This is the first in a series of sketches of craftspeople, members of the Boulder Arts and Crafts Cooperative, inspired by a quote from the book "Baron in the Trees" by Italo Calvino.
He writes "......association renders men stronger and brings out each person's best gifts and gives a joy which is rarely to be had by keeping to oneself, the joy of realizing how many honest decent capable people there are for whom it is worth giving one's best.....". This to me is the essence and benefit of our Cooperative.
Marguerite Specht's hands are both gentle and strong. They are hands that have bathed many babies, cooked many meals, and strung many necklaces. Marguerite describes her hands as "soul-imbued, revealing, and wise" and says that they both stimulate her by showing her things and save her by calming her down. She touches everything, be it a swatch of linen, a basil leaf or a cut amethyst as though she is feeling it for the first time, exploring it for its truth.
Marguerite is a jeweler and a Coop member for over 30 years. She has always loved rocks, collecting them as a child and collecting them still. She has built Zen gardens with pebbles and experimented for a few years with the soft rock, clay, in the 70's, when she met the artist Maynard Tischler, first her teacher and now her husband. Wanting to work with less complicated equipment and have more control over the material, she started making boxes, spoons and frames out of metal, a metal-smith more than a jeweler, and joined the BAC Gallery in 1979. Slowly her direction changed as she started working smaller and smaller, and in an effort to make her art more sellable, as well as for the love of it, she introduced color, finally discovering the joy and satisfaction of knotting and stringing rocks into jewelry pieces that celebrate the color, texture, feeling and energy of stones.
"I think you have to really love what you're doing", she says. "You must have an internal motivation, one that has to do with discipline, how you want to design your life, involving a sense of control and creativity. " External motivation, as in paying the bills, meeting deadlines, keeping the Cooperative stocked, is important too, but without the internal the external becomes meaningless. Her favorite part of making jewelry is the total immersion in the work, those magical moments when she is wedded to each piece, has entered the time zone of creativity, which is more about meditation than the project at hand. It is a place of solace and peace, where she can find her own voice and it is the reason why she has worked happily at her craft all these years. An added bonus is when she feels appreciated for what she does, always a highly satisfying and surprising moment.
Soldering or beading jewelry can be tricky and the fragility of the material requires great concentration and care, " and", she laughs, "the ability to be calm if things go haywire, break, and you have to start over." Another challenge of the craftsperson that works alone at home, she says, is that she labors slowly and never feels done with all that needs doing. There can be a looming sense that there is always more to be accomplished. Marguerite sees her work as still changing. She recently completed a big order for Sundance Catalogue that taught her a lot about the discipline of repetition and enjoying each piece. She says "...there was something really nice about knowing what I was going to do, how many pieces I needed to complete, and maybe it could be called total monotony, but there was a Zen quality of not trying to race to get done, to just enjoy every necklace I made and have a standard of how many to do a day..." which seems to me to be a good statement about what it means to be a craftsperson in history as well as in 2009.
--Thea Tenenbaum