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.
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
