J. Fred Woell
WINGING IT PIN.
Not long ago J. Fred Woell self-published Handouts from the 20th Century, a manual of sorts that ranges from philosophical ruminations on art and craft toa recipe for lemon cream sherbet (a speciality of the artist).A gathering of materials distributed to students over the years, the compendium includes the text of Woell’s 1997commencement speech at the Maine College of Art as wellas numerous “how to do it yourself” instructions for casting, slide show preparation, photographing jewelry, creating a good resume and other practical skills.
Woell has taught for much of his life. Senior and graduate seminars, two- and three-dimensional design, art education labs, sculpture and metals—these are some of the classes and subjects he has offered since he first stood in front of one-room-schoolhouse classrooms in his native Illinois. In addition to workshops, he has taught at the University of Wisconsin, the Program in Artisanry at Boston University (he ran the metalsmithing department), the Swain School of Design and the State University of New York.
Now in his late sixties, Woell continues to teach. A workshop attached to the Deer Isle, Maine, farmhouse he shares with his wife, artist Pat Wheeler, accommodated nine students this past winter. They were enrolled primarily to learn casting by the lost wax method and to work with precious metal clay.
Woell has been in on the ground floor of precious metal clay, a metal that models like clay, since fellow jeweler Tim McCreight brought numerous metalsmiths to the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in 1995. Recently, he has been carving the material when it is dry, contrary to the way precious metal clay is usually handled. “Precious metal clay has been quite successful,” Woell observes, even if it is, in his words, a material that is “pretty alien to metalsmiths who traditionally have to suffer and have something that resists.” He is pleased that the Japanese manufacturer, Mitsubishi Materials Corporation, has managed to lower the shrinkage rate, from twenty-eight to twelve percent. Another version being developed can be fired at lower temperatures, which will allow metalsmiths to incorporate enamels and other elements that can be fugitive at high heats.
Woell is a pioneer when it comes to materials. In the 1960s he made a name for himself through his work with plastic, which was relatively new on the scene as a medium for jewelers. An early domino-like pendant features polyester embedded in ebony. He also used plastic as a substitute for wax in casting. Making casts of some of the detritus of American consumerism led to critical acclaim, museum collections and stature as one of the country’s foremost found-object artists.
IT’S A TOPSY-TURVEY WORLD PIN.
The first found-object pieces concerned recycling. Woell had been in the scouts as a kid and appreciated the environment. He watched the proliferation of packaging, with America as a throwaway society—dumps turned into new artificial mountains. He could not stand the blatant trashing of the planet and went out of his way to find artistic uses for what others tossed.
Woell’s work was frequently political. Nixon was the subject of a large unflattering cast head—an effigy of sorts—made around 1970. Critics have tried to relate the aesthetic to Pop Art, but his jewelry is not about reproducing Campbell soup cans or frames from a comic book. It is rather more sardonic and subtle.
One of the special pleasures offered by Woell’s art derives from moments of recognition. You realize with a start that the piece you are studying features a cast of a miniature set of McDonald’s golden arches or a plastic pilot’s wings airlines give to children or the head of Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame. They have been transformed yet retain their cultural resonance.
Found objects continue to attract Woell, who accumulates all manner of bric-a-brac, some of it given to him by friends (he has had to put a halt to this beneficence for storage reasons). A variety of coins, including Indian head nickels and mercury dimes, appear in a number of his pieces, sometimes cast in place, sometimes attached by a cold connection, often bent or otherwise rusticated (Woell’s term for giving personality to an object through burning or some other disfiguring process).
WORK HORSE PIN.
Anyone who has spent time at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in the past quarter century has probably met or heard about Woell, who first came to Deer Isle in 1973 to work with Francis Merritt, the founding director. He later returned when Howard Evans was director, then helped in the transition to the current head administrator, poet Stuart Kestenbaum. He recalls with fondness a workshop on forging led by Ronald Hayes Pearson at the school in the fall of 1980. From 1989 up until last year, Woell was maintenance coordinator at Haystack.
The following statement appears in Haystack: 50 Years of Discovery, forthcoming from the University of Maine Press, with a foreword by Kestenbaum, book design by Michael Alpert and a preface by editor Carl Little.
Some years ago I came across a remark by environmentalist John Muir that has stuck with me to this day as a metaphor for what endears me to Haystack. “Thousands of nerve-shaken over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is necessary and that mountain peaks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.”
Haystack is just such a place, where nature is respected and an individual can be in nature, can absorb it and be inspired by it in such a way that all the senses are enlivened and freed to explore their creative energies.
Plop Haystack into some metropolitan center with acclaimed architecture and the same curriculum, same instructors, same format to work and create, and it would not in any way bring about the same results. The posturing of the buildings to respect the extraordinary beauty of the place does much to make it work. However, it is nature itself that createsthe mood and the possibilities that make the experience so powerful for people who go there.
The great lesson to be learned at Haystack is that we need spaces to create in, spaces that are quieting and which put us in touch with ourselves. The obvious natural beauty of the site is a successful example of this powerful statement. Nature needs to be integrated into our lives and protected for every generation to understand its healing tonic. —J. Fred Woell
Stones are another recurring element in the metal pieces. Unlike the traditional design meant to show off the individual diamond or ruby, Woell uses quartz or a brick fragment as part of the organic whole. At times, this element stands out, as a moonstone does in a recent piece—“blatant,” the artist calls it. A new work, “Star Power”, incorporates .22 bullet shells. They are “nice decorative accents,” Woell says, but they also add to the statement the piece makes.
Woell’s presentations are subtle, yet engaging; he prefers substance over flash. Indeed, he states that he does not much like jewelry, the sole purpose of which is to show off one’s wealth and prestige. A lot of expensive ornaments, in his opinion, lack interest, although the best of them have personality, and he often admires the engineering that requires intricate settings.
Brass switch plates recovered froma gutted building in Boston serve as a foundation for a series of pendants, with photo-etched plates, a miniature pocketknife and other elements affixed to them. “I find that the discards of our culture tell stories,” Woell says. Some of his objects bring to mind the magical assemblages of Joseph Cornell.
Embarking on a new piece, Woell often does not know ahead of time what he will use—he sorts and studies, and soon “things add up.” His goal is to make the final assemblage of objects into something more than just a collection of identifiable items.
Sometimes Woell sets a time limit in order to fire up the creative juices. He practices this method with his students, too, getting them to create quickly:
“We’re only together for a weekend or a week,” he explains. As a teacher, he proposes ways of jump-starting the process, of not getting bogged down with sketches, of trying to make the perfect design. “At my best,” Woell says, “I help my students find their own voices.”
Inspiration sometimes comes from unusual quarters. An admirer of early commemorative spoons that celebrated centennials and elections, Woell wondered how a contemporary version of such an object might appear. He subsequently created his own marvelous versions with handles that feature odd amalgams of cast found items from the discard pile. The spoons seem to have had some kind of magic spell cast on them, undergoing a transformation worthy of a wizard in Harry Potter.
Serendipity is a word Woell often utilizes when speaking of his art. Whereas early in his career pieces were planned with great precision, he came to recognize the beauty of the accidental and the expressive character of imperfections. The latter lesson he learned in the Champaign-Urbana studio of world-renowned sculptor Frank Gallo. When Gallo took a torch to the smooth epoxy resin surface of one of his figures or purposely cracked the mold, Woell grimaced but took note and eventually found the practice liberating.
In addition to the hands-on education in Gallo’s studio, Woell received degrees in the 1950s and 1960s at the University of Illinois (Bachelor of Fine Arts in art education), University of Wisconsin (Master of Fine Arts in metalwork) and the Cranbrook Academy of Art (Master of Fine Arts in sculpture). This background enabled him to work in just about any medium. It also led to interdisciplinary aesthetics, exemplified by the sculptural attributes of many of his ornaments.
Woell honestly appraises his work, recognizing that some of the more outrageous pins can be worn only by the most courageous. It requires a lot of self-confidence, he notes with a chuckle, “to wear a crashing plane on your bosom.” In terms of personal adornment, his jewelry has always been more sculpture than jewelry (it has been called “anti-jewelry”).
Where only a handful of galleries in the United States dare carry his work—or have the clientele bold enough to wear it—museums across the country, from the American Craft Museum in New York City to the Contemporary Art Museum in Honolulu, have acquired pieces. His metalwork and sculpture have also been featured in such landmark exhibitions as “Objects: USA,” “Poetry of the Physical,” “The Eloquent Object” and “Tales & Traditions: Storytelling in 20th-Century American Crafts.” Recent shows include “North American Figurative Jewelry,” in Birmingham, England; a twenty-five-year retrospective at Maine Coast Artists in Rockport, Maine; and “Selected Works from the Helen Drutt Collection,” at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
A tour of Woell’s Deer Isle home provides a mini-retrospective of his art and life. There are paintings and prints from earlier days, and a collection of cartoons he made for the school newspaper at the University of Illinois. Several pieces from a series titled “Back to Square One” hanging in the stairway highlight his geometric abstract sensibility. Bronze heads date from his years at Cranbrook. There are also cast epoxy pieces that grew out of his time with Gallo. Sculptures made of plumbing parts, lamp fixtures and keys underscore his genius with found material. “I’ve been poking around in a lot of places over the years,” he says.
Intermingled with Woell’s own work are pieces he has traded for over the years. He brings out a gorgeous salad bowl made by his friend Lyle Laske, with whom he set up a pottery studio on the shore of Lake Michigan back in the 1950s. Those summers so long ago still carry pleasurable memories, as much related to making pots as to cleaning up the shoreline.
Time has begun to weigh on Woell. “At this point in life,” he wrote in an article published in Jewelry/Metalwork 1991 Survey, “I’ve lived more years than I have left to live.” Clearly, Woell has a lot to say about the world, and he is being recognized more and more for the wisdom of his thinking and the significant status he holds in the world of American art. Among other honors, the Smithsonian Institute recently requested his letters and arranged to have an extensive interview conducted in conjunction with the acquisition.
“We’re certainly not living in a society where art is paramount in its interests,” Woell remarks; “We’re a lot more interested in sports and war and shopping at WalMart.” He admits that once you get him started on this kind of topic, he may ramble on, yet his words are difficult to ignore and reflect a genuine concern and despair. When he speaks of the paving over of the countryside, of the disease that is consumerism, of the lives wasted in menial jobs, of spiritual bankruptcy, his indictments hit hard.
Woell sees salvation in the arts. “The arts give people something emotional; if it’s their own thing, it allows them to be who they are,” he avows. He maintains that there is a risk in supporting the arts. “Art challenges all our resources, mentally and physically,” he has written. “It is about taking steps towards places where there may not be any footholds, and falling and failing.”
CHEAP SHOTS/PEARL HARBOR, 7 DECEMBER 1941 NECKPIECE.
The other theme that fills Woell with passion is preservation of the environment, “setting aside nature so people can get away from this ugliness we have created, shopping malls, one suburb after another.” A poem in his collection Edges, published in 1991, pays tribute to the Appalachian Trail, the twelve-hundred-mile footpath that America created “despite our lust for wealth, need for food, clothing, shelter, sex, and national defense.”
Woell admits that he has never been an artist who has tried to keep up with what is going on in the art world—he is more apt to be reading a hi-fi or photography magazine than any of the art periodicals. When he goes to museums, he does not read labels or remember names. Instead, he absorbs what he sees and sometimes finds inspiration in another’s work, be it the use of a material or a particular sensibility. Curious to note that avant-garde composer John Cage is one of the few artists Woell mentions by name. He plays Cage’s music when he makes creative decisions and likes to cite his writings, such as the following remarks incorporated into his address at the Maine College of Art commencement: “Consider everything an experiment. Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and there’s no fail… There’s only make.”
And Woell is a maker.
This article was originally printed in Volume 25, No. 3, 2002.
Related Reading
In the Vanguard, 1950-1969
Carl Little is a Maine based poet, critic and author of numerous books. He visited J. Fred Woell, whom he describes as “an amazing Midwesterner-turned Maniac.” We reprint his article from 2002 on J. Fred Woell, equally adept with metalworking and philosophy. Woell’s wry visual wit is deeply connected with his tender love of the environment and of the righteous treatment of human beings. Using discarded materials as building blocks for a deeper story, his collage-like brooches meld disparate elements into a cohesive whole that often whispers nostalgic warnings. “Art challenges all our resources, mentally and physically,” Woell says. “It is about taking steps towards places where there may not be any footholds, and falling and failing.”
