Hans Christiansen (artist)

Transcription

♪ Music ♪ >>Cullen: The reason most of us came to RIT was because of Hans. He was a unique man for what he was doing; we didn't appreciate it, we didn't, you know, we knew we had a good professor, but we weren't aware of how good and how notable and how famous he basically was. He was a European trained master. He had to push, we had to push ourselves. >>Christensen: He was very strict, because he had brought that with him from his own childhood but also when he had his education at Georg Jensen. There you worked with masters. >>Cullen: An apprenticeship in Europe was completely different than what we had here. He spent fifteen years to become a master. We were to learn as much as we could in four. >>Christensen: What he taught the students at that particular time was so different as what they are teaching now. You know, he hammered everything. He made sometimes his own stakes and he made sometimes his own hammers and those kinds of things, because everything is just hammered up from a flat piece of silver and it is hammered up and hammered up and so it is very, very special. >>Cullen: Hans could do that. He could go into his office, take a disc of metal which was dead flat... twenty minutes later come out with a bowl that was already three inches high... (laughing) ...and be done with the bowl in an afternoon. Instead of letting a machine fabricate and form your pieces, we were taking flat sheets of metals and learning to push it by hand, but doing shapes that weren't centrifugal: ovals, rectangles, squares, things machines can't do, and still can't. Everything was by hand, no machinery, and we did learn. >>Christensen: All his designs he always got from nature. That was his life. >>Cullen: Most of his pieces tended to be mobiles where a design aspect may be the fact that it's just maybe teetering, simplified bases on a spike, on omegas, which were common for Hans. The designs tend to be very plain; the detail is in the hammer work, which meant it had to be done by hand. >>Christensen: His things are so different, what he made, than anything else, his work is so simple. You know, one time one of the factories asked to make a whole set of spoons for him and he gave it to them and they said, "Oh no, that is not ornate enough." His work is not ornate! So plain and clean, but so special. I think my favorite piece is in silver was really he had a very nice candelabra that he made, because one time he was at a dinner and people had candelabras and he said, "I only saw one because the other ones were all standing beside each other." So he made a candelabra that from every angle you could see the light. >>Cullen: Hans' uniqueness were these obelisk forms, these concaved and twisted omegas, which all tend to intertwine, and you're doing this... manipulating the metal itself with hammers, which tend to be very large and you have these elements which are intertwining and to control that? None of us could understand it. That was something that was typical Hans and there was nobody else doing it. >>Christensen: The Mace is really like a world bowl, and so that was very special for him. But also the necklace that the President is wearing... and what he did is he made an eye on the backside because he always felt that the President has to look in the future, but has an eye in the back for what's happening, so that is why that eye is in the back of the necklace. >>Cullen: I probably didn't realize this when I was a student... the appreciation of what he was doing only came to me afterwards once I started working for myself. We knew that what he was teaching us was probably not being taught anywhere else in the United States. Going into this type of profession, this type of education... it's a physical... we were doing everything by hand and hammer, and we were supposed to return all of his tools that we borrowed, but a lot of us never did. It may have been a ruler, a compass, a hammer or a file, but it was our little trophy. it had his little name, the little hammer, H and C and I still have his pieces in my shop today, that's 30 years later. I still use his tools. That's what kind of guy he was.