Surrounded by Beautiful Things
On handmade artwork, and why I'm making a small edition of platinum prints
I knew I wasn’t supposed to touch it….
In 2019 I traveled to Bulgaria with my friend, the writer Gina Ochsner. We spent two weeks photographing and interviewing Roma people in their communities, and on the last day we spent an afternoon at the National Museum of History in Sofia. Room after room was filled with objects in stone and bone, copper and flax, all crafted by hand – in some cases hundreds of thousands of years ago.
I remember walking slowly through those rooms, past display after display, until something made me stop: a stone relief, depicting the Thracian Rider (a huntsman on horseback), perhaps 2000 years old. I glanced toward the door, saw no guard nearby, and reached out and touched the edge of the stone. I hesitated, a little nervous, because I knew I wasn’t supposed to do this. But I wanted to connect with an artist who’d gone before me – to touch something that another human being had touched long ago, and crafted into something beautiful.
For a moment, standing there with my hand on that stone, I felt part of a long lineage of creators and makers. Although my artwork is not in stone, and the work I make on paper won’t last nearly as long, I also am leaving my mark on the world by making beautiful things. It was a memorable moment of connection across time and space.
Junk Food
I’m really tired, in this digital and AI age, of how we consume images and art.
Picture the average scroll: a sunset, then an ad, then someone’s dinner, then a headline, then a wedding, all flicked past at the same speed, given the same half-second of attention before the next one arrives. People move through hundreds or thousands of images and videos this way. And now they can create images with a few keystrokes, letting AI do all the work for them.
To be completely honest, for a visual artist (especially a photographer), this is demoralizing. It begins to feel like all the time and effort and heart I put into crafting something beautiful and meaningful – both the image itself, and then the print of it – are meaningless. Just another drop in a big, cheap, disposable ocean.
Years ago I read some great advice: surround yourself with beautiful things. I’ve tried to do that over my lifetime. I live in the country where I can view the sky and listen to birds. I put art on my walls that I love, including my own. I listen to good music.
I feel like this way of living – slow, attentive, chosen – is being lost in the current climate. With cell phones and social media, we don’t so much view art as consume it, like junk food. Hurried, harried, inattentive, always lusting for more.
The Lo-Fi Rebellion
In response to this digital – and now AI – revolution, I’ve focused on making artwork that has obvious signs of the artist’s hand in it. Something similar happened in the late 1800’s, during the Arts and Crafts Movement. Led by William Morris, the Movement was a reaction against industrialism, and the rise of objects made by machines. Today, we’re seeing a similar trend. Recent articles in Wired and The New Yorker highlight a “lo-fi rebellion against AI,” noting that deliberately imperfect, handmade aesthetics are gaining popularity precisely because they communicate humanity, rather than algorithmic polish.
So, I know I’m not alone in this feeling of despair. We’re all starting to feel it – both artists, and those who value and collect beautiful things.
My response has included crafting whole bodies of work in encaustic and mixed media, hunched over a worktable with leaves, ferns, lichen, moss, paint, metal leaf, and paper, collaging them together with beeswax and tree resin on wood. All natural materials, all gathered and layered by hand. There’s a lot of depth to the work, both aesthetically and emotionally. In some cases you can even see my fingerprint in the wax, if you look carefully – a small, accidental signature.
I’ve also made photogravures of faces with freckles: prints inked with a mixture of charcoal, stone dust, and linseed oil, pressed into cotton paper. Each time I made a print, the plate was wiped by my hand before a pass through the press. Each print is slightly different, depending on how I wiped the plate, or aligned it with the paper.
This year I’m doing something similar with a different medium: platinum-palladium prints. Each print is hand-coated, the photo emulsion brushed onto the paper one at a time. It’s a slow process, requiring many many hours (or days) just to print a small edition. I love that no two are precisely alike, and that the traces of my hand – moving the brush while spreading the emulsion – are clearly visible in the finished piece.
I’m Rethinking Everything
Sadly, the digital age has also resulted in another casualty of cheap and abundant imagery: the closure of art galleries. As galleries close or scale back, artists are increasingly responsible not only for creating their work, but also for promoting it, finding collectors, and building sustainable careers on their own.
To that end, I’ve been rethinking everything: how I make work, promote it, price it, sell it.
When I sold my art primarily through galleries, the gallery had to take their cut, which I understand and respect. But by the time that math is done, the price sits at a point most people can’t afford.
I’ve put a lot of thought this year into finding a way to make work that’s both unique and affordable – to make it easier for my work to find a home, a place where it is valued and enjoyed.
I’m also trying to build something sustainable: an art practice that doesn’t drain me financially, but one that other people can support, even in small ways, through affordable purchases.
Making unique art by hand, selling it at affordable prices, surrounding myself with a community of people who want to be surrounded by beautiful things: this feels sustainable to me as an artist. Taken together, this feels like a circle to me – one that connects me to a long line of human creativity going back tens or hundreds of thousands of years. The circle of making and giving. Of crafting something by hand and with heart. Of other people being blessed by, and enjoying, the work.
I’ve watched that circle close before, at past print and studio sales. Someone picks up a piece. They go quiet for a second. They put it down. They pick it up again. They turn it toward the light, and decide to bring it home. That makes me so happy.
I think about touching that stone in Sofia often. Maybe that’s all any of us are doing: trying to create beauty and meaning here and now, hoping something we made outlasts the moment we made it, and touches someone else.
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