A Strike in the Forest, Lines Precipitate A lighting bolt, we can imagine, flashes at dusk. We observe the strike just beyond a curtain of leaves. The leaves quake, as leaves do, before a rain. In the background a field of tall grass shifts back and forth. Beyond, grounding and…
In the late spring of this year, May, my wife Anna and I left for Bulgaria, her home country and returned to our home in Indiana about three weeks later. While in Bulgaria, I challenged myself to fill three sketchbooks; a pocket sketchbook, a small sketchbook that fit into my…
In 2022 my wife, Anna, Rick Peterson (architect) and myself (Tammeron Francis) started planning for a small studio that now rests in our backyard. The building has a shed roof with transom windows oriented to the south, a large three foot door to the north and “box bay” windows on…
The things we make and how we make them is the primordial stew of worlds. Things offer a local and infinitely large story. All things, like local food, dialects, patterns found in rugs and an alphabet of ceramic pot design and decoration draw out a map of influence, story and…
Good bread is hard to find especially in the center of Indiana. Good bread is not terribly hard to find in Michigan where I was raised and where I routinely visit however. In south central Michigan great bakeries can be found. In Howell you can find Oh Crumbs! Bakery. Oh…
My wife Anna has a has a postcard mailed to Bulgaria from Detroit, Michigan in 1919. On the postcard George Daskalov, her great great uncle, writes to his mom, among other things: “Please start the sauerkraut and find for me a good wife.” His mother found for him a wife,…
Craft lets the world around us appear. Things (foods, rugs, dresses, cars and cities) describe a map of significance. That map, of moving boundaries, illuminates what is most and least significant to us and situates us amid the wilderness of earth in a culture. What we understand craft to be,…
It is fitting that the oldest known drawings lie in caves. Those, dark protected dream-land places feel right for the oldest drawings. All caves are to some degree dangerous. In caves people have to supply the light. They have to explored and whatever light you bring in is not guaranteed…
The most widely thought, possible, primigenial ‘artwork’ connected with our genus, homo, is a red jasperite cobble found in a South African cave. The cobble fits within the palm of a hand and is thought to be a carried art object or manuport. Some of the oldest surviving artwork are…
We won’t be able to answer the question “why we draw” with the exactness expected of a watchmaker. Indeed, any confident answer needs to be judged suspicious because of the shifting streams that emerge and recede along our path to approach the question. We can, however, shine a light on…
‘Craft’ brings to mind the medieval artisan. That specie of humanity made almost everything by hand. Books were hand written and ‘illuminated’ with illustrations and ornament. Cathedrals, town-halls, fortifications and houses too were built by hand. A cathedral’s master-builder used templates, a compass, scaffolding, chisels and saws. Gothic building technology…