There's a real art to their crafts

By John Balzar

July 7, 2005 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

The name, Sawdust Art Festival, does not say it all.

This summer-long public celebration of Laguna Beach’s artistic energy extends itself to craft too, although, careful -- “craft” is a Rodney Dangerfield kind of word, still searching for respect.

Art and craft; artist and artisan, fine art and decorative art -- when done well, the two wind up in the same place: bringing meaning into our lives. The artist and the craft artisan draw from the same inspired well. They create by hand works to please the eye and stir our emotions.

Still, we have language to contend with.

In American vernacular, the artist generally holds the higher ground -- and artisans have to prove themselves.

The Sawdust Art Festival brings the two together, side by side, where they belong, this time for the 39th consecutive summer.

In a 3-acre grove of shady eucalyptus at the mouth of Laguna Canyon, 210 artists and artisans from the city’s venerated arts colony display their work for sale during a nine-week run that will eventually draw about 200,000 people. Some of these exhibitors are familiar faces on the circuit of high-end arts festivals that occur throughout the West, while others work for the entire year just to display at Sawdust.

Workshops, demonstrations and children’s hands-on classes fill in the 10 a.m.-to-10 p.m. days July 1 to Sept. 4.

For the moment, the artists of the Sawdust Art Festival can be left to fend for themselves. Instead, here are introductions to five craft artisans you will meet at the ‘Dust:

John Barber

“I call myself a master glassblower,” says John Barber.

The European-trained Barber deserves the title. Art glass, whether functional or purely decorative, is ascending in the United States. And for 30 years, Barber has been a pioneer in the movement -- exploring techniques of the ages, from delicate Art Nouveau stemware to etched vases in a style adapted from China to, most recently, the ancient form of cast glass, in which the liquid is poured into molds and then transformed into huge paneled murals.

“We’ve done something unique in the world,” he says of America’s glass artisans. “We’ve taken glass out of the European-style factory and brought it back to the artist’s studio.

“The work we make is comparable to any in the world. And we’re now doing work that’s never been seen in the world.”

Sitting on his studio porch only a few paces from the roaring gas fires of Barber’s glass ovens, a guest is offered lemonade in a textured, subtly tinted tumbler that encapsulates the magic of glass: liquid to the eye and tactile to the hand.

Such a vessel expresses the argument for craft, the entirety of the argument from start to finish.

Lemonade would taste much the same from a waxed paper cup. But the drinking of it would not be anything of the same, not at all.

From hand to lips, from eye to imagination, such a tumbler ennobles the ordinary and thus elevates life itself.

Little wonder that Barber’s recent commissions include sacred vessels of religious ritual.

One of the highlights of the Sawdust Art Festival is the stage demonstration of glass blowing by Barber, now making his 27th consecutive Sawdust appearance, and other artists. No craft is quite so industrially dramatic, with 2,000 degree temperatures inside a brick furnace holding a “lake” of clear glass, which then is daubed onto a pipe and shaped by air pressure, gravity, centrifugal force and, of course, artistry into an object as fragile as a butterfly’s wing.

“Glass is the one medium that perfectly captures every instant of its creation,” says Barber. “That’s what makes it so fascinating.”

Catherine Reade

“I am a hand fabricator of jewelry,” says Catherine Reade.

She works in precious metals, silver and 18-karat gold and palladium, and sometimes with precious and semiprecious stones too.

Like jewelry makers everywhere, Reade works in shapes. Unlike many, she also works in textures -- finishing the flat surfaces of her necklaces and bracelets with such things as the imprints of concrete or of fine-mesh screen.

For many craft artisans, Reade among them, there is a pinch-me quality to their lives, as if they are in a perpetual state of amazement at their own gifts and their good fortune to have their talent recognized.

“I’m so totally excited about what I do,” Reade gushes. “I sometimes find myself talking in the third person, saying things like, ‘Isn’t this wonderful?’ ”

Before she became a full-time artisan 16 years ago -- this is her sixth year at Sawdust -- Reade was a graphic designer. Her past carries forward into her metier with strongly graphic shapes, the visual effect of which is heightened by luster. The designs are hers, often custom rendered to match the personality of a customer.

She describes her work as unisex -- plates of precious metal, linked by hand-formed chain, are a common motif. Other words she uses include “not frilly” and “industrial.” What makes hand-fabricated adornment so much fun is that the artisan can go on to call her pieces both “refined” and “primitive” without being the least contradictory.

Among Reade’s wittiest creations are sets of textured silver dog tags, sometimes teased with gold, that hang from beaded-silver chain. These familiar symbols with their military connotation become an evocative play on shape after they are hammered, textured and polished, seemingly transforming a statement into a question.

“When I start, I see the finished design. Then I ask, ‘How am I going to make this?’ Then I start by drilling a hole here, soldering something there ... “

Interviewed at her hillside studio, Reade makes the case for craft: “It’s a way to personalize life when we live in such a depersonalized world.”

Randy Bader

“I ain’t no woodworker,” says Randy Bader. Once he started a magazine article with just that provocation.

“I am an artist, a craftsman, who chooses wood as my medium.”

Bader is a furniture maker, perpetually backlogged with orders to meet the demand for his distinctive rockers, tables, wall mirrors, shelves, lamps and clocks -- fine contemporary furniture that suggests motion, frozen in the instant, and sometimes a good deal of wit too.

He calls it “jewelry for the home and adornment for the walls.”

His pendulum wall clocks, with names like “Time Over Time” and “Time After Time,” are about playfulness. His rockers, more subdued than the current trend of elongated sculpture, are foremost about “sit-ability,” that almost magical quality in which rigid wood conforms to the contours of flesh as perfectly as the leather of a glove.

Many woodworkers rely on the grain and color of tropical hardwoods to emphasize their point. By contrast, Bader prefers understated maple and walnut. Classical woodworkers -- he calls them the East Coast school -- typically follow traditional patterns of joinery. Bader describes his own approach as that of an engineer, wherein “the look of the piece dictates the joinery, not where the joinery dictates the look of the piece.”

A professional and a Sawdust veteran for 25 years, Bader crafts furniture that is, of course, more beautiful and finely constructed than it has to be -- these being the defining characteristics of true craft. When a piece leaves his shop, it also carries something else from him: the artist’s expectation that it will evolve and grow more precious by assuming a place in the narrative of its owner’s life.

He tells the story of a customer who called to arrange repair of a rocker that had been unintentionally gouged by a friend. Oddly, the customer never followed up. Later, Bader learned that the customer’s friend had died unexpectedly. The gouge was then transformed from an imperfection into a memory.

Barbara Schuppe

“I am an artist who works in clay,” says Barbara Schuppe. “Clay is such a delicious medium.”

You could also call her a painter, a potter, a ceramicist.

Her studio in Bluebird Canyon, just one street below Laguna’s devastating landslide, reflects an artisan of moods. On her workbench is a painted and engraved set of cups and matching vase in a floral motif rendered with Asian formality. Nearby is a series of wide-lipped, lighthearted vases painted with words that please her: “succulent,” “thank you,” “yes” and “friends.” More whimsical are the series of her popular coffee mugs painted with a cartoonish spacecraft and the words “rocket fuel.”

“I’m the daughter of a fighter pilot,” she explains.

Every piece comes with a story. It is one of the pure pleasures of visiting an art festival.

The sacred cross shows up in some of her recent projects. This, she says, is less a matter of religious symbolism than personal “spiritual edge.”

“We live sometimes in a bleak and discouraging world.” She is searching for “re-enchantment.”

“I crave having a connection with something that a real human being made,” Schuppe says. “What is sweeter than having functional art integrated into your daily life?”

A formally trained painter and ceramicist, Schuppe is exhibiting at her 19th Sawdust. She works primarily with a finely graded clay known as “light earthenware,” which is hand-shaped or molded and then fired at nearly 2,000 degrees for a cycle that lasts for eight hours. Paint and glaze are applied and fired for another eight hours.

When she handles her own work, say a simple coffee cup, the object gathers gravity. She thumbs the sweep of the handle and speaks of the labor that made it smooth and graceful to touch. She holds the cup in her palm as if to judge its balance. She does not look into its bowl but lifts it higher to catch reflections of light on the glass-cladding of glaze.

No one appreciates craft quite as intimately as the artisan.

Schuppe has several favorite objects, with the bowl perhaps her favorite of all. “Bowls are so utilitarian,” she explains. “And they are beautiful metaphors for our lives. They hold things. They both offer and receive.”

Ray Caruso

“I’m a scrimshander,” says Ray Caruso. “I like to make things.”

As a grade-schooler, he studied drawing at the Institute of Art in Cleveland. Later, he developed a fascination with fossils. Long ago, the two interests converged unexpectedly when he picked up a hitchhiker -- a man who was exhibiting jewelry at the Sawdust Art Festival. It was jewelry inlaid with fossilized ivory from the tusks of extinct wooly mammoths.

Caruso began scratching pictures onto polished pieces of the ancient material, then filling the scratches with ink, the process of scrimshaw. Someone asked to buy the second piece he completed. The following year when he debuted at Sawdust, he virtually sold out in three days.

“Here it is 28 years later and I’m still making more,” he says with a smile.

Scrimshaw is the art made famous by American whalers 200 years ago, then using the ivory teeth of the sperm whale. Caruso emphasizes that he does not utilize or deal in any type of fresh ivory, not whale, not elephant. He uses only prehistoric, fossilized material, chiefly found in the arctic reaches of Alaska and Siberia. This wooly mammoth ivory retains the buttery, tactile feel of ivory but is usually tinted or streaked shades of tan and brown by minerals from the earth in which it was buried, infusing each piece with antediluvian mystery.

Caruso transforms this fossilized material into accessories, such as money clips or belt buckles, often scrimshawed but sometimes just polished.

His decorative pieces -- mounted tusks and small sculptures -- allow a larger surface for the scrimshander’s art -- tall ships at sea or nature scenes from the arctic tundra to the African plains.

The process begins with polishing an ivory surface. The “painting” is then hand engraved in almost microscopic detail. Ink is rubbed across the surface to fill the engraving. After the ink dries, the surface is repolished and the engraved image remains, pictures that reveal astonishing realism and detail the closer one looks.

It is a natural form for Caruso, who once reduced his travel diaries to a postcard that required a powerful magnifying glass to read.

“I guess I think small,” he says with a laugh.

For those approaching scrimshaw, or any craft, without an expert’s knowledge, Caruso’s advice is as timeless as the material he works: “Buy what you like. You have to live with it.”

Sawdust Art Festival

Where: 935 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach

When: 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily, through Sept. 4

Price: Adults, $7; seniors; $5.50; ages 6 to 12, $2; 5 and younger, free.

Parking: Limited metered parking on Laguna Canyon Road, $1 an hour, quarters only.

* Also: City-run Act V lot half a mile up Laguna Canyon Road, $5 all day, with free tram service (walking not recommended on this section of Laguna Canyon Road) or pay lots in the vicinity of downtown Laguna, within walking distance of Sawdust, about $10 daily.

Demonstrations and activities:

* Glassblower stage demonstrations, hourly 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.

* Continuous from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., children’s arts and crafts booth, ceramics and pottery wheel instruction (children and adults).