Art & Design: It's in the DNA

On the road of art and design, I am a bit of a distracted driver, weaving across lanes from art to design, then again from design back to art. I love making art, I am an art professor, yet design woos me back continually. It is something about the direct connection to a consumer or the way that materials can be manipulated into functional objects that keeps tempting me. Maybe it's just in my blood. I am one of four brothers and all of us have made our way into product design. However, our paths all drifted from various other areas ranging from criminal justice to studio art. There are two bachelors degrees, two associates degrees, and one MFA between us, and only one of us actually went to design school. Maybe I could blame it on the endless hours of building with Legos or deconstructing all the mysterious old contraptions my father accumulated in our garage, but in any case, here we are, making cool stuff every day. Well, at least my brothers are. I am the outlier when it comes to product design, and it's my own fault. It's because I am actually an artist and cannot be satisfied to live in that world where I am only serving the consumer. I need the expression of my artwork to alleviate the tension and rigor that product design inevitably imposes on me. I am also not employed full-time designing for someone else. I am an entrepreneurial designer. And I didn't even do it on purpose. I graduated school with a degree in art and then went on to get my MFA in ceramics and sculpture. But once I finally left the halls of academia as a student, life got real real fast. My wife and I had our first baby before I was even done with my graduate work and the bills started coming in. I intended to use my art and ceramics degrees to be a studio artist and worked at showing my pieces at art and craft shows. Trouble is, no one wants to buy ceramic artwork at art and craft shows, they just want cheap crafty stuff. So a couple years after schlepping my work all over New York State I took the advise of my wife, "just make things people want," and started making pottery yarn bowls. It was a fun experiment making items from clay that encouraged making other items from yarn. It didn't take log before my birdie yarn bowl design was picked up by a large national distributor and suddenly I was neck deep in the product design and manufacturing game. For the next six years I was just as interested in making ceramic products as I was making ceramic art-probably more. The influx of business from yarn bowls allowed me, and in some ways, forced me to continue research and development on ceramic production. Previously I had always thought of ceramics as a mode for artwork. But as I was able to turn my products into a vocation I delved deeper into product design, and ceramics was my material. I wasn't so much an artist anymore, but now an indie crafter. I still dabbled in fine art ceramics and would attempt the occasional art exhibition, but I was now deeply interested and invested in production. Ironically, the production life of an indie crafter was too tumultuous for me, my family and our finances, so when the opportunity arose to take a teaching position in art, specifically ceramics, I was happy to do it. And so the pendulum swung definitively back to art. Or so I thought. I found the academic environment to be an ideal place to really push the R&D of ceramic production. As a professor I have access to more space, more talent, and better tools and materials than I was ever able to amass as a startup entrepreneur. And, since I am employed as an instructor of fine art, I am required to scratch that itch all the time. So the double-helix of art and design finally formed: one strand art, one strand design; both revolving around each other and continually connected and influenced by the amino acid chains of creativity and necessity. It is admittedly a lot to handle on a daily basis. I have my classes, three studios to run, plus a small ceramics manufacturing studio independent of my courses and academics. I have business partners, and employees, students, and student workers. I would argue it makes my academic scholarship stronger, and connects me better to vocational art that many students are looking for. The greatest struggle is keeping both strands growing so they can continue to influence each other, and in turn grow and influence me and my students. I am an artist and designer. It is my DNA to create in both worlds. Time will tell if one will overtake the other, but for now I will just keep making.