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DAVID CAMPBELL|
David Campbell. “Turning and turning in the widening gyre …”
W.B. Yeats.
“I’m
kind of like a dog trying to find a place to lie down. I walk
around in circles and then just swoop in and there I go.”
David Campbell.
Fire
and Wood and Heritage. David Campbell is an oil painter, a blacksmith, a metalworker, woodworker, wood carver, and organ maker. He works wood, metal, iron, and oil paint with equal facility and except for the modest presence of electricity his timeless shop could be from another era. The ageless clang, crackle, and snap of work done with of fire, wood, and metal fill the air. David doesn’t just use tools: he makes them and one gets the impression that if he were dropped into another century, even another millennium, he would not only feel comfortable, but he would prosper. While splitting a piece of sugar pine David speaks about fire. “Some of the most frustrating times I have are starting fires. It’s how the wood is arranged, the openness of the space.” As the fire warms the studio we talk about the grain of Oak, Ash, Chinquapin, and Alder, which David says with a wary hint of cynicism, “They’re trying to introduce now as beautiful Alder, since everything else is getting scarce.” Talk turns to coal. “I had a lot of experience with coal fires from working with a blacksmith’s forge. You can start this stone {coal} on fire with only two full pages of The Register Guard tight against it. It just catches fire and takes off. You have this huge source of fire. I do it here, at my forge.” “Are you a woods guy?” “Not much of an outdoors guy actually. I was born in Oregon, in Corvallis, but I have an interesting combination of experiences. From the time I was two until I was twelve, I grew up in Connell, Washington, dry prairie, with a population of 900. We thought of green Corvallis with 15,000 people as a big metropolis.” A Campbell who is a maker of musical pipes: I ask him about his heritage. “I’m Scottish by heritage. I have a nephew who has traced the oldest member of the family from the 1500’s and has the family going from Scotland to Northern Ireland. My immediate ancestors came over after the settlement of America as Scotch/Irish. They were Protestants. In 1592, there would have been quite a question because of the timing of the Reformation. “I play Uilleann pipes and I make reeds. In Scottish they’re called, Oolin, and in Irish, illin, ” he says while reaching beneath his bench to grab a solid, dark, block of heavy wood. “ This is African Black wood. This is what they make pipes out of. It’s similar to Ebony but tougher. It’s hard and finishes to a luster and has a lovely Rosewood smell. I tried to get my former boss to sell me this piece. That’s a chunk that weighs about thirty something pounds and might be four to five board feet. If you tried to buy it, it would be about $150 per board foot. My boss didn’t want to sell it to me but was comfortable giving it to me by me showing him some good will and doing some work with him.” Our conversation shifts to David’s family. “My wife is a wonderful person, we have three kids: two daughters, one thirty-two and the other is thirty. My son is twenty-seven. My wife is from Germany originally and she worked in day care. She’s really a lovely person, poorly paid, like most people in that profession, but she’s an excellent person and started working for the school district in Eugene ten years ago as a teaching assistant. She has the right attitude about kids, sympathizes with them but she’s not gaga about them. She’s demanding, much more so than most teachers nowadays. “Dad was a carpenter.” “Did you grow up building things?” “No, I grew up doing not very much of that. My Dad was a lovely person, so was my mother, and they treated me extremely well, but he wasn’t kind of open to, or I didn’t show enough interest in doing the building stuff. I didn’t do serious woodworking on my own until I was at the University when I built a bed for us, and then a table. That was my first {project} when I was twenty-one, started going to flea markets buying tools and got interested fast after that.” On C.S. Lewis, and A Sad Way To Avoid Vietnam. “Before that, I liked to draw, and my parents were generous with their praise, so I was a person who just liked to draw. I went, step to step wanting to be Walt Disney, then Norman Rockwell. I didn’t want to be like those people -- I wanted to be them. Then Andrew Wyeth; you couldn’t talk me out of it.” “At that time I wanted to be C.S. Lewis, I wanted to be an English scholar but I figured C.S. Lewis started learning Latin when he was eight, and Greek when he was twelve and here I was eighteen and got discouraged. I studied German in high school and when I decided to join the Army and then did well enough on the language test that I was given a choice of languages. I chose Russian with my second language, Chinese.” “I was assigned Vietnamese and I was on my way to Fort Bliss, Texas to study Vietnamese in 1967 when my Dad had a heart attack a couple of weeks before I finished basic training. It was serious heart attack: he died ten years later at the age of sixty-one. That got me out of starting the language school, and when I got back I had a choice between Russian and Swahili and I chose Russian to study at Monterey. I tell everybody that my Dad got me out of Vietnam.” Bi-Mart, Nepotism, Ten-Cent Raises, and Bungling. “After {college} graduation, I took a language test for the NSA, but I just couldn’t do it. It was a false atmosphere that I just couldn’t stand. I got out of school and went to work at Bi-Mart. I got into Bi-Mart due to Nepotism: my brother in law. After six months I got a ten-cent raise.” “It sounds like you were not on that “artist track.” Is that accurate?” “Well, sort of, I was a bumbler, but I did want to be a famous painter. I was having to support my family and as I compromised I was just looking for some interesting work and I didn’t know better so I did some interesting things.” “After leaving Bi-Mart, I went to work at Myrmo’s, a blacksmithing shop started by George Myrmo in 1925. The original Swedish anvil was there -- 200 pounds. I went and looked around up there and found out they needed somebody there in the blacksmith’s shop and they asked me if I had any mechanical ability and I said, “Who knows, maybe.” I worked there for three years; two years with Les Nylander, a smith from North Dakota who’d been there for twenty-five years. Then I took over the shop for one year and they’d made so many changes; they got rid of the coal forge replacing it with an electric furnace and a gas forge, neither, which worked. It was not something they were into. On Blacksmithing I had a family to raise, and ordinary responsibilities, and I had to work, so when I first got out of school I made an effort to be self employed and I went to work as a blacksmith and did my MFA by doing a series of iron projects-- three gates for the downtown Bus Barn building. One gate is still on there.” “At the time I was at the Myrmo Shop (In Eugene) there was kind of a blacksmithing renaissance talking place and so I got in on that when there was a lot of enthusiasm and material available in 1976. I finished my Bachelors in 1975, got the job in 76, and in the shop there was a line shaft, drill press, everything in the open, old style, belts and no guards, and trip hammers, and pulleys, and a five-horse grinder for grinding hoe dads (The legendary tree planting tool).” “From my experience as a blacksmith and doing metalwork I kind of lost track of my desire to be anybody in particular. I got into this other thinking that didn’t have that many proponents, historically. So I just kind of did my own thing, I got interested in calligraphy. Ironwork is kind of like that; it’s calligraphy with a surface. You could see the quality of the hammered surface.” To Get An M.F.A. -- Nixon’s The One! “After the Army I got my degree in Russian and Painting at the University of Oregon. That’s when I met Max Nixon who taught Jewelry, metalsmithing, and weaving.” “Max was born in 1915, the same year as my dad. Until 1940 there was Sam Yellin, who started a shop on the second floor over a dentist in Philadelphia and did all kinds of work around the country, the Federal Reserve Bank in New York City in the Twenties. It was exquisitely executed and conceived ironwork. This is something that Max would have been aware of at the time. And this is during the W.P.A. time, the same time that O.B. Dawson did the ironwork at the University of Oregon Library and the green gates at the Robinson Theater: genuine forged ironwork. Yellin had high standards. At one point he had 250 employees at his shop in Philadelphia. I’ve been there and met his granddaughter, but I think it’s been torn down. He was remarkable individual and there are only a few more like him that had similar standards. There was an established tradition in the country then, in the Thirties.” “So I explored going back to school and talked to Max Nixon again and they were interested in starting up a tool making program. With a friend of mine, Jerry Harpster, we built some forges and set up a smithing area. I was there as an adjunct for ten years and taught metalsmithing and drawing.” “Max kind of kept me on. They wanted to close the place down, I believe, to get money for other programs, It was probably pretty ugly due to the political nature of that environment, but Max was holding out there and I think he was giving some of his money back to the school so they could pay me.” “I kind of blew that opportunity because I didn’t show the right kind of attitude to be considered for a permanent faculty appointment. I could have done more publishing or been receptive to more opportunities to teach, but . . . the job went to a woman who came up with a video that was about making money for art departments. She was there for one year and then went off somewhere else on her way up.” “I was grateful that I didn’t get a job there because I would have been dead from a heart attack from, just, chagrin; disgusted with myself.” Integrity and Iron. “I have this sense of integrity that my mother instilled in me that I can’t seem to get around. I try, but I can’t so I have to do things for the right reasons if I think about it.” “Look at that anvil, it has been forged. The idea was to make it as smooth as you can with a hammer. They used to take wrought iron and caseharden it on older anvils and stakes. Look at the grain, but that is {He files it} from case hardening with hoof trimmings. The iron soaks up the carbon and then it is cooled in water. Case hardened!” “They don’t make a lot of wrought iron any more; it could be highly refined-- triple refined for Samuel Yellin’s work. They don’t make that anymore. Today, it’s steel, a crystalline material. Steel is an alloy of iron and carbon. Wrought iron is fibrous, like muscle tissue with silica between the iron portion – David reveals there is a deeper awareness available if you pay attention. “It’s got to make a certain amount of sense. It has a higher melting point since it’s not an alloy. It has a slight amount of carbon in it. You can forge weld it without flux.” “At some point, smithing became cold-worked bar and flat stock, and the quality of design went down hill so you end up with cruddy stuff.” How did you get involved making pipe organs? “I knew John Bromabaugh and Associates had a trip hammer, a power hammer, a Little Giant hammer, and I had a friend who got this job making hinges for this complex façade.” “It was an opportunity. As a high school student I’d checked out E. Power Biggs, so I went there and just asked him for a job. He hired me, though he put me off for a couple of months. He paid me $4 and hour, and when I asked if he could give me $4.50 an hour, he told me I should check with somebody else who didn’t know what I was talking about. The origin and scope of the pipe organ? “There’s evidence of Hydraulis from ancient times and a bunch of bronze pipes from a Roman site. That is before the first pipe organs we know are from Europe. The oldest I know of is in Scion, in Switzerland, working from the 1300’s. A beautiful old thing standing, in what is called a Swallow’s Nest, that is still in working condition. The heyday was kind of late 1500’s through the 1700’s and the highest cases to my mind would go early on in the 16th century in Belgium.” “I went to Sweden in 1998 for 14 months and worked on a pipe organ project doing the front pipes for a 17th century organ research project. I have been in Europe a few times and went to Gothenburg, Sweden in 1998 after being there in 1991 for a church in Gothenburg. We landed in Copenhagen and went specifically to Hilerod to see Frederiksborg Castle church there, made with lead roofing made the same as organ pipe metal a technique they still use and saw the Compenius Organ and got to have a tour and fiddle around with the organ thanks to my bosses reputation.” “I learned about the physics and I’ve developed an ear for good sound due to the high standards of my boss. I know about how the length of the pipe dictates the pitch, and if you put a cap on it lowers the overtone pitch one octave and changes overtone series. What’s the process of making a pipe? “We mix the alloy; it’s a lead tin alloy cast in sheets on a table, a granite table that’s 3” thick by 30” by 16 feet, and covered with a heat resistant product used for firemen’s protective clothing. In the past they used linen with a size of hide glue and chalk. We have a melting pot, a boom, a pour pot, and a ladle and a wooden box that spans the table and you just pour the lead in there kind of 1- 2- 3 and lay it, this sheet of semi molten lead. You can see your reflection in it. The sheets are tapered so the pipes, especially the big pipes, can stand on their own. Because lead/tin alloy tends to creep under it’s own weight the foot of the pipe has to be able to hold the weight of the entire pipe.” How is that sheet rolled?” “After the sheets are cut out, we scrape and even the sheet and lay out the final proportions for the feet and cut those out, then roll that edge along the body and make marks so the foot will fit the body…trigonometrically. I’ve learned a lot of mathematics by doing this stuff. We size and cut out and scrape the edges so you have a V.” “We got to the point that in our shop we don’t have failures and thanks to the standards of our boss who told us what he needed and we just provided that, this to the dismay of some German pipe makers.” “We voice the pipes using an oscilloscope with a card that John designed to tune the pipes. You listen to all the pipes, and try to get them to play. Actual tuning of the organ and pipes is done in the hall once everything is in place. It’s very time consuming.” The Future of Organs in Glenwood. “It’s going to be gone at some point because the land is going back to the city of Springfield for the greenway. I don’t know what’s going to happen with all the tools but I’m trying to make room for some of them.” “Pipe makers tools tend to get handed down, they flow to whoever uses them. John says he’d like to get rid of the whole lot to someone who wants to continue with making the pipe organs. “We never advertised, no web site, always working with no interval on the next organ. People always ask how many organs can you build in a year, and sometimes I say, well sometimes just a third of one, because there are a couple of three year projects.” On Working with Lead. “Like asbestos, it’s not as dangerous as you think. You act carefully and avoid getting it in your mouth, nose, in your food. You take precautions and wear a mask and gloves when cleaning up. You handle it carefully. After I was there for ten years I had a blood test to check my lead levels and my lead level was lower than normal.” “I went to Sweden after making pipes for seventeen years and I had lower lead levels than anyone in the shop, which had to do with their scraping and exhaust system. “When there were fewer people the little bit of lead in most water was (okay), but (now) there’s just too many sources of contamination. Then you have lead in the gas, millions of driving, it’s not the lead but the number of people messing with it.” A Grand Aesthetic or Philosophy That Guides You? “Not that I know of, but I’m sure I do. I try not to pounce on it. Like painting, it’s so important to me that I just don’t want to do any painting, badly, so often I’m kind of a procrastinator. Maybe {because} I was under the influence of my second grade teacher who told me I was a procrastinator that I became a procrastinator, or maybe, she was really insightful. I was seven years old.” “I have a lot of experience designing things. I have this idea that you don’t want to get too comfortable with what you do because then you just start whipping out these little things with stilted, repetitious effects. It’s probably just an excuse not to do things but I like to be a little bit off balance. My ideas are better as a result of that.” “I have certain ideas I want to do and I have a lot of experience with a lot of techniques. I’m skilled at pipe making, and it’s a matter of having had problems in the past and then accumulating hours of experience and it’s that way. Mostly I’m really at my limit. It’s a matter of integrity, there’s a certain integrity there which means I don’t get much work done because I’m really kind of fussy about what work that I do.” “I’m kind of like a dog trying to find a place to lie down; I walk around in circles and then just swoop in and there I go. I’m kind of like that. I go to drawing sessions and I know it’s important to just get started, I tell that to people that it’s important just to get started.” “I’m a good craftsman because I know how to fix my mistakes. I both know what I want, and I know that I don’t know what I want when I start out. The skill of an artist is to be able to see what’s there after getting started, and then to react to that and really go with it.” “I’m now more open to doing things in a more creative way, no particular way. I don’t want to be Amatus Pinctor: Beloved Painter, any longer.” “I figure things out. I know what I’m after and I figure out how to get there.” The End.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all convictions, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? |
