This is another in a series of sketches of craftspeople, members of Boulder Arts & Crafts Gallery, inspired by a quote from the book Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino. He writes, Association renders men stronger and brings out each persons best gifts and gives a joy which is rarely to be had by keeping to oneself, the joy of realizing how many honest decent capable people there are for whom it is worth giving ones best. This to me is the essence and benefit of our Cooperative.

- Thea Tenenbaum

Bruce Campbell trucks down to the Pearl St. Mall in Boulder, CO most everyday when weather permits, loaded with paints, brushes, rags and an old piece of metal, prepared to make art in public. When he really needs to concentrate or prep a piece or do something he calls scary like weld or bang on metal hell stay home but otherwise he heads off seven days a week. It makes him happy, connecting to the community and the high energy of the Mall. People stop to watch and talk, and making art while talking about art is Bruces idea of a good life. “The Mall is so simple”, he says, “and the rest of life can be so complicated. Doing this is great for my outlook”.

Born in Indiana in a small farming community that he left as soon as he could, he has always loved visual art, finding it easy and natural to draw and paint. As a youth he would make perfect copies of photos and draw absurd cartoons, and was especially fascinated by rhinoceroses and elephants with all their wrinkles. He remembers painting on an old sign he found in the woods when he was in high school, his first foray into his lifetime obsession of painting on things thrown away. At 19 he was already selling paintings and drawings in a casino art gallery in South Lake Tahoe, California.

After a few years skiing and fighting forest fires in the Sierra Mountains, Bruce moved to Boulder in 1981 and took his first job as the janitor at the Boulder Theater. When he saw how much they were paying an expensive ad agency to do their publicity, he announced that he could do it all himself, and within two months he had become their entire art department, a position he held for three years, designing print ads, making original paintings for the display cases, and a new poster every week. This led him to start his own ad agency with a partner and then to freelance, learning by doing, being taught by his own research or by advice from the printer. He illustrated a childrens book for the Denver Art Museum which was funded by an NEA grant, painted murals and designed the monthly movie schedules for the Art Cinema, and created the labels for Rainbow Juices. He supported KGNUs yearly pledge drive by making 5 years of Grateful Dead posters that became collectibles, and from this spawned a cottage business of posters, stickers, cards and T-shirts. He also designed a line of casual fashion clothing called brucesuits which was sold on a hand-cart on the Mall. When he started renting an historic old farm in Boulder he began his serious incursion into painting on farm junk. The land was strewn with old water heaters, boilers, tools of all sorts, cars, pipes and old metal of all shapes and sizes. He had time and royalties coming in from his other ventures, so in 1989 he started cleaning up all the old metal and doing art for fun again. Im just gonna paint junk, he announced and before long was showing in galleries in Boulder, Denver, Breckenridge, Aspen, Taos and Los Angeles.

His present aspirations are to continue his public painting on metal on the Pearl Street Mall but also to make fine art prints with the same images he paints on recycled metal. He also wants to expand his reach with a new gallery in Aspen, NY or LA as well as have a big museum show. While he knows he is changeable and flexible, he believes he wont tire of his Mall gig.

Bruce started working in public at the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival in Manchester, TN, where hed been invited by their recycler to make art out of junk, and he created two fifteen-foot tall steels drum totems to frame a stage. He realized how comfortable he felt painting in public at venues such as music festivals and other public places. For many years he has had a fruitful relationship with the CU Environmental Center where they often ask him to appear at gatherings. This led to a commission for a sculpture on the CU campus, salvaged from the debris of the demolition of the old
Fine Arts building. He is what he calls a rabid environmentalist and classifies himself as a Boulder hippie who wants peace and love. He feels like it is an honor and privilege to represent Boulder while painting on the Mall and for this reason he loves being part of the Boulder Arts and Crafts Gallery. He wants to support it as an entity and organization with his energy and work. Any bigness or fame he is sure to collect he wants to bring to the Co-op, for the benefit of all.

This is another in a series of sketches of craftspeople, members of the Boulder Arts and Crafts Cooperative, inspired by a quote from the book Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino. He writes association renders men stronger and brings out each persons best gifts and gives a joy which is rarely to be had by keeping to oneself, the joy of realizing how many honest decent capable people there are for whom it is worth giving ones best… This to me is the essence and benefit of our Cooperative. – Thea Tenenbaum

Annie Gifford, Painter

Annie Gifford, painter and Boulder Arts & Crafts Gallery member since 1980, started her painting career at age 4. She remembers her father was a huge encouragement to her from the beginning. He even brokered her first sale, a painting of a clown. The price was $12.

After college she lied her way into a straight manufacturing job as a silk-screen printer. “I learned the technology of the time and I learned fast”, she says, of the very laborious, hands-on, layering work of silk-screen printing. One day while repetitively printing T-shirts, it suddenly dawned on her that the same technique could be used to make art, where her heart was. At night she printed the first artistic works of her own, colorful astrology charts.

For the next 30 years she made silk-screen prints, gratefully supporting herself and her son. About a dozen years ago, she re-discovered the joy of watercolor painting, a more fluid and less hard-edged medium that suits who she is now and allows her to consider herself a painter again. Her most recent development is making silkscreen print-like images of her creative paintings using Photoshop on her computer, a less toxic technique than silk-screening that she has developed and perfected on her own.

“It’s in my blood”, she says. “I could certainly have had a better-paying career, but not a more rewarding one.” Her greatest temptation is that she would like to paint all the time, with short breaks for teaching, wandering in nature, and singing while playing her guitar, but sometimes it is hard to find the time to paint at all. Her great luxury is going to Ghost Ranch in New Mexico one week a year and doing nothing but painting, hiking, reading and eating.

Annie has created the poster for the Bolder Boulder for seven of the past 20 years, after race sponsors discovered her work at Boulder Arts & Crafts Gallery. For several years they requested what she calls her faux serigraph technique, where the finished artwork looks like a silkscreen print.

Annie’s eye is always out for inspiration and ideas. She spends a lot of time outdoors, hiking, her digital camera at the ready, taking photos of everything she sees. A self-styled exercise freak, even while swimming in the pool she is always thinking and head-clearing, allowing room for new images. She loves the classes she teaches for the elderly at the East Boulder Recreation Center and the Meridian Retirement Center, which encourage her to paint and keep a fresh eye.

Annie described to me her favorite moment of her life as an artist, her animated voice sounding suddenly tender: “It’s when I am simply sitting and painting. It is so meditative and I enter another world. It’s the very best when it’s raining and the door to the studio is open. I just paint and listen to the rain.”

This is another in a series of sketches of craftspeople, members of the Boulder Arts & Crafts Gallery, inspired by a quote from the book Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino. He writes association renders men stronger and brings out each persons best gifts and gives a joy which is rarely to be had by keeping to oneself, the joy of realizing how many honest decent capable people there are for whom it is worth giving ones best… This to me is the essence and benefit of our Cooperative. – Thea Tenenbaum

Marguerite Specht, Jeweler

Marguerite Specht’s hands are both gentle and strong. They are hands that have bathed many babies, cooked many meals, and strung many necklaces. Marguerite describes her hands as soul-imbued, revealing, and wise and says that they both stimulate her by showing her things and save her by calming her down. She touches everything, be it a swatch of linen, a basil leaf or a cut amethyst as though she is feeling it for the first time, exploring it for its truth.
Marguerite is a jeweler and a BAC member for over 30 years. She has always loved rocks, collecting them as a child and collecting them still. She has built Zen gardens with pebbles and experimented for a few years with the soft rock, clay, in the 70s, when she met the artist Maynard Tischler, first her teacher and now her husband. Wanting to work with less complicated equipment and have more control over the material, she started making boxes, spoons and frames out of metal, a metal-smith more than a jeweler, and joined Boulder Arts & Crafts in 1979. Slowly her direction changed as she started working smaller and smaller, and in an effort to make her art more sellable, as well as for the love of it, she introduced color, finally discovering the joy and satisfaction of knotting and stringing rocks into jewelry pieces that celebrate the color, texture, feeling and energy of stones.

“I think you have to really love what you’re doing”, she says. “You must have an internal motivation, one that has to do with discipline, how you want to design your life, involving a sense of control and creativity.” External motivation, as in paying the bills, meeting deadlines, keeping the gallery stocked, is important too, but without the internal the external becomes meaningless. Her favorite part of making jewelry is the total immersion in the work, those magical moments when she is wedded to each piece, has entered the time zone of creativity, which is more about meditation than the project at hand. It is a place of solace and peace, where she can find her own voice and it is the reason why she has worked happily at her craft all these years. An added bonus is when she feels appreciated for what she does, always a highly satisfying and surprising moment.

Soldering or beading jewelry can be tricky and the fragility of the material requires great concentration and care, and, she laughs, the ability to be calm if things break and you have to start over. Another challenge of the craftsperson that works alone at home, she says, is that you never feel done with all that needs doing and often there is no one else there to tell you when to stop!

Marguerite sees her work as still changing. She once completed a big order for Sundance Catalogue that taught her a lot about the discipline of repetition and enjoying each piece. She says, “There was something really nice about knowing what I was going to do, how many pieces I needed to complete, and maybe it could be called total monotony, but there was a lovely Zen quality of not trying to race to get done, to just enjoy every necklace I made and have a standard of how many to do a day.” This seems to be a good statement about what it means to be a craftsperson in history as well as in 2012.

This is another in a series of sketches of craftspeople, members of Boulder Arts & Crafts Gallery, inspired by a quote from the book Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino. He writes association renders men stronger and brings out each persons best gifts and gives a joy which is rarely to be had by keeping to oneself, the joy of realizing how many honest decent capable people there are for whom it is worth giving ones best…. This to me is the essence and benefit of our Cooperative. – Thea Tenebaum

Robin Grabowski, Glass Artist
Want a recommendation of a great book to read?
Want to take riding lessons on a well-loved horse?
Want to learn about bravery and fortitude?
Want to learn to appreciate and make kiln-worked glass?
Call Robin G., a Boulder Arts & Crafts Gallery member since 1990.

Robin started working with glass over 40 years ago, as a new mother, because shed always loved art, had been drawing all her life, and, she says, it was better than waitressing. She couldnt afford to take a class, so she picked the brains of a friend who could, and started off her career as an upstart – making sun-catchers. She needed only a glass cutter, a pair of pliers, and a kitchen table, and got hooked, fascinated by the vital qualities of glass: its beauty, how it transforms with light, how it is always changing with the time of day, the weather, where it is placed.

Without much fuss she soon started a business in Crested Butte, Colorado, making stained glass windows, many of which she can still see as she wanders the towns streets. While she feels pride in these pieces, even stronger is the question that she asks herself of Who was that person who made those windows? Who was I then? What was she thinking and seeing?

Robins glasswork is constantly changing. Her designs are always new and very different from the ones before, and she is always experimenting. In the last several years she has started painting with glass paints on fused glass, and also using glass frits, which allow her to use her considerable drawing skills with much more freedom. Her secret is that she has no secrets, and when she teaches she communicates everything, from techniques to motivation, hoping that her experiences will inform others, and knowing that what comes honestly out of her will come out of no one else.

Robins abiding inspiration comes from what surrounds her. Where I live now is so gorgeous (on 250 acres in the mountains above Lyons, Colorado), she says. I am surrounded by horses in horse heaven, with all that space to run in and grass up to their backs. Those horses, all seven of them, shape her days as she rides them, feeds them morning and evening, uses them to teach riding lessons, and dreams over them out of her studio window. She tells of a scene which inspired a recent glass piece called A Chat and Some Tea, when she looked out of her window to see 5 little birds sitting on her horses back, from which vantage point they could see the bugs in the grass. Theyd hop down, eat the bugs and then back theyd jump, bouncing along as the horse trotted, looking for all the world like ladies gathered for a get-together. That inspires me, and makes my heart flutter, says Robin. Add this to the brave young artist who
starts a glass studio with no money or experience, who looks beyond and deeper than appearances no matter how gorgeous or shiny.