Craft in America

Even as a kid I used to just be obsessed with the idea of drawing things. They used to say oh he can draw. You know, oh yeah Jim, yeah he can draw. I think I used to do it to try to get approval from people at first and then I realized that really what I'm doing is I'm trying to show that I can perceive what you perceive like and I can prove it here's what it looks like in my head so I'll make it. This particular model banjo is made by William E. Boucher Jr. in Baltimore. He started making them in the 1940s when the banjo got real popular and they were knocking these out in a factory and they weren't that well made but they looked beautiful and people were buying them. There was a big demand for banjos. You know I'm trying to make the same Boucher banjos but I'm probably making a lot sturdier than they made it because I don't want anybody coming back and saying my banjo fell apart. Basically neo-classical, it comes with a little decoration on top. Craft is real important. When you can make an object come and occupy space in a nice way, that's a great sense of satisfaction that comes from that. Musical instruments even better because it occupies the sonic space, you know you're occupying the physical space, now you're occupying a sound wave, you know like you're pushing it even farther and I like the idea of living with things that you actually produce, you know that are like extensions of your own perception, just common making things. I'm not talking about you know masterpiece stuff. I'm just talking about the idea of making things daily, you know as a practice. I enjoy making things from scratch. There's something in the idea of like using you know your hands, eyes, you know working. I'll give you an example. I was working on carving stone in India. I was able to go and study with a bunch of stone carvers. These are the people that cut all the stone by hand to make all these beautiful temples and sculptures all over India. Some guy comes into the stone yard with a big trailer, with a compressor and all this pneumatic carving equipment and he says to the guys in charge, he says we want to sell this to you. You know this is going to make your work a lot easier, all this pneumatic carving, stone carving thing and these guys are all cutting great big stones with big sledgehammers and doing all this and then very finely carving it into statues so he set up his compressor and he gets this guy. He sits down he says I'm gonna carve, you know relief lotus flower on this stone and the guy who's my teacher he says I'll carve it over here by hand and we'll have a race so Peremo was the carver, was the guy who was my teacher, he's sitting there, he's carving, he's watching this other guy going you know with the machine knocking this thing out and Peremo would just stop and watch and every once in a while, he'd do it and then he was done. This guy's still over there banging away at it you know and then I said to Peremo well, he said well we don't want that because what we're doing, he says you work with your hand, your heart, and your eyes. You can't do that with a machine.