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Meet the Artist Mondays

From EastKingdomWiki

Meet the Artist Mondays is a joint project created by THL Sugawara no Naeme, Consort's Champion of A&S and Pan Jan Janowicz Bogdanski, Sovereign's Champion of A&S, as bi-monthly Facebook posts, shared to the Unofficial and Official East Kingdom groups to spotlight the work of Eastern artisans, and launched in August of 2021.

The Champions ask each featured Artist 3 questions as way of introduction: How did you come to practice your art? What inspires you to create? and What is your favorite obscure fact about your art?

Artists are listed with their answers to the questions in the order they were featured. Links are included to the original Facebook posts, however you must have a Facebook account and be a member of the group to view them. Additional link(s) included for the featured artist's gallery or blog where available.

Sigvardr Halfdanarson

  • How did you come to practice your art?

It really started when I wanted to have a necklace but didn't have the money to buy one so I slowly taught myself to make jewelry.

  • What inspires you to create?

My inspiration comes from the people around me pushing me to be better, and the masters of the past. The details they were able to obtain was incredible.

  • What is your favorite obscure fact about your art?

Something obscure is that a lot of Viking era jewelry was made to weight standards for easy trade and storage of wealth.

Brendan Firebow

  • How did you come to practice your art?

For me, while I always enjoyed crafting and building things as a child, learning leatherwork started out of need. I had ordered an item from a local leather worker, who became swamped with orders and requests. After waiting some time for my item, I asked if it would help if I came by to give him a hand, and he said yes. So I started learning how to do leatherwork - patterning, cutting, dyeing, painting, and eventually how to tool leather. I had learned mostly on fantasy styles and pieces, but once I started becoming more interested in historical leathers, I wanted to produce more of those types of pieces. I love to do pouches, rapier hanger, scabbards, and have been learning more about making cases too. I always want my pieces to be functional first, and then beautiful. For the martial side, I had always had an interest in swordplay, and enjoyed just playing at it. Heavy fighting never truly grabbed me, but fencing did. I was encouraged to look into the historical styles by a friend who wanted to see my skill improve. After starting to learn some Italian rapier, I went to a class on the rapier and dagger of Salvator Fabris… and a style that had been almost arcane looking to me, suddenly made sense; I just wanted to learn more, as I began to have very much fun with it - in learning it, fighting with it, and in teaching it.

  • What inspires you to create?

That’s a complex question… I think largely it is seeing the beautiful works of other artisans, contemporary and historical, is a big one. It drives me to try new things, and to have ideas for variations on items - whether that be in just decoration, function, or creating something to fill a need. Necessity also inspires, as does need… the need of an item for a friend (which would be why I started, and continue, to do Vigil books), or to fill a function. Creation in rapier is less easy to define… sometimes it’s creating plays, combinations of movements, to practice, or to teach; sometimes it’s creating a means for oneself, or another, to understand why something they are doing is, or isn’t, working. I suppose it’s a bit of problem solving, and like with leatherwork, it’s inspired by necessity and need.

  • What is your favorite obscure fact about your art?

There are two things with leather. The first is obscure because it is easy to miss the forest for the trees… Leather was so widely used throughout our time period (and indeed, modernity); it was used to make everything from shoes, to clothing (pants, tunics, doublets, hats, gloves), to accessories (belts, pouches, glasses frames), to everyday use items (books, cases/covers, water jugs, mugs, storage cases). It is ridiculously versatile. The second is definitely more obscure: the blacking of leather that we see in period (and some of the pieces I do) is not a stain or dye, but rather a chemical reaction between the tannins in the vegetable tanned leather and the ferrous sulfate (that was later found in what is known as “vinegaroon”, which is made with vinegar and iron shavings); it is the same chemical reaction that happens when you leave an iron tool on damp oak or leather. It won’t rub off, so it won’t stain clothing. My favorite obscure fact about rapier…that the teachings of Salvator Fabris, post period, got translated by/into, and very much love from, the Germans.

Vivian de Dunbar

  • How did you come to practice your art?

My mother taught me to crochet at 11 years old and I was an avid crocheter. I was sad to learn that crochet was not a period craft so I went about searching for a substitute. I took a period sock knitting class one year at Pennsic and the next year took a spinning class as the idea of being able to create my own yarn to knit fascinated me and I quickly became obsessed with spinning for both medieval and mundane crafts.

  • What inspires you to create?

Many of my A&S projects come from questions that were raised during a previous project. My inspiration is almost always to experience the process of making something out of fiber. Having a finished item at the end of the project is just an added bonus. I also love to spin a fiber from an animal I have never spun from before. I keep a "wishlist" of fiber animals I want to spin from. Top of my list, fox of course 🙂

  • What is your favorite obscure fact about your art?

The North Ronaldsay sheep from the Orkney Islands in Scotland have evolved to eat seaweed and drink salt water in order to survive on the island. They are not able to be crossbred with other sheep breeds due to their diet and therefore the modern sheep that live there are a very close DNA match to the remains of a stone age sheep that dates from around 3000 BCE. It was a thrill to spin wool from this unique and remote sheep breed

Berakha bat Mira v'Shlomo

  • How did you come to practice your art?

I come from a family of singers, albeit none of them professionally. My father used to sing in his synagogue choir as a child in Switzerland, a practice unique to Yekke jewry among the larger community of Ashkenazi Jews. My mother has a lovely voice as well, and she would often sing to us anything from musicals to Israeli folk songs. Musical participation is pretty standard in my cultural background - we sing at Shabbat, holidays, in synagogue, the whole community together, and often our cantors are not professionally trained but come from the populace. So that was the sort of cultural background in that performance was not professional, but it was public and deeply felt. It was not a large jump from that background to exploring other forms of non-liturgical historical music! With the SCA, I first started singing with Ishtar, a band based in Pittsburgh that also jam at SCA events like Pennsic, which got me started on Balkan and Turkish music, and soon after, I started taking classes to get professional training under my belt to both expand my historical repertoire and also become a better singer. While I am nowhere near Broadway quality, the improvement has really helped me expand my musical horizons.

  • What inspires you to create?

That's a tough one. Music is something so fundamental to the human experience, and I am not sure there is a single person who has yet lived who dislikes all forms of music. It is a nourishment to the soul and a fundamental part of the human expression, and therefore a very meaningful cultural repository. The ability to tap into a wide range of human emotions so purely is a big part of the musical experience, and one that really speaks to my soul - and, I hope, to others who hear me as well.

  • What is your favorite obscure fact about your art?

Your voice vibrates up through your skull and how you form your mouth shape can wildly impact the sound in a thousand tiny ways! Learning to make my own teeth buzz was super fun.

Ellynor Redpath

  • How did you come to practice your art?

My mom taught me how to sew when I was 7 years old. I started out with small doll clothes, and then mundane clothes until I joined the SCA. Once I joined the SCA I wanted to do Elizabethan garb, but I quickly realized that the foundation undergarments really mattered to the overall shape. I've spent the past few years researching and creating those, and now I'm working on dresses to go with them.

  • What inspires you to create?

I am an engineer mundanely, and it fascinates me that we can create these elaborate 3D shapes, or even reshape the human body to an extent, using seam placement and some bits of reed and wood. The further I go down this rabbit hole, the more I see just how overwhelmingly practical a lot of this clothing was. It appears ostentatious (and definitely was) but there are so many small details that let the wearer live their everyday life. Everything from waistline to hip tabs has a purpose in the overall function of the finished gown..

  • What is your favorite obscure fact about your art?

The extant stays that are frequently used as an example (Elizabeth's effigy) are not actually from her wardrobe! They were commissioned and created in only 3 days after her death! Considering it takes me a month of work to create a pair- that blows my mind.

Cornelia VanDeBrugg

  • How did you come to practice your art? I have always been fascinated by how things were made. I am not sure when exactly I started being interested in metal work, but it was sometime in my teens, maybe during shop class in junior high when we made a sheet metal car and fabricated a small hammer that the metal bug bit me.

I went on to taking evening classes in Jewelry and hollow ware fabrication after high school and did cold forging and pewter casting once I joined the SCA. A friend invited me along to a knife forging class and I started diving deep into hot forging ever since.

  • What inspires you to create? I love to look at an artifact and try to see how it could be made, or taking period methods and making something specific for someones persona, such as some of the regalia I have designed and made for people in the past.
  • What is your favorite obscure fact about your art?

There are only 5 or 6 basic methods of manipulating metal when forging, yet these limited ways of manipulation give you untold opportunities of creating unique items. Hence the saying that blacksmithing is easy to learn, yet extremely difficult to master.

Richard Heyworth

  • How did you come to practice your art?

Every once in a while, I have felt this urge to "create." It didn't matter so much what it was, I just needed to make something. I've found several outlets for this over the years, but none have filled the void quite as effectively as embroidery has. A couple of years ago, I was making a linen shirt, and I thought about how much nicer it would look if I added a bit of blackwork ornamentation to the top of it. Thinking that would be easy (ha), I reached out to Mistress Elena Hylton, who I knew did embroidery of this type. She gave me some suggestions and a couple of webpages to look at for guidance, which were enough to get me through the project. At this point, I was hooked. I read everything I could on the Athena's Thimble embroidery guild, its categories, and embroidery in general, and I ended up spending much of the early pandemic period furiously exploring new styles and stitches. The urge to create still drives me forward, but now, instead of looking for a solution to a problem - "I need decoration for my shirt" - I'm usually starting with the embroidery or research idea first and looking for a reason to justify it.

  • What inspires you to create?

I find that my greatest motivation for creation comes from one of two sources: the desire to fill a practical need, or the desire to create something beautiful for someone else. Generally, if I find myself wanting to try a new type of embroidery, my first goal is to find one of these two reasons. For example, I was interested in trying out the Or Nue style of goldwork, so I thought about ways I could make something for Mistress Amalie von Hohenzee for her elevation present, using this technique (I ended up making her coat of arms). Once I'm within a project, the motivation to continue is much easier: embroidery is a wonderfully meditative practice for me, and I can let my mind sink entirely into the work. It's incredibly therapeutic for me. More broadly, I find period embroidery to be incredibly beautiful, and it always amazes me to think about the quality and quantity of work produced by these artisans. The meticulous work that could take teams of embroiderers years to create yielded stunningly beautiful art of out thread and fabric, and the extant works that remain are incredible windows into another world of art.

  • What is your favorite obscure fact about your art?

As someone who frequently works on embroidery deep into the evening, using a light attached to my forehead, rushing to meet a self-imposed deadline, this fact always amuses me: in the 1303 charter for the Paris Embroiderers Guild, it was illegal to make any embroiderer work in candlelight. They could only work during daylight hours (by 1316, the regulation included the medieval equivalent of "unless it's an emergency or you're trying to meet a deadline").

Isabel del Okes

  • How did you come to practice your art?

I have been writing and making things most of my life but my bookbinding started about eight years ago. I was playing a LARP and I needed some tokens for an in-game library themed event I was running. At first, I was going to buy a bunch of little doll house books to give away but then I thought, "I bet I can make some small little books!" I found some tutorials on line and I made about 12 little simple leather bound books. They went over really well and I enjoyed the process of making something that was pretty and useful. So I went looking for other tutorials to make bigger books and that started me down the bookbinding path.

  • What inspires you to create?

I just really like making things! I don't feel alive unless I have some kind of project kicking about, either in process or in planning. I also feel inspired by the period books that exist. One of my favorites is St. Cuthbert's Gospel, with its raised motif on the cover. Lastly, I am so inspired by the people around me. I love seeing all the amazing things that are made by the artisans of the East and I often write poems inspired by people I admire.

  • What is your favorite obscure fact about your art?

I love me a good book curse! Books sometimes had curses in them to protect them from thieves. A common curse was to bring "anathema" (excommunication) down on the heads of those who would mistreat a book but some curses are more fun like "May he who steals you then be sent a blow upon his fundament.(buttocks)."