Curious Worlds: The Art & Imagination of David Beck

(slow jazz music) - It is called the "Movie Palace," and it's sort of like a little temple.

It's almost like a religious shrine to the movies.

These are like sort of depictions of different movie genres.

This would be like the epics, you know, Ben-Hur type movie.

This is sort of film noir.

Eggshell up here.

This is actually chicken eggshells.

These are wood, but they're made to look like they're copper.

Are you ready?

(jazz bright music) People kissing, smooching, and people eating, mainly eating.

A lot of people eating.

There's a man here looking for his date.

He's got a giant thing of popcorn in.

(jazz bright music) - To me, David is in the center of the note of what American art has always been about and is still today.

We think he's one of America's great artists and someone who needs to be seen and known everywhere.

He is in many ways under-recognized, because of course he's not out there curating his own career.

He's not out there calling a lot of attention to himself.

He's in his studio doing his work.

(slow jazz music) - As that I am kind of loathed to clean up my desk, I've made this extension.

So I have to pull the drawer out and then more and more stuff.

Eventually this will go all the way across the room and I will never have to clean it ever, ever again.

So I built this tray to... I used to work on this to keep, when I would drop things, it wouldn't roll, but now it just become this thing that holds all of my tools so.

Electric motors break or wear out eventually electric lights, and then that means somebody has to go mucking about in them.

And I don't know, I think it's nicer to not have to rely on some technologies.

I'm kind of getting back to like really primitive technology.

I mean cranks, you know.

(slow gentle jazz music) I was asked by the director of the both the Smithsonian American Art and the National Portrait Gallery to make something for the building for their museum's grand opening in 2006.

This particular corner is the presidential corner.

These have all the presidential portraits that you can find in this museum, since it is the National Portrait Gallery.

So I've got everybody from Washington to, I don't know those other guys that were presidents.

These objects are actually reproductions of objects that were collected on this, the Wilkes Expedition and that were brought back.

These are some masks from the Pacific Northwest and these are some pieces from Fiji.

Here in the center cabinet, there's a Gabriel that is, you know, stabbing evil or Satan.

But if you notice that port of his teal is escaping the confines of the glass case, because no matter what you do, it's really pretty difficult to stamp out evil.

I know that.

(upbeat jazz music) - I absolutely remember the first time I saw David's work, an amazing piece called "Pipe Organ."

- You don't really need a knowledge of music to play this thing, you can.

If you have a sense of rhythm or something like that, you can make up things.

The way that this is set up on the bottom there are these fish and they act as bellows.

And then you have the ever popular guys in blue suits who kick bells.

Yeah, I mean when you think about sound and music, you know, I mean, we're imitating something, you know, birds for whistling sounds.

So that's how this came about.

So if you blow into 'em, (horn tooting) - I called him up and I said, "Mr.

Beck, this is Betsy Broun.

I work at the Smithsonian American Art and I want to come and meet you."

I felt as if I was a groupie, going to meet a rockstar.

(upbeat bright jazz music) - If you ever asked David, where do you get these ideas?

Have you ever asked him and has he given you the pat answer?

I have a book, "Ideas for Skinny Sculptors."

(upbeat bright jazz music) - Took me a little over a year to make.

And when I work on something, it's all I do.

Everybody in the audience is wearing glasses because they're nearsighted.

And so am I. In the very beginning, it's sort of an evolutionary scale it sweeps into the back.

(upbeat bright jazz music) They're playing fish and it lights up.

(upbeat bright jazz music) (bells chiming) At the time that I was making this, there was a lot of scary stuff going on in the world in terms of nuclear proliferation.

I mean, it was like on my mind and I was afraid of being, you know, annihilated.

So I was thinking probably the safest place in the world to be would be an Antarctica and like who's gonna mess with the penguins?

And so for some reason, I did that and there's like a little character here who has a mustache and he's in a penguin suit and that's kind of me in a way thinking about being safe.

(slow playful jazz music) I knew nothing about opera.

I just thought it was like a lot of fat people singing.

(slow jazz music) There's over I think 200 figures in there.

So that's a lot of carving.

And the ones that move, then they have multiple pieces.

(slow jazz music) I did a lot of research.

One of the ideas came from an article in the newspaper about people who follow the ring cycle, which is the Wagner.

And when the all four operas are performed, people travel from all around the world and they can congregate.

So there was a whole article in "The New York Times" about these people in a hotel and they're wearing like, you know, hats with horns on 'em and you know, they're part of like a hole.

They're almost like Trekkies.

So that sort of gave me the idea of having opera members in the audience.

So the movements are caused by a little electric motors that are hidden under the floors.

And there's actually a series of motors.

So it's all divided up.

So there would be one motor or power source per audience section.

Each one has to be done separately.

Each figure, each movement.

And if there's a multiple movement on a figure, then each one of those has its own sort of special linkage.

(slow jazz music) So what happens is that the lever rolls on top of them when it hits the spike it, forces the lever up which then makes the mouth open or close or that type of movement.

So that's basically how it's done.

(slow jazz music) It was a long haul to work on this piece.

And I can tell you that at the time, people were getting concerned if I was ever going to finish it, the guy who commissioned it.

And Allan Stone, my art dealer at the time, he was like, "Well David, is this gonna be finished in my lifetime?"

Then the client was asking, then all of a sudden I was started wondering if it was gonna be finished in my lifetime.

So it was, I'm still alive.

I think, well, it's debatable.

(slow jazz music) So I made this whole hinge.

I haven't been able to find things just like this that will work for me at this store I made.

Sometimes I do, but like these two hinges here on this piece are old piano hinges that I bought the hardware store.

But I'm not really, they're kind of on there as a placeholder.

I'm not really crazy about the way they look.

And I had been designing this other hinge.

This is a hinge that I made.

Anyway, there'll be two of them.

There'll be one at the top and then one at the bottom with a rod in between.

So I think that that will look a lot nicer than, and also it'll be better.

It'll swing out nicer.

So somebody asked me about why don't I buy hinges from the store?

I'm not opposed to finding things, but if they don't work, they don't work.

I was caught by a guy named Joe Marmol.

Joe was someone I admired quite a bit.

He was a man of mystery.

He was maybe fled Argentina and he landed in Brooklyn, worked at a gasoline station.

And at night he would carve things, tiny things and do scrimshaw.

And he made things for the designers in New York and stuff like that.

He exposed me to a lot of like the deco furniture people.

I would go over to his studio and he would come over to mine.

He was influential in sort of making me think about materials and about furniture makers as artisans and artists, you know, and their design concepts and their use of materials and blending different things together.

But he would give me his castoffs and his straps and things like that.

So I'd actually have hands-on, you know, trying to figure out what to do with them, and I could see how he would work with them.

I guess for a small example, there's a material called chagrin.

Some people call it shark skin, but it's actually a skin from a manta ray and it was used a lot in deco furniture.

These pieces came from him.

They were scraps from a larger piece that he had.

It's a very thick skin.

And the way that I did it, basically you have to sort of straighten it out by wetting it and then glue it onto a board or something like that.

And then sanding it to get, you know, that sort of texture takes off all the little bumps.

This is Joe right here, and this is framed in shark skin or chagrin.

He's passed away.

But I wanted to, you know, honor him and honor what he'd done for me.

(slow playful jazz music) Well, Joe taught me about inlay.

You're breaking little tiny eggshells or ostrich eggs or mussel shells.

I was living in New York at the time in SoHo when I was making this.

I lived on Worcester Street and there was a bar there called Fanelli's, and it was a bar that like most artists hung out and used to be able to get a draft for 50 cents.

But I could go at night with a bucket and they would give me all the muscle shelf scraped off the plate, you know, and they said, and the guy first they would wash them and give them to me and it was fine.

And then the guy goes, "What are you washing all those muzzle shells for?"

And he go, "Well, David's coming by."

And he goes, "Well he can have 'em, but he's gotta wash 'em himself."

So I take these like mussel shells home and buckets at the spaghetti and tomato sauce.

And it was really disgusting, you know.

But I mean you can't really blame the guy.

- [Kate] You used this as a studio once, didn't you?

- That's right.

Right, right.

- I can't remember why.

What was the situation?

- My old, I was working on that bar and I was making the panels for the top, the mussel shells and they had shut off my electricity on Worcester Street at my old studio.

So I didn't have a place to work.

So I used your electricity and set up a job one right here on this to grind it down.

- That was the smell of low tide.

- Exactly.

- I kinda remember that.

Right, it was very dusty and I was very popular in your neighborhood for that couple of weeks that I was here.

- What did they say?

- What are you doing?

These are all done on little panels, like six inch panels glued on, crushed.

And then after that, it's a lot of work.

You have to grind, sand, polish and then bring them off and then there really, you know, it's a very unique kind of surface.

All of this started out as, you know, clear glass and I gilded the back of the glass like a sign painter would guild on a door, you know, like doctor so-and-so, you know.

Well that's the technique you use like a... This was done with gelatin, you know.

I mean, you buy pills, you know, gelatin capsules and that's how it's done.

And then that's washed into a paint of glass and then you thin, thin, thin sheets of gold are placed on it.

And then I painted it all black on top to make it secure.

Then I took those sheets of glass and cut tens of thousands of tiny little squares.

So then I made my own tiles in that.

So they're all different sizes and then I glued them all in.

That's how that stuck.

Got a lot of cuts on my fingers.

(slow upbeat jazz music) When I was first starting in the '70s, I worked for a sculptor and he came out of a group of... There were a group of guys in Chicago who were making monumental sculptures.

So things were outside and they were really big and it was a very macho thing.

You know, be big or go home.

And I just thought it would be, 'cause I guess it was sort of perverse on my part, but just to do it backwards, do it upside down, and to make small pieces.

And I responded to them more.

And also was always, I always had a problem with where I was living.

Like I would be asked to leave all the time.

So I had to find a new place.

It was a lot easier to make really tiny things than put 'em in a suitcase and go to the next place.

The very first show I was in was a new talent show.

I was very young.

It was at the Allen Stone Gallery.

It was 22.

I went to New York.

I hadn't finished college.

Somebody gave me a ride and I worked small.

So I took a lot of work in suitcases.

Every place I'd gone to in SoHo.

I walk in with these two suitcases and the people go, "So you want to show me your work?"

I go, "Yeah."

And they go, "Do you have any slides?"

And I go, "Yeah, I have slides, but I have the real stuff right here."

And they go, "I'd rather look at the slides" And I'm thinking, what's wrong with these people?

I mean, why you wanna... And so everyone kept saying, "Well, you should probably go uptown to Allan Stone Gallery."

So I walked in the door, woman there, Joan Wolf.

She goes, "Oh, so would you... You're an artist."

I go, "Well, yes."

And she goes, "Well, would you like to show Allan your work?"

And I said, "Well, yes I would."

She goes, "What's your name?"

I said, "David Beck."

She goes, "Just a minute."

She picks up the phone.

She goes, "Allan, David Beck is here to see you."

And so she goes, "Go through there."

And I go, "Where?"

She goes, "Over there."

And then, so I walk through this labyrinth of rooms and then I hear this voice, and I go, "Is there somebody back there?"

And he goes, "Yeah, keep coming back here."

We sit in these two chairs and I open up these suitcases, and he takes hold of these pieces and he goes, "Ssh, just a second."

And he runs out and I hear him cackling with Joan in the desk and then, which is fine by me 'cause it gives me an opportunity to look what he's got hanging around in his office.

And then he comes back in and he goes, "You have more?"

And I go, "I got a lot more.

I don't know how much of this stuff you wanna see."

He goes, "I wanna see it all."

And so then he comes back and he goes, "Listen, I'd like to put you in the new talent show next month."

And then, "But I want to do a bigger show, you know, like in the fall or winter or something like that."

I said, "Well that sounds good."

He says, "Do you like cookies?"

And I said, "I do like cookies."

So we sat around the office eating cookies, you know, so that was that.

And he became, you know, a really very, very important person in my life.

(slow upbeat jazz music) How we first met?

- Okay, so.

- Destiny, faith, it was in the stars.

- So my husband and I had a... - You were married?

- My husband and I had a pickup truck, an old pickup truck.

And David and I had seen each other across the street, but we'd never spoken.

And he asked me, he said, "I noticed you have a pickup truck and would you mind driving me up to the gallery with a piece of sculpture that was bigger than my arms could stretch?"

And it was a wooden rhinoceros with little doors and the doors opened up and you can look inside and it was very, very cool.

- Mario lived there was this place called the Hebrew Publishing Company and they had all these wooden boxes about so big they were throwing them out.

And I collected a whole bunch of them and I've put them around my doorways and stuff like that and built little dioramas, you know, sort of like honeycomb my house or my storefront.

And then I kept getting more and more, so then I started putting them together until I formed this whole rhinoceros.

And then I found a bunch of leather on the street and I covered the whole thing with leather and made little doors.

And then I built dioramas in each one.

So this piece is basically 60 or more boxes.

(playful upbeat jazz music) I would go to the bars at night.

People were about my age and stuff like that.

And it was a whole scene and everyone talked about their making sculpture or being poets or dancers or all this other stuff, but they're staying out every night until the bars closed at four in the morning.

And I couldn't understand how you could ever get any work done.

So, and it kind of occurred to me that you couldn't.

You couldn't live like that, you know?

So I sort of slowed down.

- You were this like 25-year-old kid who lived in a little storefront with a potbelly stove, and was there a sleeping loft because the whole place was his studio.

Yeah, it was a tiny little studio - I love (indistinct).

- [Rosalie] And I loved going in there and looking because everything was so fascinating.

Man, I used to think, he's got an incredible mind that he's able to do this and he's doing it on a tiny, tiny little budget.

- It was very cold and drafty.

And I remember one, I think it was Christmas morning, somebody came by and broke the windows out.

So that was a dragon.

Snow was coming in and I was trying to, you know... It was pretty.

Sometimes it was grim.

You know, it was really because I didn't have the people come to visit and they knew that I'd just turned the heat on just before they showed up.

So it wouldn't look so bad.

But then occasionally they'd sell some, something would happen and I would help people, odd jobs here and there.

I just didn't want to get like a real straight job, full-time job because I really wanted to devote my time to making things, you know, I was very, very driven.

(slow upbeat jazz music) (slow dramatic music) My mother said, "Well there's other boys that are making this sculpture that, you know."

I said, "Yes, ma, there's other boys that are making this sculpture."

It's like I came from another planet or something like that.

(slow dramatic music) They couldn't quite understand like, shouldn't you be teaching or something like that.

I would show her some things, but you know, it didn't mean anything to 'em because they have no point of reference.

(slow dramatic music) I had a friend down the street that I spent every waking moment with, and his parents were interested in art.

His mother used to draw cartoons and he had his own room.

And so we would build things there.

We were encouraged by his mom.

Junior high school I started thinking, this is really what I want to do.

I want to be an artist.

I was also involved in like school theater productions.

And so they would have me like design the program and then paint the sets of, you know, things like that.

I really didn't know anything about it.

But, you know, I went winged.

I took as much art classes I could in junior high school and high school.

I think one of the things my mother said to me once was, "Well, you know, your uncle makes picnic tables."

And I go, "Yes."

It's a lie, yeah.

So she could understand somebody making something, you know, She can understand a picnic table a lot easier than like a rhinoceros with a bunch of, you know, anarchists running through it.

But I really can't blame her actually.

I can kind of understand a picnic table myself.

But later, as she passed away, I met some of her, some women friends, and they always said that she was really proud of me, but they didn't really understand what it was I was up to.

(slow jazz music) I got into Carnegie Mellon.

I was accepted, I didn't even apply.

So we went to like the administration office and stuff.

And the guy said, "Well, this is all very good, but you know, we don't have an application on file for you."

And I said, "Oh, well I never really filled one out."

And he goes, "Well, let's do that now."

But then he says, "Well, so how are you gonna pay for this?"

And I said, "Well, I don't know."

How much does it cost to go to school?

It was like $3,500 a year.

And I'm going, oh crap, you might as well save $35 million.

I said, well, I got, he said, "Do you have any money?"

I said, "Well, I've saved $300."

He goes, "That's not really gonna go that far."

He says, "You folks have any money?"

I said, "Well, I'm not really."

I said, "But you know I'm an emancipated minor.

Does that matter?"

He goes, "Yes."

He says, "You're an emancipated minor."

I said, "As a matter of fact, I am."

And I had the papers and he goes, "Well, that's different.

So it means you're financially responsible for yourself."

And so he was able to give me a scholarship, a loan, a work study and stuff like that.

So I went to school, started the next day.

(rapid upbeat jazz music) When I first started art school, the first assignment was to go home and come back with a self portrait.

So the next day everybody showed up and there're these sensitive types that did naked self portraits and are pictures of themselves looking very serious or you know, depressed or something.

And I wasn't really interested in realist drawing at the time.

I was doing more abstract, you know, meaningful marks and things like that, but also some elements of things.

So I actually did this drawing that kind of continued on what I had been doing these stripes and blotches and things like that.

A lot of color ink, different materials.

And then in one part of it, I had like a tiny face that had like a cow's udder.

And that was my self portrait as a little tiny cow.

So I handed that in and I liked it.

And he goes, "This is your self portrait?"

I said, "Well, yes."

And in fact that's part of me right there with the... this is portrait of me as a cow on this part right here.

But the whole thing is.

And he goes, and he liked it.

He liked my drawing.

He goes, he says, "Okay, just wait right here."

And so then he had the rest of the class, he explained, "Well, we're gonna have a model."

And when everybody set up on the model and you know, this is what we're gonna do.

And he comes back to me and he goes, "David, now you can draw from the model if you like, but you don't have to.

You can set up a little studio back here and do whatever you want."

He told me, like, he said, he didn't want to like change me.

He didn't wanna force me into different, you know.

He thought that I had a different kind of vision that should be encouraged.

(slow upbeat jazz music) - I wanted to ask you some questions - Sure.

- about the cow.

- [Collector] So what's the appeal of magic?

- All about magic.

- It's all about the magic.

- It's all about the magic.

That's this whole cow is a magic cow.

- Do you do magic?

- I did as a kid.

Houdini was my big hero as a little kid.

I mean the whole notion of being able to escape and that was very appealing to me, very appealing.

- [Collector] What were you trying to escape from?

- Yeah, yes.

- Maybe from childhood.

I like the fact that the story that you told me before that the hare was from a horse that belonged to your grandfather.

- Right.

- [Collector] And what was the horse's name?

- Barney.

- Barney, yes.

- Well, he called it his racehorse, but it was a workhorse, you know.

It wasn't how, you know, but that was his thing.

And he loved the horse and so we kept it - And the idea that... - after it died.

- The idea that Barney was made into a coat after he died.

And then that the coat suddenly, the coat suddenly found another line - Right.

- bits of it.

- Bits of it, yeah.

- Bits of it, yeah.

- I still have lot... - The rest of the coat?

- Most of them, most of them, yeah.

I wore 'em all through college.

- What was people's reactions?

- Well, they would keep their distance, but it's a very warm coat.

Coming to see it now is, you know, it's a good feeling for me.

Some things, you know, I feel very divorced from after not seeing them.

But this one I still remember, you know, working on different aspects and I was really happy with the little magic show and then stuff, because there's a lot of stuff from my history, personal history in this piece.

And then I have all these sort of darker elements, these Mexican death masks, which can commemorate the dead or remember the dead.

It's a kind of a dark piece.

(dramatic music) So the very first show at Allan Stone, we sold three pieces and they went to this one family in Chicago, the Bergman family.

And I didn't know this, but I found out later that they were like the biggest collectors of Cornell's work.

And so that was a big thrill for me to know that, you know, the first people to buy my work were people that collected somebody that I liked.

And it so that there was a sense of validation in that.

(dramatic jazz music) Well, this is a piece that I made a very long time ago, probably 1977-'78.

It's called "Flamingo A-Go-Go."

And what it is, is it's a portable flamingo.

The legs pull out of the back or articulated, they can move up and down.

The head comes out, sort of works in reposes there.

The wings, the wings will flap.

And the most important part.

Only plays Mexican music.

(vocalist singing in foreign language) (jazz music) (distant chattering) Inventors, guide or instrument makers or kind of... - I like it.

- It's gorgeous, because it's like the little filigree.

- These are my pieces.

These are my pieces.

- Oh, these are you?

- Yeah, and... - [Reporter] How can I get your picture to go along with it?

- It doesn't exist.

I break cameras.

(distant chattering) - [Attendee 1] Wow, oh my gosh, that's great.

- He explained to me that he encountered the dodo at the exhibit, at the Natural History Museum in New York, I believe around early '70s and was completely taken by the character.

He explained that he searched and searched for pictures and illustrations of the dodo.

And I know that it's a recurring character for him.

Speaking of the dodo, I think, for me, he's exploring that concept of self-portraiture.

- These are pretty early dodos.

Very early actually.

I think these were maybe '76.

When I first started seeing them at the Museum of Natural History in New York.

And I still hadn't, you know, I was experimenting with the way that I like wanted to portray them.

That's more dodos.

Little bulb on the end of their nose.

There's two looking up.

Another one coming up at a hole on the ground.

Well, it's true.

I've been sort of obsessed and fascinated by the dodo for many, many years.

I mean, the name, it means stupid in Dutch I think, and then in Portuguese it means something like big bottom.

But I always felt like, well why are we, you know, they're just friendly bird.

I mean, why should they be synonymous with stupid?

Because they're friendly, you know, and it has that kind of draw for me.

There's a lot of speculation, which intrigues me what the dodo actually look like.

So it's very free because there's really no, you know, set thing.

There are some skeletons and things, things like that.

So you don't really know exactly.

And there was a guy named Roelandt Savery who did a lot of paintings, used the image of the dodo a lot.

And that image itself is probably the one that's most copied.

They're sort of a funny looking animal.

And from all the descriptions, they're sort of bizarre.

They would so heavy that they walked, they waddled.

And so they had a comical kind of look about them.

The necks didn't seem to really support their heads, which had an enormous beak.

And then they had tiny little wings that... So everything about them was sort of funny in those aspects of, you know, beauty or something like that.

But I find them I very handsome sort of animal and admirable.

(light uplifting music) I built a piece called the "Dodo Museum," which is an actual sort of homage of the history of the dodo.

And it's a little building that's covered in feathers.

And on the inside is a skeleton of the dodo that goes up through two floors.

And on the walls, I've taken unicorn tapestries, but replacing the unicorn with a dodo, but also telling the story about it being discovered by European sailors and then being destroyed by animals that were left on the island.

(light uplifting music) - I also feel like the dodo being extinct, David is the type of artist that is almost extinct because I have never encountered anyone like him.

And I don't think even any other artist that can even come close to what he does, in my opinion.

(upbeat jazz music) - These are the wings.

And the legs took these tracings off of the wings that I'd drawn.

And I do use like textbooks.

Here's a textbook, and then I transfer this onto like wood.

(upbeat jazz music) In this particular mechanism, it was driving me nuts for many, many weeks and months.

I mean, when I figured that out and I figured out how to connect the rods and stuff like that.

It was like, ho ho, that was pretty good.

There's an incredible amount of frustration involved sometimes with what I do.

Just like all of these pieces here, all these metal pieces that I've made were at one time or another in this piece.

So here's a whole series of discs that didn't quite work out.

Here's a whole series of wooden marquettes.

And then I've got a whole box of these too.

These are also pieces that didn't make it in that I could... Some of the stuff I can maybe reuse.

This was about three hours of making, you know.

It's crazy, really.

This little setup here.

I mean we're looking at like a week's worth of work, just like, look, you know, messing with this stuff here.

I've been working on this for about five months, six months, something like that.

I'm not reproducing nature.

I mean that's not something that I'm even interested in doing.

I'm using it as like a springboard.

It's like a romantic version of it in a sense.

- A toy has a kind of remove.

But this work is very, very personal.

It's very detailed.

It's very intense.

It's not a toy.

It's close to being the real thing.

And that takes away, its kind of funniness.

- For sculpture and the things that I do, there's a lot of problem solving, which is somewhat creative but also it's very practical when you conceive of things that are gonna be actually made take up space, and things like that.

You have to think about, well how you gonna keep it from falling apart or how's it gonna be held and how's something gonna be joined together?

And if it has a moving part, then that has a whole other aspect.

And what I try to do is I try to consider everything, you know, so it can get to be.

It's a lot to think about.

And so thousands and thousands of decisions, you know.

Three quarters or at least three quarters of the way done on the clay.

I just want to... A lot of this is, feels like meditation in a way which is calming and I enjoy doing it.

The wrinkles and putting in the detail.

Eventually I want to take measurements off of this and build it in wood.

And I was thinking of turning it into like a small cabinet so that portions would open up and there would be objects on the inside that you could look at too.

And 'cause a lot of the things that I make are that way there's sort of an act of discovery.

It starts with an outside piece and then you move inside and see something else that's going on.

He does kinda look sad, doesn't he?

Sort of.

(slow upbeat jazz music) - [Lauren] When you go to his house and you see the way all the objects he owns or has collected are laid out in little arrangements, (slow upbeat jazz music) whether it's on the wall or on a bookshelf and the way certain objects are with other objects, the glass domes and turtle shells or you know, stuffed something next to something else.

And there's incredible sensibility that's so almost heartbreakingly elegant and refined and it just, I mean really just so exquisite.

(slow upbeat jazz music) - I kinda like this.

- That's it David.

- What do you think that is?

- I don't know.

I think it's for candies maybe.

I don't know.

It's nice though.

It's the best price I can get from you today?

- I could do $7 for you today - All right, that'd be great.

- for being so polite.

- One thing that always drew me to David is that he's extremely attentive.

He's very, very watchful and he can be very still.

You can't necessarily tell what it is that he's looking for or what it is that he sees, but he has a quality of a very intense observation.

- I look at a lot of older things.

I look at a lot of relief carvings that are very inspiring to me.

Asian pieces.

There's a sensibility there that I really, really like a lot.

Their sense of space and in design, especially in Japanese work, they really the sort of the masters of what you would like call negative space but it's not negative at all.

It's balanced out.

Sometimes I look at that stuff and I feel like I'm a real Claude because they're so elegant and you know, lyrical.

Like I think I like gothic and medieval pieces, like private little prayer books or personal shrines.

Very small personal things that people carry with them.

(slow jazz music) Well, this started out as a working drawing to figure out how to make the elephant.

And I did take tracings and made cardboard and paper patterns to start the clay elephant.

(slow jazz music) I will take this kind of wood and build a structure like so.

It'll be only be that high maybe like a like at that.

And then I do the drawers like coming out of it like that.

So that's the structure that's on the very inside.

(slow jazz music) When I'm working on something very small and intense, what happens in my mind I think is that I can completely lose myself in it.

It's very enjoyable, at least for me.

(slow jazz music) This is a very tiny, tiny, tiny skull.

I think I made this, I just wanted to see if I could make something that small, basically.

- The work is for an individual, right?

It's for you when you are playing it.

- That's interesting.

- And look at the beak.

Do you see the beak... - [Lauren] But then what's really fun would be showing it to a friend.

- [Attendee 2] Howard, and it's not something.

- [Attendee 3] Yes.

- It's not so much he's introducing a miniature into our world today.

I think he's inviting us to enter a completely different world on a whole nother scale.

And you begin to question your own scale in the environment that you are in.

- I am fascinated with what scale is in his hand and how far he can take it and how tiny the needle is that he can thread and show us that he... I mean there is a performative aspect there.

A kind of a Houdini in David's handling of scale.

(slow upbeat jazz music) (bass music) (bass jazz music) (audience applauding) - This is a pretty solitary occupation.

I need a lot of quiet time to keep focused on something like that, but it's can be too much.

So that's why I pursued music.

And because it forces you, it forced me to go out and to have interactions with other people, other musicians, you know, so I've developed some close friendships.

(light bass jazz music) (audience applauding) - That was good.

- That was good one.

- That was good.

In the way that we play, since it's sort of improvisational music, it's more like having conversations and it's better to have a conversation with someone else and constantly with yourself, you know?

I can get it a little dangerous.

- David, since you're visiting your old artworks, I wanted to, - Right.

- this is - to show you this piece you made for me - The John Parks finger series.

- There is this kind of flavor to the work that is hard to describe, but quite identifiable when you look at his pieces.

It emanates a certain kind of poetry that he's not simply making a point or creating an entertainment.

He actually creates this sort of consistent vision of the world that draws you in and has a very particular flavor, engages you in it in quite a special way.

And you know, you are close to it and close to something that's very unusual.

(slow dramatic jazz music) - I think every artist have a certain amount of craft in what they do.

It's not all technique that I'm interested in.

I sort of develop techniques or I learn techniques if I think that they're appropriate for what I'm trying to build.

(slow dramatic jazz music) I'm starting to make little drawers for the legs too.

This is like a combination of things.

This is like the mouth of hell.

So the mouth kept getting bigger so that you could see inside what was happening.

That's why.

This piece is sort of is evolving out of like a long term, thinking about these cabinets of wonders by and large the encyclopedic or a way of for me understanding the way of the world or just things.

Making the pieces a journey.

It's not always plotted out.

I always think that really nice art.

There's always a mystery to it.

There's sort of something baffling and there's something that draws you in.

(dramatic upbeat jazz music) I used a lot of materials that I'd never used before I started to do.

So like along this edge here.

This is all ostrich eggshell.

And then on the inside what they're actually dancing on is chicken eggs, both.

So they're dancing on eggshells.

So it's sort of a little pun.

(upbeat bright jazz music) Little vignettes of people in private worlds, but actually in a public setting.

So people are reacting to each other in a way, but also they're also in their own sort of private world at the same time.

(upbeat bright jazz music) This area here, you have a couple, it's actually an interracial couple and they're dancing sort of wildly together.

And then you have these two sort of matronly yentas almost that are tracking them and they have sort of a judgmental, you know, look about them.

There's also a woman who's all by herself who constantly drinks.

I think maybe she's feeling a little bit left alone (upbeat bright jazz music) Thinking about fish.

More fish.

I have an interest in everything, you know, I'd like to do everything.

You know, it's something that's sort of keeps me going.

(upbeat bright jazz music) (upbeat bright jazz music continues)