with her clients.
Glassman’s next live appearance will be January 20-29th at the Tyson Wells Sell-a-Rama, in Quartside, Arizona.
Resources:
Julie Glassman, Grand Junction, CO, (970) 464-4843
Back to Top
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: NEWS
Bronze Artifact Thought to be 1000 Years Old Discovered on Alaskan Penninsula - December 05, 2011
The prehistoric bronze artifact found at Cape Espenberg
resembles a buckle and may have been used as part of a
harness or horse ornament before it reached Alaska.
Photograph by AP Photo/University Of Colorado
The artifact resembles a small buckle, researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder said in an announcement. How it got to Alaska remains a mystery.
"The object appears to be older than the house we were excavating by at least a few hundred years," research assistant John Hoffecker said in the release. Hoffecker led excavating at Cape Espenberg on Alaska's Seward Peninsula.
The object has a rectangular bar connected to a broken circular ring. It's about 2 inches long and 1 inch wide. It was found in August at a home site dug into a beach ridge.
The excavations are part of a project paid for by the National Science Foundation to study human response to climate change at Cape Espenberg from A.D. 800 to A.D. 1400. Archaeologist Owen Mason, a research affiliate with the university based in Anchorage, says six or seven home sites were excavated.
The bronze artifact was found in 3 feet of sediment near the entryway to the house by a University of California, Davis, doctoral student, Jeremy Foin, as he used a sifting screen. Beveling on one side of the bronze and the concave shape of its other side indicated the item had been cast in a mold.
A copper needle was found at another Cape Espenberg house. Early Alaskans were known to hammer copper into tools but there is no known metal casting in Alaska, Mason said.
"It would be incredibly significant if there were metallurgy in Alaska, but I just don't see that being here," Mason said.
The house site is within the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve and the origin of the piece more likely was Korea, China, Manchuria or southern Siberia. Early Inupiat Eskimos in northwest Alaska might have brought the object from the other side of the Bering Strait about 1,500 years ago, the researchers said, and passed it down through generations.
A piece of leather wrapped around the rectangular bar gave a radiocarbon date of about A.D. 600.
"That seems early based on what we know presently about the house, but we haven't dated the house well enough to be confident that our previous thoughts about the house are correct," Mason said.
One Asia archaeologist suggested the piece may have been part of a harness or horse ornament. The researchers are looking for an East Asia expert to confer with on the bronze piece.
Mason said it's not likely the bronze piece was washed ashore after being dropped by a Russian explorer or a whaler.
"That's totally unlikely, in fact nearly impossible, considering where it is," he said.
The excavated home was an inauspicious mound that was part of a marsh in a sand dune away from the current coast.
Purdue University Assistant Professor H. Kory Cooper, prehistoric metallurgical expert, will study the bronze piece, Mason said.
Researchers recovered several thousand artifacts at Cape Espenberg, including harpoons used to kill seals, fishing spears and fishing lures.
