For Mar Goman, art is what you make out of the materials you have at hand. “I call myself a multimedia artist,” she says. “The media itself isn’t as important as what you make out of it. I’ll use found objects, old paper, fabrics and rusty metal. I go to junk shops and antiques shops and even old garbage dumps.”
Most people see a shovel purely as a gardening implement, but when metalsculptor Joseph Warren looks at atool, he sees the beginnings of an animal. “A shovel makes a good chest piece,” he says. “A pickaxe can be a spine.”
In 1961, when she was 23, Margaret Thierry moved from her hometown of St. Louis, Mo., to New York City, where she discovered she could be an artist. “While waitressing, I made friends with a bunch of artists,” she says. “They were always talking about art, so I started going to museums to see what the big deal was and to be able to contribute to conversations. After a year, I was hooked on art.”
After graduating from college, most people try to find a job in their field. Furnituremaker Philip Culbertson took a different route. “I got a degree in behavioral zoology at the University of Michigan in the 1970s,” he says, “but I was tired of using my brain, so I got a job in a cabinet shop outside Washington, D.C., and I stayed there for six years.”
A childhood dream of becoming an animator led painter Marcus Gannuscio to become interested in learning to draw the human form. “When I was 12, I saw ‘The Lion King’ and decided I wanted to be an animator,” he says. “My mother actually contacted someone at Disney to find out what I’d need to do to become one, and the person’s advice was to concentrate on learning to draw figures and anatomy.”
Issuing an artistic challenge to his industrial design students at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Wash., metal artist and industrial design professor Arunas Oslapas took it up himself. “I asked them to intercept garbage and make something from it—and I’d do the same,” he says.
From a very early age, fiber artist Leena Riker has been working with yarn. “I grew up in Finland in an environment where a lot of things were made by hand,” she says. “I was born before World War II, and during the war, we had to be creative about making the things we needed. My mother taught me to sew, knit and crochet when I was 4, and I kept that up.”
As a child, furniture designer and artist Rachel Sanders knew her future lay in creating pieces for interiors. “I was always reassembling my room,” she says. “It was an ongoing project throughout my childhood. Then I’d go around the rest of the house and make sure everything was just so, sometimes to the annoyance of other members of my family.”
If you’d asked Rachael L K Kurynny just a few years ago whether she’d ever spend her spare time designing jewelry, her answer would’ve been no. “I was always a math and science girl,” says Kurynny. “I wasn’t thinking about doing art.”
When furnituremaker Bill More left Brooklyn, N.Y. and headed west on a train, the trip had an unexpected result. “I met my wife on that train,” he says. “She got on in Wisconsin, and neither of us got off until the train arrived in Portland.”
More grew up in New Jersey, where school sparked an interest in building things. “I liked classes like shop where they’d give you tools and just let you work with them,” he says.
