john t. unger studio

Bottle Cap Art Tutorial: How I Craft my Bottle Cap Mosaics

Every few weeks I get an email asking me about how my Bottle Cap Mosaics are created… people want to know what they're made of, how the caps are attached, where I get the caps for the mosaics and so on. I've created the video below to answer most of those questions.

Probably the most frequent question is "do you drink all that beer yourself?" Well, no. If I did, I'd never get anything done so I hire professionals (ie: I get most of them from bars and quite a few from friends who save them for me).

It's only life or death. It's always only life or death

The best thing that ever happened to me was the night an angry, messed up cab driver pulled me into the back room of a 24 hour diner and held a huge handgun to my head for over ten minutes, all the while describing in intricately fetishistic detail exactly what would happen when he pulled the trigger.

Why? Because it changes you, staring down a nutjob holding a gun. After that, the small stuff just doesn't get sweated. You either break, or break through to a mandatory satori of keeping things in proportion that most people never get to walk away from. It's an ice calm I wouldn't trade for anything.

The second best thing that ever happened to me was when the dot com crash of 2000 wiped out most of the design industry at the peak of my career as a freelance print designer. I went from turning away work every week to working exactly 7 days of the next year. I lost my girl. I lost my loft. I lost part of my thumb in an accident moving out of the loft. I pretty much lost it all.

Of course, the only reason I was working in offices was to fund the art career I wanted… materials, space, tools, etc. I worked eight hours in the office and ten in the studio, sleeping when I passed out involuntarily. I decided that if my industry had tanked, I was damned if I was gonna retrain to do something else I didn't want to do. I chose to make the art be my sole means of support. I built some monumentally scaled commissions working out of borrowed shop space, with borrowed gear, sleeping on borrowed couches.

It worked. I've been making my living as an artist ever since, and these days I earn triple the income I ever did from the best corporate gigs.

The third best thing that ever happened was the day my studio building collapsed under a load of snow while I was standing on the roof shoveling. I rode that roof to the ground like a gut-shot rodeo pony. The building and some pricey tools were completely destroyed, but I was unharmed… until I spent the next three months (December, January and February) without heat, running water or a stove because the natural gas line into the house had been severed in the collapse. The gas company refused to fix the line until they could bury it in the spring. I lost a few brain cells, I'm sure, by running an unvented kerosene heater inside the house to stay alive.

How was that good? The bank came out to assess the damage, saw my work and suggested I do a $10,000 commissioned sign as the down payment on the remaining two buildings I'd been leasing with an unlikely option to buy. Getting this place had a lot to do with making the art career fly. I had affordable space to work and a place for customers to find me. I don't think the deal would have happened without the disaster… They didn't want to take a loss on the property (or hold it) and I was willing to take it on at the cost of the mortgage before the building fell.

Bottom line:

The only way you can tell the difference between disaster and opportunity is to decide to make an opportunity out of every event.

Postscript:

During the second and third disasters, my friends were pretty evenly divided in their response to my choice to make the world work on my terms.

One camp said, "Dude, you're so brave to just bail on the day job and do your own thing. You're my hero. I wish I could do that." The other camp said, "Look, don't be crazy. Just take whatever work you can get until you're on your feet, even if it's fast food or something. You're never gonna make it without some cash." Really, both camps were wrong (though I love them all dearly).

I wasn't brave. Not the least bit. I was frickin' desperate, is what I was, but not terrified. I was back to that ice calm… you learn that it just ain't over till it's over, and that giving up never got anyone out of a jam. I didn't want a life of stability if it meant I had to do digital layouts of junk mail for a living. I wanted to do what I was best at, what I loved, and get paid for that. It was worth the risk. It was the only real way I could see to better my situation.

I wasn't crazy either. By the time I figured out that the design work wasn't just in a slump, that it wasn't coming back any time soon, I had about $5 in cash and $20,000 in debt. There was no way that a subsistence level job was gonna fix that… I ran full tilt towards the art career because I knew if I did it right, and worked my ass off, I could probably make enough to get out of the hole

I had to think about it again when the building crashed. That time, I almost did pack it in. It felt like my dream was a stupid idea after all, that I had just run everything into the ground betting on a long shot. But in the rural economy here, few jobs pay well enough to escape the poverty line and there are fewer and fewer jobs available anyway every year. A job wasn't gonna save me. It would just suck all the time and energy I needed to realize my dreams, while keeping me alive enough to resent it.

I remembered other businesses I had started on a shoe string earlier in life… each of them ultimately failed the first time something major went wrong because I hadn't had enough cash to keep them going. Or had they? Had money really been the only way to get them back on track, or was it a failure of creativity and nerve? Had they really failed because when faced with a seemingly insurmountable problem, I'd believed it to be what it seemed, bought into it, walked away because I didn't feel able to do the so-called impossible? I decided that what I really couldn't afford was to waste all the time and energy I had put into building an art career that was just on the edge of being sustainable. I'd come too far this time to back down.

Having weighed the pros and cons of sticking to my guns, I decided to force a positive change out of the crisis. Within a month, I unexpectedly sold a few major pieces, paying off the last of my old debts with the money and having cash left over. From that moment, the art has sold exponentially better each year. If I'd given up at the moment, none of the great things that have happened since would have come about.

Emoodicon Movie: Marcie's Grand Adventure

 

Just before heading off to SXSW this year, Chris Carfi and I went live with a new site, emoodicon.com. I couldn't be more excited about it! Now I need some help spreading the word…

The animation above explains how the Emoodicon ring works. It was really a blast working with Sheharzad Arshad to create the animation. He did amazing work that far surpassed my expectations. In fact, it was kind of addictive… I really want to come up with more things that justify doing an animation!

If you can help get the word out about emoodicon, please do. Rate the video on YouTube, link to the new blog, or submit the site to digg, del.icio.us, etc. I'd sure appreciate it. There are little buttons in the footer of every ost at emoodicon.com that make it easy to submit the site to your social network of choice.

I'm pretty darn pleased with the design of the new site, but I'd welcome any suggestions for ways I could improve it. Oh, and if you'd like a chance to win one of the Emoodicon Rings for yourself, do enter one of the contests at the Emoodicon site!

Podcast Interview with Daily Confection/sheunlimited

Daily Confection just posted a really fun phone interview I did with Gary Connolly. We discussed a broad set of topics including art, business, marketing, the ways that blogging and the web in general have impacted my work as an artist and 30 foot fire-breathing dragon boats.

The interview came out really nicely. After I gave it a listen, I realized that I haven't ever posted photos of the dragon boat here on the blog, so I figured it was time… This was a fun project I did with my friend Neil Verplank to figure out what you could get away with on the Chicago River. We were having coffee one evening and, for some reason, the question came up. So five days later, we sailed the first of many dragon boats down the river just to see what would happen. The improvised flame thrower worked pretty well although you had to lean out over the river and hang onto the dragon's neck in order to light it. Like I said, fun.

 

The Mighty Dragon Boat Prowls the Chicago River
click thumbnail to view larger image.

Recycled Steel Tree for Earth Day

 

Okay, actually, since recycled steel art is still the main gig here at the studio, it's really kind of Earth Day all the time. On the other hand, a tree made of 100% recycled steel seems like just the thing to post in observance of the day. And hey, it's brand new too!

I've been playing around with the scrap pieces cut out from the Great Bowl O Fire this week and I think this tree is probably my favorite of the results so far… It's kind of a revisitation of the bottle trees I did last year, but this time with scrap steel leaves. The most remarkable thing about it is that, from a distance, it's very hard to tell that it isn't a real tree! The coloration of the rusty metal, and the shapes of the pieces, make it look an awful lot like an oak shrub.

I'm really curious to see how many people actually notice it as a sculpture when they pull into the studio parking lot this summer… I know that for the last couple days, I keep seeing it out of the corner of my eye and wondering for just a split second, "hey, where'd that tree come from!?!"

It's a little tricky to get a good photo that really shows it off (at least until spring really hits and I can plant it in the grass) so I've included a bunch of alternate views below. Definitely check out the lower left picture that shows how real it looks from far away.

click thumbnail to view larger image.

Amiable Heretic Manifesto

Hugh had a great post today in which he wrote:

Why take 50,000 words [the length of your average business tome] to say what you have to say, when 500 will do? Brevity. I love brevity. We're both in a hurry.

So I'm thinking, well, there's also a lot of people out there besides myself and the bloggers I read, with ideas needing spread. Powerful ideas that could be easily summed up in 500 words or less. And I would really, truly, seriously like to do what I can to help get them out there.

So here's the deal. If you've written a manifesto in 500 words or less, and you want help spreading the word, just e-mail it to me, or send me the link. If it's any good I'll either link to it, or post it on gapingvoid.

So here's a quick collection of some of my thoughts on how to think clearly and creatively. It's not complete, but it contains some of my favorite personal mantras for coming up with useful ideas. Hope you like it!

1. Good ideas almost always begin as heresy.
2. Life is pointless. So what? Make your own meaning. Revise to suit.
3. If you can't think anything at all, you can't think anything at all. Any limitations you place on what you're willing to consider restrict your ability to engage in rational thought. That includes, of course, limiting your ideas to "rational" ones… Sometimes silly leads the way.
4. You're only entitled to the opinions you've thought through. You can only do that if you use hard data. Opinions you adopt from others are other people's opinions, not yours.
5. Fear is caused by thinking you have an answer when in fact, you haven't done anything to get one.
6. Belief in one truth over all others debases that truth. There are always a lot of truths… don't require them to be mutually contradictory.
7. Having no good flaws is worse than having no good traits.
8. The inability to run a mental simulation of the effects of any given action is an excellent indication of a possible new frontier. Simply, if you don't know what will happen when you do something, there is no question that you will learn by doing it.
9. The common denominator of human nature is the desire to transcend human nature. What are you doing about it?
10. Why is the marketing of a product inevitably more effective than the product itself? Self-help books induce millions to buy, though few change. Appropriate the techniques by which you are manipulated into buying life-styles and packaged ideals, and use them to sell yourself the actual life and ideals you want. Learning how illusion works allows us to make illusion work for us.
11. New ideas result nearly exclusively from the combination of thoughts, images, or concepts previously assumed to be exclusive. Creation is entirely the child of synthesis and discord.
12. It's not important that others agree with you. It's equally unimportant that you agree with others. It's important for everyone to listen.
13. If an answer is easy, it's probably wrong. If an answer is simple, there's a fair chance it's right. Or at least useful.

Here are some additions to the original manifesto a year later. They're mostly in random order.

1. Making people think is important. Attempting to control the outcome of that thought is immoral.
2. Almost nothing is impossible but many things are less than obvious. Almost nothing is written in stone, but many things are written.
3. In design, and hacking especially, the answers come from looking at what things do rather than what things are supposed to do.
4. A subset of the above point is that almost all the hacks I've come up with are based on using a feature for something other than what it's intended use. Misusing something because it does exactly what you need when put in a different context is the core skill of hacking.
5. When I'm told that something is impossible, my response is: "list all the ways in which it can't be done." Usually, one of those ways will work if you get rid of the assumptions about why it won't.
6. Find and exploit your weaknesses. If you don't, someone else will.
7. It's harder to be Ghandi than not to be Hitler: you don't have to be a saint, you just have to be a little better than your imagined best.
8. I love empirical data, I'm just not sure there is such a thing.

Nice work, Rachel!

Rachel Thomas sent me the following email a while back:

I'm an art student at William Jewell College in K.C., MO and I really admire your work. I've been attempting a bottle cap sculpture for my sculpture class. If you don't mind me asking, I was wondering how you attach your bottle caps to the plywood. Do you use just nails or some sort of superglue as well?

I replied with some quick, basic advice about the sort of nails I use for my bottle cap mosaics, but I think she had finished the piece before I got back to her. Rachel used hot glue and Super Glue for her mermaid.

I asked if she would send me a photo of her finished piece and here it is. Pretty cool! I especially like the way she did the tail fin… the multiple colors work really well.

If you haven't seen my bottle cap mermaids that inspired Rachel you can check them out at the new portfolio blog here and here. Or go to the bottle cap mosaic index to see all the work I've done with caps.

Technorati Tags: art, bottle cap, bottlecap, crown cap, folkart, mermaid, mosaic, outsider art

Kids Make Cool Art

My friend Maggie brought her two boys over to see the studio yesterday. I had promised them that they could try their hand at cutting out a steel drawing using the plasma cutter. I think they did a great job!

I spent some time before their visit explaining over the phone to Jacob  what kind of drawings work best for this and asked him to help his little brother with his drawing. I also showed the boys some of the drawings in steel that my daughter Mya did when she was here this summer. Jacob had brought a pretty workable realistic drawing of a dog, but in the process of transfering it to the steel, he came up with what you see below. I think the "cartoony" version is actually a lot mor fun in some ways. While Jacob worked on his drawing, I helped Simon turn his stick figure fairy into something that could be cut out from steel.

The basic trick is to remember that you're cutting out shapes, not lines… and also, that if you want to draw lines inside the shape, you have to leave a bit of steel uncut so that the piece doesn't fall out. The best example of this is the eye or nose on Jacob's dog. If the lines that make the shape of the eye go all the way around, then the inside of the eye is cut free of the piece and falls out. Another example is the sun in Simon's sculpture. In his drawing, it was just a circle hanging in space. So we added the pointy sun rays and made sure that a couple of them touched the Empire State Building. Problem solved!

Jacob is eight and Simon is five. Jacob did almost all the cutting on his sculpture after a little practice on some scrap steel. Simon was a bit more spooked by the sparks, so he let me cut his sculpture out for him while he held onto my cutting hand. It was pretty cute.

There's something pretty remarkable about the way kids' sculptures turn out. There's a real charm to the work that I could never emulate in a million years now. I just love the way they look as sculpture and the way that giving kids a chance to do something this permanent gets them excited about art.

 

 

click thumbnails to view larger image.

Technorati Tags: art, kids, children, sculpture

A Custom Fire Bowl Project

UPDATE: Check out the new photos of this project here!

Mary Abe at Garden Gate Landscaping contacted me a while back to see if I could create a custom fire pit for an extensive landscaping project she was putting together. The project called for a buried fire pit set in stone with a steel lid and a remote control gas burner. She wanted something clean, simple, modern and industrial looking that could be set into a stone patio. She wanted heavy rivets or bolt heads set into a flat lip that would surround the bowl. Mary sent me a drawing to describe what she was thinking about.

No problem, I said. I've got just the thing in mind.

So I sent her a revised drawing, and over email and phone we hashed out the final design. The fire bowl was to be installed in Maryland and I'm in Michigan, which made it really important to address every issue in depth… once the bowl was shipped off, it would not be possible to make changes. It was important for me to be able to get photos, a verbal description and measurements of the intended site to make sure that everything would fit properly. The next three photos show the site prior to installation, as well as an amazing stone gateway that leads into the fire pit patio area.

 

 

As the project progressed, we made some changes to the overall design… in each case the changes were based on practical considerations but had to work aesthetically as well. The lid had to be thick to permanently withstand the elements, and was also limited by the sizes of steel tanks I recycled to make the pit. Creating a custom domed lid from scratch would require a machine about the size of my house and probably 100 times as expensive, so that was out. The flatter domed tank end that I had planned to use was too small in diameter to cover the opening of the pit, so I added a stepped piece from another kind of tank and mirrored the rivets used on the rim. I think the stepped look adds to the industrial look that Mary was aiming for and ultimately we were all pretty happy with that.

But then we realized that the weight of the lid was a bit unweildy… we discussed a few different options to address that. We considered hinging it to the rim, making it from copper (doable, but expensive) and cutting it in half. I was worried about cutting it because the heat of the plasma cutter would certainly warp the steel somewhat and might have made the lid difficult to fit back together. My favorite idea was to quarter the lid and hinge it so that it would open like a flower… Mary rejected this idea because of the potential danger of someone catching a shin on the sharp points. Well, yeah. But it would have looked pretty cool and I'd definitely be up for making a version like that if someone else likes the idea and has good liability insurance.

In the end, we decided to cut the lid in half and fit a thin bit of steel on the inside of one half to keep water out. I devised some guiding latches to insure that the pieces would fit together properly. As it worked out the lid held it's shape well and fit together quite snugly. There was a bit of distortion that creates a sort of fissure where the two lids meet, but with the seal below it actually creates an interesting feature that the client really liked. It's kind of like ceramic work I've seen where carved fissures are part of the design. Here's a few pics that show the lid before cutting, a detail of the fissure and the latches:

 

 

Here are a few pics of the bowl and half the lid.

 

 

And here's the entire finished piece right before it shipped out.

 

 

I talked with Mary and her client today to make sure the installation had gone smoothly and that they were happy with the finished fire pit. They were both ecstatic… The first fire was last night and went smoothly, and both of them made a point of saying that they pit had exceeded expectations and was much more beautiful than the process photos I had sent them (that would be the pics above, folks). Mary said she would send me some photos of the finished, installed fire pit tomorrow or the next day and I can hardly wait to see it. I'm told that the patina has taken on a great tone. I'll post the installed photos here when I get them.

If you like the look of the Great Bowl O Fire but want something tailored to your own needs or design, drop me an email. I'm always up for trying something new.

 

Technorati Tags: art, commission, design, fire, fire bowl, fire pit, firebowl, firepit, fireplaces, flame, garden, outdoor, patio, yard

Now You're Cookin' With Gas…

 

Had a call this morning from a guy in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina who's building a water park. He wants to fit out one of my Great Bowls O Fire with a gas burner and install it in the park along with some tiki styled fountains. Groovy. But it gets better than that… he solved a major design issue for me with a really simple idea. I love when that happens, and it's a big part of why I get a kick out of working with clients to customize my work to fit what they want to do.

I've had a lot of inquiries about whether I can make a gas-fired version of the Great Bowl. Until today, my standard answer was too complicated, I think. Frankly, I'm not 100% comfortable with doing gas fittings because of the potential liability issues. I call a pro when I want a gas line run, so when people inquired about gas fired Great Bowls, I suggested they contact a local heating and cooling contractor to fit the bowl for gas. What Ted suggested was brilliantly simple, though. He asked me to weld a 6" piece of threaded gas pipe into the base of the bowl so his gas guy could just attach it to the burner inside and the pipe on the outside. That's something I can do easily, and it makes the work on the other end easy too. Genius!

So, if you were thinking you wanted a kick-ass fire bowl made from 100% recycled material but you just weren't down with the emissions from burning wood, now you can request one tricked out for cleaner burning propane or natural gas. It's still not environmentally perfect, but hey, it's an improvement. Not only that, installing them indoors just became a lot more practical.

More pictures and pricing info for the Great Bowl O' Fire.

Pictures of the Great Bowl installed in the Landmark Resort Waterpark.