| ||||||||
| ||||||||
|
As Marks’ skills and confidence grew, he entered more exhibitions and began to receive awards for his work. He won his first Best of Show award at the Sonoma County Museum in 1987. The next year he won Best of Show again, this time with a more complex table design that involved two coopered columns with an elliptical glass top. In 1989 he applied to the Baulines Craft Guild to become a Master Member and was accepted. “Through the Guild I also got involved with artists in other disciplines: metal workers, glass blowers, textiles, clay. All those other materials just open up your design ideas. As a woodworker, you tend to think only within the parameters of woodworking. But if you start to look at textiles, for example, at all the gradations of color and how the fabric is woven together, you take some of those influences and try to figure out how to do that in wood—that adds a whole other layer to your work.” About that same time he met an artist named Randy Johnson, who worked extensively with gold leaf and various metals and patinas. Marks was immediately excited about the techniques, and they agreed on an exchange: he would teach Johnson veneer work, and Johnson would teach him about gilding and patination in return. By the early ’90s Marks became proficient enough at it that he found himself teaching classes on gilding and patination to other woodworkers. These techniques have since become a signature part of his work. Musing about how chance events can change your direction, Marks recalled going to hear Wendell Castle speak at the Oakland Museum back in the ’80s. “One of the things he said that really struck me was that he didn’t want to know what he was going to be doing a year from then. I thought that was curious, but I really started to understand it after a while. When you’re trying to earn a living at this and you’re anxious about paying the bills, you tell yourself: ‘My goal is to have a backlog of work that’s going to take me through the next couple of years.’ Well, Wendell said ‘I don’t want to be booked up any more than six months, because maybe eight or ten or twelve months from now I might be on a whole different path.” Two other chance events wove their influence on David Marks. Back in 1981, at the California Woodworking show at the Oakland Museum, Marks was particularly taken by the work of a maker named Michael Graham, who had created some unusual wall-mounted boxes that looked like bent pipes. The key to his work was the carving involved, and the potential of carving to hand-shape the work made a lasting impression. Marks had also seen another show, a King Tutankhamen exhibition that came to San Francisco around the same time. This prompted him to pick up several books on Egyptian art, and he started sketching ideas inspired by what he had seen. A “wild and crazy design” for a low table emerged. The table became a project that would go on for years, and it grew in complexity as time went on, becoming a showcase of sorts for everything he had learned. There were bent laminations and extensive carving; there were gilding and inlays; there was some challenging veneer work as well. The veneers were resawn from some rare quilted mahogany that Marks found at a local hardwood supplier in 1985; difficult to work but with figure that was extraordinary. At the time he bought as much as he could afford, and to this day wishes he could have bought more. The problem was that this piece was purely speculative, gobbling up time and money, and he had a mounting pile of bills to pay. By now they had a second child, adding more financial pressure. So he reluctantly put it aside and went back to work on other projects. Another reason for the long delays was the response he sometimes got from other furnituremakers when he showed them his work-in-progress. After one person whose talent he respected laughed and told Marks the piece was ridiculous, he so lost his self-confidence that he didn’t work on it for months. Fortunately, most of the responses were positive and encouraging, and when he did finally finish the piece he successfully showed it in a few major exhibitions—winning another “Best of Show” award at the Sonoma County Museum in 1991—and in numerous publications. The visibility was an important boost to his career. And even more fortunately, he eventually sold the piece for enough money to recoup the 800 hours he had put into it. In addition to the mix of commissioned and speculative pieces he was now doing, Marks began showing at national juried craft shows, learning how to present his work and talk about it to potential buyers. Another lesson learned from the craft shows was the importance of diversity and a range of prices: “you’ve got to have something that sells for $500 along with that table that sells for $5000.” To accomplish that he began to show turnings along with the furniture. What he soon realized was that turnings were easier to ship to shows, didn’t cost him nearly as much in time or materials, and had the potential to be a better source of income. As he had many times before, Marks enthusiastically sought to learn everything he could about something new. He started attending the annual turning symposiums at Brigham Young University, taking classes and soaking up information. He also took some classes locally. He says candidly: “I think one of the things that happens to people is they get to a certain point in their career and say, ‘I’m too important to take a class with somebody else. If I take a class with somebody else then that means I don’t know everything.’ Well, I already know that I don’t know everything. And I also consider myself to be a lifelong student.” He had an idea for a piece: a large wall sculpture, a turned disc almost four feet in diameter, that would be gilded and patinated. His wife worried about yet more speculative work, but unlike the Egyptian table, he made the wall sculpture relatively quickly and sold it almost as quickly for $5000. By the late ’90s he was focussed almost exclusively on this new direction in his work. | |||||||
|
| ||||||||
