Urchin Pin, 2008, polymer clay, sterling silver, 3 1/2 x 3 1/2 x 3/4"

Our next show will be the American Craft Exposition, better known as Evanston for the town where it’s held.  The show is open to the public August 27-29.  Like the other top craft shows in the country (Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Smithsonian), it’s a benefit  run by a well organized Women’s Committee.  In this case they are raising money to fight breast cancer at the North Shore University Health System.   The site is the Henry Crown Center on the Northwestern University campus, a stones throw from Lake Michigan.

We love doing this fair because there are serious and enthusiastic collectors who have been coming to the show for years.  For the most part, they’re an educated audience that understands American craft and appreciate seeing the work evolve from year to year.

Untitled (SF100622P), 2010, unique collage relief print, 30 x 44"

I have a show of twenty of the prints that I’ve been working on, at JAGR: Projects on Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia.  The show runs thru October 15th.

Edith Newhall of the Philadelphia Inquirer reviewed the show on Sunday August 1.  She said, “Ford’s linocuts, such as Bricks (2008), composed of a brick-wall pattern of colored blocks, make use of old-fashioned colors common to American cupboards and fabrics – pine green, yellow-ochre, barn red – and also to their worn and striated surfaces. The simpler Ford’s patterns, the better they are. In one untitled piece, of overlapping rectangles of indigo blue, he pushes his pattern and color to a perfect, if slightly unruly, union.”  Overall, not bad, but she focused on the first larger print that I made two years ago.  Maybe simpler is better, but I enjoy complicating things too much to stop.  The untitled image above, one that my partner Ron warned was “difficult” and “challenging”, was also the first to sell on opening night.  We referred to this print as “the snake”, but because many people are afraid of snakes, I was encouraged to find other metaphors for the figure (an Andy Goldsworthy river line, was the best thing I could come up with).  The same warning was given to me when I wrote Creating with Polymer Clay for Lark Books.  I referred to a coil of clay as a”snake” and was told that would have to be changed.

If you’re in Philadelphia, I hope you’ll go see the show.

Makers: A History of American Studio Craft, Janet Koplos & Bruce Metcalf, 2010, University of North Carolina Press

“Here is the first comprehensive survey of modern craft in the United States”

This new book just came out last week, and it features our work (see pages 457-458).  It was written by Janet Koplos, editor of Art in America and Bruce Metcalf, perhaps the country’s best combination studio jeweler, critic and writer.  We’re honored to be represented in the 1990′s, a decade titled, Mastery as Meaning.  

“Ford/Forlano jewelry is colorful and decorative.  Forlano did not use the bright colors of commercial polymer clay but mixed countless tints and shades on his own.  While their patterns and shapes may have had correlates in the real world–glass canes, pebbles, scribbles–they relied on experimentation rather than historical quotation ”

“The typical reaction to marketplace success is to endlessly repeat a signature style, but Ford and Forlano made their open-ended editions in different color schemes.  No two pieces are ever alike.  Furthermore, they constantly add new designs to their line and eliminate old ones.  Customers can see new work and also trace Ford and Forlano’s growth and change.  In the long run, this organic evolution has stimulated sales, and demand for their work has only increased.”

Blue Heron Gallery, Deer Isle, ME

The last weekend in July,  I’ll be doing a trunk show in one of my favorite parts of the world, Penobscot Bay, Maine.  I was invited by Sue Wilmot, owner of the Blue Heron Gallery, to bring our latest jewelry  for a three day show.

The Gallery is close to Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and Sue shows the work of many of the faculty there. Dave and I taught a workshop at Haystack many years ago. It’s a magical place.

My love of Maine started  when I first visited Deer Isle almost 30 years ago with a friend who’s family had a summer house built on a stone ledge in the style of the Haystack architecture.  We picked blueberries and cranberries, sailed, canoed and swam in the frigid water.  We hiked around a granite quarry that was used to mine the stone for President Kennedy’s tomb, and took day trips to Isle au Haut.

I had a summer house of my own near Machias, ME for most of the 1990′s.  It was an 1880′s farmhouse on 15 acres where a small river met the ocean.  It was also a 12 hour drive from Philadelphia.

Especially with the boiling summer that we’re having in the mid-Atlantic states, I’m looking forward to enjoying some cool fog, saltwater breezes, and some wild blueberry pie!

1964, 2010, polymer clay, sterling silver, 5 x 3 1/2 x 1"

The owner of our longtime gallery in Seattle, Facere Jewelry Art is turning 70 this year.  Karen Lorene asked her artists to choose a year and make a piece about it.  Dave and I chose 1964 because that was the year of our births.  All of our jewelry is abstract, so the problem was how to express the idea without specific historic imagery.

I thought about how the conservative nature of the 1950′s sort of led to the blossoming of the creative and effusive nature of the 1960′s and that was facilitated in part by the arrival in the US of the Beatles in 1964 .

This pin starts out at the bottom like an O’keeffe Pin ends up at the top like a Ribbon Pin.  The sterling setting follows this with a bezel at the bottom and prongs at the top.

Happy Birthday Karen!  And thanks for all your support of our work over the years.

Untitled (SF100622R), 2010, 30 x 44", relief prints, collage

While Dave and I are exploring a collaboration of printmaking and drawing/painting, I’m also making collaged print work that is mine alone.  Here is a recent example.

I think it relates to the collaborative jewelry that I make in the process I use to build an image.  I make lots of bases of individual sheets, building up palettes of color and textures.  After i have a group that works well, I overprint more layers on top of the bases.  That’s essentially how I’ve made jewelry for the last 22 years.  Most necklaces, for example, start out with randomly made beads, organized into groupings of ideas, and rounded out with new beads made to focus each piece.

I like working with just a few elements, and on this larger scale.  Back in the day, when we taught polymer clay workshops, I would often quote a former art school teacher who has influenced the way that I make work, whether it’s jewelry or prints.  He would say “different is different”, a seemingly simple and obvious phrase, but one that I’ve taken to mean that I should explore all the ways of making the same few things different; ie, scale, texture, tone, color, etc.   This works to unify a piece while also making it complex.

Untitled (FF100211E), 2010, 22 x 28", relief prints, paint

Recently, we were invited to show some of our collaborative drawings in a show at the Fuller Craft Museum called Different Lines: Drawings by Craft Artists.

The show opens on July 31 and is up until February 27th.

This is one of three of our drawings in the show.  Like the other, similar work that we did last year, these started out with a print base that I collaged onto a sheet of rag paper.  I then sent them to David in Santa Fe and he drew, scratched, painted, scumbled, and scraped a collection of imagery on top.  The three drawings selected by the curator, Joan Hausrath, are a unified group, that show the influence of such Abstract Expressionist painting heroes as Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottleib, and early Jackson Pollack.  I have no idea how David will react to my printed bases, and it’s a great surprise for me to see what he does with them–just like our jewelry collaboration.

Steve's base for Untitled (FF100211E), 2010, relief prints

These three are quite different from what we’re working on now.  David is sending me painted and drawn bases for me to overprint and collage.  I’ll probably send them back to him to pull them together into a final state…..he’s good at that.

We’ll be showing this newest body of work at the Marketplace Design Center in Philadelphia in October.

Calder Flower Pin #6, 2010, 3 3/4 x 3 1/2 x 3/4", polymer clay, sterling silver, gold leaf

I started this series of pins after seeing the show of Alexander Calder’s jewelry at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2008.  I loved the simplicity, the directness, and the line quality of the wire drawings that made up the jewelry.

This pin is the 6th in the series so far, and they feature the clay hole punches on edge with which I started this blog.

Maryanne fabricated the piece according to my scale drawing, but I wasn’t satisfied with the metalwork.  It wasn’t in any way her fault, I’d just changed my mind, or found that getting what I wanted to be lacking somehow–happens a lot.  So, I altered Maryanne’s silver work by dapping the flower pedals with little dimples.  I also leafed alternate pedals to lighten the visual heaviness of the metalwork.  Then I was happy with the final incarnation.

Sometimes the back and forth is between me and Dave, sometimes between me and Maryanne, and sometimes between me and myself, but I think it’s important for our work (it’s always OUR work) to go through changes before arriving at something we can call complete.

My name is Josh Harmony.  I’m a young potter renting studio space from Steve and Dave in exchange for some work around their adjacent studio.  For the past ten months I’ve been working with Steve to archive the last twenty two years of Ford /Forlano jewelry.

We started this project in September of last year.  Steve hired their long-time photographer, Robert Diamante, to show us the ins and outs of the entire documentation process. He set up the photography equipment and gave us a brief overview on how to take successful pictures. It was a lot to learn in one session and over the past ten months of work I’ve finally started to understand what Robert was teaching us.

After physically taking the photograph I upload it to the computer where we do some color balancing to make sure the colors of the work on the screen are as close as possible to the colors of the work and we clean up any dust specks that may have settled on the background. From there the images are archived in File Maker Pro and saved to an external hard-drive.

It’s amazing to see how much someone’s work can change over the years and yet there are still similar traits carried through each generation. I feel like the archiving process is important to keep track of these changes and to even help steer the future. Who knows when you might find inspiration in old work? I also think it’s a great idea to have a history of where you start out as an artist and to see how much your skills and handling of the material has progressed over time.

The only cons I can see to archiving is the extra space needed for the photo setup and the time and energy it takes for the whole process. I think as an artist just starting out it doesn’t make sense to invest the time and energy yourself where it might be more beneficial to be spending time in your studio and developing your work. And if you can’t afford to get the setup yet, take your time: It took Ford and Forlano 21 years to start archiving their own work.

O'Keeffe pin, 2010, polymer clay, sterling silver, 3 x 3 x 3/4"

We named this pin series after Georgia O’Keeffe for obvious reasons.  It looks like a flower, and landscape, or maybe a body part.

Dave and I were in Washington DC for our recent trunk show, and we saw an amazing show of O’Keeffe abstractions at the Phillips Collection.

This is another example of a fashion approach to jewelry design (see earlier post).  It’s a simple construction; an idea with endless possibilities for variation. It’s one of only two pin designs that we make regularly where the clay work comes first and Maryanne sets the finished clay with a fine silver bezel.  She often roller prints the bezel wire to bring texture  to the front of the pin.

This pin has a white clay base and opaque and translucent overlay  using a technique that Dave developed after a trip to Japan in 1995.  Kathleen Dustin picked up on the idea and developed it to great effect in her handbags.  She has always graciously given David credit for the idea of the technique.