Saturday, August 22, 2020

Milford to Marbling with Love


      As a boy growing up in the late 40s and early 50s in the safe suburban town of Milford, Connecticut, the magic of marbling came to me in the most natural of ways. Next to the apartment where I grew up was a converted garage that housed a backyard Mom and Pop paint store that my family were partners in called The Color Bar. The abundance of paints and solvents, both old and new, would sometimes spill on the ground and driveway and when it rained a glorious oily skim of refracting swirls of color would form on the surface of the puddled water. Somehow as a kid the chaos of that ‘marbling’ image sent me traveling back in time. I imagined cavemen looking at the same oily patterns millions of years ago.

      Some years later as a teenager entering high school I was required to choose the direction of my life. One was either going to college and taking ‘college’ courses, or you could choose ‘industrial arts’ and learn things like car repair, woodworking, printshop, home economics or drafting. Although I chose the ‘college’ path I was a lucky 13 year old who got to hang around the printshop after school and learn everything about letterpresses, setting type, and the basics of offset printing. Getting printer ink under my fingernails, both figuratively and physically, changed the way I looked at life and learning. On the wall of that printshop was a little sign in 72 pt. Caslon Bold - “Be Certain, Be Sure … THIMK”

      In college at the University of Connecticut I ended up taking courses in art and theatre and in the mid-60s spending a summer in Provincetown, Cape Cod. We, my pre-hippie friends and I, rented half of a tiny duplex apartment on Commercial Street with a small ground floor retail space (gallery) we named Innerplay. The owner of the building had a separate studio in the back where she did large and thick polymer abstract expressionist flexible paintings that were sometimes made into cylinders and exhibited as outdoor sculptures. Yeffe Kimball (Effie Goodman) kept a few barrels of solvents she used for her art behind our ‘pad’ and just like she had taken her Native American identity, every once and a while I would ‘appropriate’ a little of her chemicals to use in my experimental mixing of paints and water to create crude poured marbled patterns that were somewhat like the early Chinese painting that marbling expert Jake Benson called “slurry’ marbling”. What I was doing was creating crude freeform paintings on waste binder board salvaged from a local mill’s dumpster to create backgrounds for collage posters that we sold for a few dollars in our little hippie gallery. Those posters and the free cod fish that we would panhandle from the local fisherman kept us alive for months.

     By 1967 my group of friends were living in communes as an extended family that we called “The Tribe.” In the last hour on the last day of my last semester at UConn I went uninvited into President Homer Babbidge’s office and told him I was dropping out of school to “Join the revolution.” He said something about “Patterns of education changing” and I said “No man, I’m out of here for good.” Maybe it was the LSD I had started to take or all those blows to the head I got playing football but either way a few months later I was broke and crashing with friends in New York City. In Connecticut my friends formed a “transcendentalrock band called NGC 4594 with that beautiful Sombrero Galaxy being both an iconic logo and their spaced-out destination. My former roommate Buddy Swenson painted space scape backdrops for the band’s stage shows and built a keyboard ‘light organ’ that played different colored light, including ultraviolet, that were projected with rhythm onto the space mural set. Having learned the difference between the additive and subtractive nature of pigment vs. light (Add all primary colors of pigment together you get black. Add all primary colors of light together you get white.) at the same time that you alter the hue, saturation and intensity of color while adding fluorescent colors within your painting, an animated movement is created on and from a stationary image. Most of the light show of the 60s simply used an overhead projector and different colored oil floated on water (marbling) that was squished between two clear glass bowls to create the ubiquitous liquid projection images.
     My time in NYC lasted only a couple of exciting years. I managed a rock band; did light shows for them; and worked for Walter Cronkite at CBS. But when the band broke up and CBS said I really wasn’t corporate news material, I split for California arriving at Haight Street, San Francisco on New Year’s Eve 1969. I spent a couple of years in that magical City by the Bay working in a record warehouse and making a funky news letter/order sheet, sometimes with marbled covers, called The Music West Flyer.
     Among the group of people living communally in the beautiful old Victorian house in the Haight-Asbury was a guy named Olaf O’laugh who shared my interest in making candles and doing marbling. It seemed many of the people I met at that time had names other than their given names. From the famous like Wavy Gravy to street people like Groovy Bewildered Dead and women like Marsha Motherfucker to my future wife, Maya Blue. In the radical city of Berkeley across the Bay, a couple of years later while living in Olaf’s house, it was even more pronounced. Among my friends and people that I did marbling with there were names like Ken Spacely, SuperJoel, Katherine Star and her friend Luna, (writer Anton Wilson’s daughter who was murdered) Groovy’s friend and rock ’n roll groupie Diamond Sunday, a dope dealer named Sunshine and another just called The Egg Man; and Smacky Beary who was Tim Leary’s son, Jackie Leary. One notable exception was a star map maker friend who’s unique maps I marbleized. When meeting people, this guy with an intense interest in the heavens and with the ability to name every star visible to the naked eye, would introduce himself, sometimes with a disclaimer of being “a self-proclaimed idiot savant”, as “Hello, I’m David W. Teske, from Manchester, Iowa”.

       Many of my friends and I, including David Teske, Olaf, and my wife, were participants at the Northern California Renaissance Pleasure Faire. In the beginning the only marbling I did were the large background fabric pieces for Olaf and my candle booth. Olaf and his friend Miller had imagination and resources to build our first marbling tank. They cut the top off of an old VW bus; turned it upside down; welded a drain to it and welded a metal frame to hold the 4 ft. by 10 ft. (60 plus gallons of water) repurposed metal marbling tank. We used wall sizing glue (methyl cellulose) to thicken the water, oil based alkyd outdoor sign paints as pigment and gum turpentine as a thiner. It is interesting that by the time we stopped marbling in that manner with those ingredients, the City of Los Angles had already established strict regulation on “evaporative painting” and the State of California was beginning to place controls on the heavy metal pigmented paints that we were using. 
 
      Most of the 70s was spent making and selling “Fabs” on the street, Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley. In the age old tradition of secrecy about the process of marbling, Olaf decided when asked about marbling he would, in order to deflect the questioning, call the process, image and marbled products, “Fabriano” after the Italian paper maker. Soon a length of marbled fabric was simply called a “Fab” and thanks to David Teske, not only did the character that I was playing as an actor, booth operator and participant at the Renaissance Faire become “Count Fabriano”, but that identity carried over to my life on the street or “The Ave” as it was called in Berkeley. 
 
      One of the most well known street people was a young man named Groovy. He was a big fan of my marbling and even a bigger fan of Rock ‘n Roll music, particularly The Grateful Dead. He was a super groupie, meaning not only would he panhandle or talk his way into a concert but end up partying with the band after the show. He would get right up front next to the stage and throw presents like Teddybears, jellybeans or pieces of my marbled fabric on stage as offering to his heroes. I remember going to a Kinks concert with him and watching him toss a small ‘Fab’ onto the stage and much to his delight, the piano player draped it over his instrument. One of the bigger marbled pieces we made together was a 400 square foot marbled fabric piece we had made in a temporary marbling tank of plastic that sat on the ground. Groovy and his friends put it up at one of the Grateful Dead’s famous free concerts in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. It lasted about a half hour before some people stole it.

      I think it is important to differentiate how I was marbling compared to traditional bookbinding marbling. Firstly, the colors were not sprinkled on with a brush, whisk or stylus but rather applied off the side of the tank and allowed to flow like a river onto the surface of the sized water. Also sometimes I would premix multiple colors in a small separate can and pour the mix across the tank.The color would not blend together but stayed separate from each other. It was like the new infantile painting fad of acrylic pouring, but on the surface of water and then transferred. It was just one of the ways pigment was applied not the technique used. Second, I tried to keep the bath moving rather than still and stationary which has been the case throughout history. I wanted to create large waves and vortices like weather patterns seen from space. Third, I used compressed air, lik a hand hair dryer or hand fans to tease or manipulate the pattern of colors on the surface like the wind would do in nature. I would sometimes use a comb or rake on part of the design as a signature but not over the entire surface. There were other differences from traditional marbling such as scale and what I marbled on. My marbling while in Berkeley, including doing the so-called ‘ancient’ surface design on fabric, paper, and 3D objects made from all kinds of materials - that in and of itself was somewhat revolutionary. In a way, I never considered traditional marbling as a separate art form unto itself. For me the process and its image was part of or in combination with other art forms or painting technique or surface design. In theatre while with The Berkeley Shakespeare Festival, my marbling was used as an abstract forest backdrop set for Midsummers Night Dream and my marbled fabric was used as the waves in the opening of the Tempest. Some of that same marbled fabric was later used in fashion or costumes. As David Teske would explain about our marbleized star maps, “Although in constant motion the stars look the same as what the ancients saw. We have taken the cosmic image of the heavens and combined it with the galactic flow of the marbling to make a new statement on the universe.” And nothing was more apparent as when our “new statement” was chosen to decorate the large hall for an early Star Trek Convention.

      Although during the 70s I mostly marbled fabric, I did do some marbling-related art work on paper and cardboard, such as my show of collages, fabric and clothing at the Children of Paradise Gallery in Berkeley. Even at that time I knew the chemistry of my marbling was not appropriate for bookbinding or conservation. But my connection with clothing manufacturers allowed my wife and I to become jobbers of excess fabric and merchandise that we would sell at flea markets all over this country from our hippie VW bus. Our travels took us from Appleton, Wisconsin and The Dard Hunter Paper Museum to Old Lyme, Connecticut, where I took a class in marbling paper from Terry Harlow; from selling marbled fabric to Macy’s NYC or G Street Fabrics in Washington, to taking photos of commercially printed fake marbled curtains in a meat market, and asking about a handmade marbled dress in the window of an expensive boutique in the same city of Delray, Florida. All in all, traveling made marbling more than a interest for me, it became a fun obsession of discovery.

      My wife Maya and I left California on the eve of the Eighties, landing in the sleepy small town with a big reputation, Santa Fe, NM. One of the first people we met was Pam Smith. She was a printer, marbler and Curator of the Palace of Governor Printshop. By then the marbling I was doing was with water based pigment, carrageenan bath printed on paper. I also was doing glass blowing and selling my art, marbling and glass on the Plaza. The glass blowing fascinated me in the sense that I saw in my research patterns of color and design in 3D that were like marbling but predating paper marbling by thousands of years. Instead of ‘combing’ patterns, in hot glass you pull or ‘drag’ colors with a hooked stylus and when repeated next to one another, a combed or ‘raked’ marbling pattern occurs. Santa Fe at that time was touted as the “Third Largest Art Market In America.” For a small town of fifty thousand people it had scores of galleries and museums. Artists like Georgia O’Keefe and Native American artist R.C. Gorman were walking around downtown and there were half a dozen good marblers in the area, including Katherine Loeffler, Paul and Dianne Maurer, and Polly Fox of the Ink & Gall marbling journal. 
 
      I was lucky enough in the Eighties to have been able to travel to Europe a few times and visit marblers in other countries. I was also fortunate to be in a place that other marblers wanted to come and visit, an art center like Santa Fe. So when Don Guyot came to give a marbling workshop or Turkish marbler Hikmet Barutcugil was passing through, I would host them at my home and got the benefit of their friendship but also knowledge and experience. I’m not sure how it came about, but whether I was giving a demonstration of marbling at the Palace Of Governors with Pam Smith or on the Plaza or in the public schools with Katherine Loeffler, I saw a growing interest in a mysterious craft, and the human satisfaction created by both teaching and learning marbling. I think the idea for The First International Marblers’ Gathering came out of that simple joy of sharing something so simple yet miraculous with other people.
St. John’s College in Santa Fe is known as “A Great Book College” so I thought what would go better with great books than great marbling. The college was vacant in the summer, had lecture halls, studio space, empty dorm rooms, a functional  kitchen/dinning room and was actively looking to host small conventions. Originally we expected about 50 people to attend and thanks to the marbling journal, Ink & Gall, over 225 people plus speakers attended. The three day event was an incredible success. Over 20 countries were represented and the entire event was documented on video. It also led to a series of marbling ‘gatherings’ in the U.S. and Europe.

      In the ‘90s I continued to marble and take part in group shows like the one at The Second International Marblers’ Gathering in San Francisco and a show (Rebirth of a Craft) curated by Tom Leech with the State of New Mexico’s Museum system. In Santa Fe I taught classes, demonstrated and marbled on canvas. In Hawaii I worked with illustrator/artist Alexis America creating ‘Water Paintings,’ trying to capture with marbling the island’s powerful water, waves and seascapes. And in one of my most unrewarding activities associated with art and marbling, I experimented with digital marbling on my computer, and even later joined a social networking Facebook page , The International Marbling Network, which in my mind is the farthest thing possible from the inspirational qualities of the First International Marblers’ Gathering.
Going through old files about marbling made me think of all the wonderful people, both living and dead, that touched me and passed through my life because of marbling.
Somehow I ended up with a letter to Katherine Loeffler from Ingrid Weiman telling her that Chris Weiman was sick and there was a hard ass letter from the late Richard Wolf turning down an invitation to speak at our first Gathering. Watching the video by the late Dana Draper of the making of the World’s Largest Marbling, or seeing and hearing the late Phoebe Jane Easton talk about “Lighting a candle rather than cursing the darkness,” I thought about the humanity embedded in marbling. I remembered how amazed German marbler Gabriela Grunbaum was at the First Marblers’ Gathering as she stated to the attendees in front of her that an event like this, with its sharing of information, “would not be possible in Europe” at that time. 

      And lastly I am grateful to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Watson Library and Grolier Club for taking an interest in a very important part and time in the history of marbling, and in the people who added so much to the unique magic of this craft and art form.

Cove