Most
families have a horsethief or two in their histories, but we just have forgery
in our closet. My dad first told us that
my grandfather, Thorsten (which means “Thor’s Stone”, which suggests that the
‘real’ “Thor’s Hammer” was not what we think of as one, but just an old stone; a
reverse knock-off, honestly) over from Sweden after carving a copy of the “royal barge” for the
king;
was running from
a business destroyed by alcoholism ; not his but his brother’s; his business
partner. The business: making duplicates
of ‘ priceless’ antiques; read: the 6th Louis Catorce dining chair to match and
fill out the other five already in existence and crying out for the full set to
achieve the primo price. Oddly, my first unwitting, of course, foray into the
‘family business’ (which I only discovered years after I was already an
established furniture maker) ,was making “Taos Beds”; well, to be honest,
everyone made them in those halcyon days of the mid seventies, as they were
going like hotcakes. Only one problem;
it was Taos Furniture or some such (different stories out there) that “invented”
them, although my grandmother (on the
other side) said they were just “Morris Chairs”. I often get people who want something they
have already seen somewhere and I try to
make a little change to keep honest, but, frankly, it is sometimes hard not to
copy a little. I have also been copied
and mostly consider it a sort of
compliment; on a good day. The guy I
learned from came up with all these designs; cool ones with lots of detail and
he was so proud. Finally I discovered
that he had a (tum tum dum tum); book (that he took his ‘original’
designs from). These kinds of stories go
on and on. Just the other day, I was asked to take a picture of a gate so
that I could make some woodwork based on it.
I often “google” (a legitimate
real word now) anything that I want to represent and take the best twenty or so
pictures from “images” and then paste them into Microsoft Word and use them to help
create the final piece. Hey; it works!
So, there is something,
though, that needs to be paid attention to and I think it rallies around the
word “authenticity;, so what does it
look like? If you take a bucket of water
from a trout stream, or you dam it up to
make a lake, you do not have a trout stream.; a trout stream is only a trout
stream when it is flowing between its own two banks, at its own pace, in its own
sweet way (language borrowed from The
River Why). Or like the lyrics: “You
know all the words and you sung all the notes, but you never quite learned the
song she sang, you never quite learned the song…”
So, there are subtleties here, like talking about love, quality and they
involve the dynamics of us peoples’ eyes; you see, we, most of us, have the
ability to notice the most minute details like whether the edges of a piece of
furniture is planed, sanded, routered, chiseled or left alone. People like Bernard Ewell, fine art
appraiser, neighbor and one of the more
interesting people in the world, who has a refined eye for detail and can often
just feel that there is something
wrong with a forged, say, Dali piece and then takes it from there.
There is a lot
at stake here and that is why he wrote a soon-to- be- released book,
Artful Dodgers: Fraud and Foolishness in
the Art Market. The issue is
ubiquitous and Bernard says that Thomas Hoving of the Metropolitan Museum of Art said that “40 percent of all pieces offered to him for display are forgeries”!! So; Buyer Beware; but that is not enough; for
instance, right here in our neck of the woods are three businesses (Bobcat Bite,
The Legal Tender, Santa Fe Southern)
that self-define authenticity and
probably cannot be replaced; once they are gone, with all of their
characteristics; good natured attitude, sense of honor, sense of place, sense of
esthetics, mysterious ingredients that make the heart soar; it takes some magic
to make anything successful and it is hard, if not impossible, to
duplicate. This not ‘paint by the
numbers’, folks, and do not be fooled by cheap imitations…..or expensive
ones! As Bernard’s ‘motto’ goes: If a (person) has integrity nothing else
matters; if a (person) does not have integrity nothing else
matters.
