Making
There is little more satisfying in life than to take an idea and turning it into something real. This is true for anything; a business, a webpage, a song, a painting, or a photograph but, for me, it is even more true with a tangible physical end product. Taking a raw material or material with a previous life and manipulating it to create a vision for a new life is deeply satisfying.
We don’t know exactly where ideas come from. That is why so many artists talk about their work flowing through them. Religious artists talk about channeling the voice of God. There is a consensus among creators that often times the best ideas seems to come from elsewhere. The word genius originally referred to a guardian spirit. You were not a genius yourself, you were visited by a genius that brought you an idea. In reality, ideas are an amalgamation of everything we’ve ever experienced, all our thoughts and feelings and memories, the neural network that comprises who we are and all we’ve done. When that network makes a new connection, connects the dots, categorizes two seemingly disparate things in cross referenced bins, we call it an idea. It happens with frustratingly unpredictable spontaneity (the most creative ideas never come right when you want them to) so it feels like it comes from outside of ourselves.
Once the idea pops into our consciousness, we have the choice of if we want to nurture it. Is it worth protecting and nurturing? So often ideas are referenced in terms of fire or electricity: a spark, lightning striking, the cartoon image of a lightbulb in the thought bubble. I think of them as an ember. Once the ember is created in your consciousness you have a choice of how to treat it. If you ignore it, you can allow it blow away into the breeze, likely it will just go out or it might start a fire elsewhere. However, if you choose, you can protect and nurture the ember, you can put it in a nest of fuel and breathe life into it.
This is how I look at making things. It’s the process of taking that little ember. Something amorphous and fragile existing only in the impossibly complex electrical storm in the neural network of your brain, and turning into something someone else can see, or feel, or touch. Then, if you’ve done your job, you’ve transferred that idea to someone else’s brain. In some ways we do this every time we write a note or an email, every time we open our mouths to speak, but somehow it just feels so much more potent and beautiful when it manifests as a physical product that you can touch, and feel, and use.
Another beautiful part of the process is that no idea is created in a vacuum. They are all products of the people we surround ourselves with and the places we dream them up. The same way identical twins can have the same DNA but be totally different people, even in their physical characteristics, the way an idea is expressed is much dependent on it’s environment. This table is not just mine, it’s a collaboration of thoughts and ideas of the super talented crew at The Public Works and the beautiful shop I built it in.
This is a table that I made from a Denver cottonwood tree saved by a local arborist and given to me by a friend that has since passed. I built it with steel channel in the center to give more width and to fill with river stones, succulents, and air plants. The table legs are a-symmetrical steel beams left over from the construction of the battery621 roof deck and aged (rusted to shit) in the back lot. The benches are from a 100+ year old beam that had several lives of its own before I traded @finartco a bottle of whiskey and some stories for it. They are burnt with the Japanese sealing technique, Shou Sugi Ban and finished with conversion varnish.
I need to take some proper photos of the table and benches but I haven’t had a chance and if I wait I’ll never get this blog post up.
Likewise for all the things I’ve built for my home. Until then, here’s a quick peek at my chicken coop and claro walnut and steel coffee table.
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