Creative Living & A Sustainable Vision
With Andrew Brant Sculptor & Artist / Interview by Sue Hunt & Photography by Jenna Peffley
Sue: Tell Us about your move to Santa Fe, if you feel comfortable sharing the nitty gritty details; we want to hear what moves you and inspires you about creating there!
Andrew: So many places I could start, I grew up just outside Kansas City, Missouri, spending a lot of time in the Ozark Mountains or in Colorado. One very special trip was through backpacking the Sangre de Cristo mountains near Cimarron when I was 15. I fell in love with the way the land transitioned, spending sunrise at 9,200 feet.
Life took me to Chicago for college, studying philosophy and studio art at both Loyola Chicago’s downtown and north shore campus, and abroad in Rome, Italy. There I was an illustrator for a newspaper, screen printed t-shirts in my apartment, and worked at a furniture shop when I wasn’t behind a bar or making coffee. I got an offer to join a management training program at Apple, which led me and my day job to Cupertino, and me living down the street from Stanford, where I managed animations and motion graphics in their marketing dept.
Knowing I wanted to be an artist full time, and accepting the pressures of a day job at least in art production, I studied everything I could as hard as I could every second I was there, while building up my woodworking and design skills. I had outgrown my shop and the market in our sleepy little, beautiful coastal village. I made all kinds of furniture but I was getting asked more and more to make wooden bathtubs. We talked about New Mexico, and though our marriage didn’t last through the transition, I’m halfway to my home in Kansas City and I can get to my Santa Fe shop in fifteen minutes. Gorgeous lumber from California is totally accessible, as is shipping back to customers in California. Friends and family love to visit Santa Fe, it’s perfect for me.
Sue: We love hearing the twists and turns of your back story, do you know your astrology, your main three, sun, moon, rising? To create work that lives in someone’s life must take a certain kind of vantage point, how do you wrap your head around this and get organized to build?
Andrew: I am a Taurus sun and an Aquarius moon. I’ve always felt aligned with the creative, dream-like qualities of Aquarius, in my imagination, and Taurus, because I selfishly make and design everything for myself.
While I consider what other people might want, I certainly make what I want and love. I play a lot of music, and though I’m not much of a songwriter I try, and know that the only way to write a good song is from your heart, as soon as you try to anticipate what the audience might want, you lose them. It’s been a long road to get here, but I feel like my personal process is built on a really solid foundation.
Sue: The materials that you use are so organic and luscious, can you talk about your relationship to the raw materials you build with and how it supports your creative vision?
Andrew: Yes! I love all kinds of materials. I have loved furniture and vintage furniture stores, sculpture and fine art before I came to wood. My dad built a redwood sailboat I helped maintain growing up, and did ornamental lathe turning with fancy exotic woods; this was definitely an early influence.
I started spending every weekend at the lumber yard whether I needed anything or not just to see if anything new had shown up, I was hooked. Reading the books of George Nakashima, the japanese-American woodworker from New Hope, P.A. was a huge shift. Both with wabi sabi, letting the natural be, letting the cracks be and not hiding them. Influenced by Krenov, asking ‘the wood what it wants to be’. The tree was alive, the wood is still alive, growing, shifting in the sun or the humidity. Swelling when it’s in a boat or a bathtub, sealing it tight. Alive. I’m also exploring more metal working and leather working. Wood will always be my main focus, and making furniture to last generations.
Sue: This resonated from your writings “People with the treasures and scars from a life lived as creatively as possible, as curiously as possible, as imaginative as I’ve ever seen.” Here at Rhizo we can totally get behind this! It’s often something we as onlookers don’t see about the creative process, ‘the scars from a life lived creatively’. Will you share the risks you have taken on yourself as a creative, and how they might have been scary and caused deep growth as an artist and sculptor.
Andrew: Sure, the sacrifices in my life have been huge. My craft, my art, is the main focus of my life. Building something with my own two hands. I’ve broken bones, worked exhausted nights, pushed my muscles and sinew to the limit. Hours after endless hours because I’ve had such a clear vision of what I want to be building with my life from a very young age.
I built the skills one after the other with persistence, love and dedication. I’ve also been very willing to jump in with both feet and have terrible results. I learned from the failures quickly. But I’m still a punk at heart, an idealist, someone who will scream loud and get angry. If half the audience leaves, it wasn’t for them I guess. The half that stays always seems to really love it even more. I will always work my ass off to make this great and support the team I’m building. And I’m really appreciating the support I feel now, in Santa Fe, and around the world!
Sue: YES! I am going to say that again, fuck yes! It’s reassuring to hear the ups and downs, and the level of love and commitment you have to your work. You must have developed quite the eye for something special in all those pills of wood over the years. How has reclaimed wood hunting influenced your understanding of sustainable cycles as well as the impact of your art?
Andrew: I have, slowly and surely, developed an eye for wood. My Dad’s enthusiasm influenced me, with a basement full of little bits of every kind of wood imaginable, from a time when things were certainly less sustainable. An assortment of woods from South American or African rainforests, taught me about variety and beauty. Then looking at local, sustainable, reclaimed if possible expoanded my understanding.
In Palo Alto, where I spent time they would put a tag on every tree and check once a year that you didn’t cut one down, even the new growth. Cherry comes from orchards, Sycamore is beautiful and tall and straight but not very good at building houses out of, so I’ve been loving that lately.
This massive tree grows for a thousand years, and finally falls down, taking most of a day to do so. And a new tree grows right from the stump, and you can see the fern covered forest floor taking another hundred years just to decay back to soil, to start again.
Sue: Explain your relationship to the interconnected nature of human expression, art and our relationship to it as humans. There seems to be an important link here for you, because your creations contain function, beauty and a sustainable purpose in daily life.
Andrew: It’s evolved over time, though I’ve always had a love for the earth, a conservationist through the Boy Scouts, the Martha Lafita Thompson nature sanctuary where I spent hundreds of volunteer hours tending to native Missouri tallgrass prairie.
I think it’s key that people understand that they have a choice, not to get a plastic bathtub; furniture that is made of wood and can last a lifetime. On top of that, I believe in having an artful life. A full life, a life full of pleasures, whether they’re material or sensual in any other way.
I’m not anywhere near the sort of person that thinks things should regress back to the past and how things were, but I do think we’ve forgotten some basic things like how to build furniture well, how to build houses to suit the climate they are in. How to conserve water or food and share it in a community. Cost and capitalism are always the demon we are all fighting. I have connected with so many amazing people, just loving what I do and doing it the way I feel is right. Many have responded to that, it amazes me daily! I feel so fortunate and it gives me hope.
Sue: What are you currently working on? What support do you currently need as an artist?
Andrew: Right now, I’m building orders for half a dozen redwood bathtubs, I’m building two large sycamore and cherry dining tables. I’m making a piece of hanging wall art, sycamore inlaid with wood, for the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness for an auction at SOMArts Cultural Center.
I’m building a pond shaped slab coffee table inlaid with some Magatama shapes from Japan and with a hand carved edge. It should be a real treat, for a repeat patron in Los Angeles. I love making the redwood Ofuros, doing inlay, making new things. I’m also doing some vanities lately, I’d love to do the whole bathroom of my own space here in town, or someone else’s with a shared vision. I love connecting with architects, interior designers, home owners, spa owners, and anyone else with a vision we can collaborate on to bring it to life. My goal is to have a whole house’s worth of various furniture I’ve designed and produced with the team soon, and keep pursuing pure fine art myself alongside.
I’ve got work in art shows happening all the time around Santa Fe, either by myself or with my art collective, Abstract Picnic. I’m super proud of putting it together.I hope to see you soon when I’m not covered in sawdust and glue!
Find more of Andrew here:
AndrewBrant.com
RedwoodOfuro.com
@_andrewbrant / @redwoodofuro
