J.R. Portman

New Additions to Trees of City Park Series

jrtisan — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 04:12:33 +0000

Finished editing a few more of the “Trees of City Park” series i’ve been shooting, bringing the total up to 16. With city park being as big as it is, this series could be endless. However, as it gets warmer, I find it increasingly more difficult to get shots I like. Basically, trees seem to be more interesting when it is cold and they have less leaves because you can see their limbs more. Check out this example of a tree i shot a month ago, which i wasn’t totally satisfied with at the time, and then the re-shoot from this week:

Though still a cool tree, you begin to lose some of the wildness that comes from the crooked limbs in the center and the ones stretching out to the sky. I ended up using the first image after all, seems to have more character. Here are the three others:

if you’re interested in seeing more from this series, go to http://www.jrportman.com/photography/trees-of-city-park

Salvations 2011

jrtisan — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 03:39:14 +0000

The Salvations Design Competition put on by the Green Project is on display now at Canal Place for only three more days, before the fifty pieces of handmade furniture and lighting are auctioned off on saturday April 16th at a gala to benefit the Green Project. The idea behind the competition, in case you don’t already know, is to showcase what creations are possible through the utilization of material that is often considered waste. The designers were challenged with making a piece of lighting or furniture out of at least 90% reclaimed material. This is a difficult task enough, but even more challenging is competing with the caliber of work that is produced by the designers. Some of the best woodworkers, lighting designers, and artists in the city pull out all the stops and produce some truly original work. It is really cool to see what designs these craftspeople come up with through inventive reuse of salvaged materials.

I have two pieces in the show, one piece of lighting and one piece of furniture. I built a lightbox using a salvaged window and transferring an image I shot onto the glass using caulk as a medium. I then built a lightbox and attached it to the sash, so the whole thing becomes a lit New Orleans night scene when it is plugged in and turned on. It made it to the top 20 in the competition.

2942 Royal Street

The table is made entirely of salvaged lathing strips, which are the pieces of wood that are behind the plaster in walls. The top of the table is plaster with another image transfer, this one done with acetone. The Lather’s table took me a really long time to build, and was by far the most difficult furniture project I’ve ever undertaken, but I’m happy with the results.

: Lather’s Table

The Salvations Furniture Competition was written about in The Fine Woodworking Magazine blog by editor Asa Christiana in which he suggests that using reclaimed materials in furniture making might be a developing trend (it already is in New Orleans for sure). I personally use salvaged wood all the time in my furniture making, simply because it is readily available and saves me money on new wood. In addition, old growth wood is often superior to what you can buy today, and old wood has a character to it that I just like.

Historic Green

jrtisan — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 02:38:24 +0000

I recently had the privilege of working with Historic Green for a week at their Spring Greening volunteer event in the Holy Cross neighborhood of the ninth ward. Historic Green a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization devoted to assist and lead in the transformation and restoration of under-resourced communities through education and service focused on heritage conservation and sustainable design. They descend upon New Orleans every year with over a hundred volunteers and get things done. Here is a description from their own website that explains what “Spring Greening” is:

WHAT IS SPRING GREENING?

” Helping to rebuild one New Orleans neighborhood as the nation’s first ZERO CARBON community.

Spring Greening is the event through which Historic Green realizes its vision. For two weeks each March since 2008, hundreds of students and professionals converge on New Orleans, bringing their energy, ideas, skills, and compassion, working hand-in-hand with residents to help revitalize the Lower 9th Ward. We restore homes, parks, businesses, and community centers using strategies that are sensitive to history and sustainably sound.

New Orleans’ Holy Cross Neighborhood and the Lower Ninth Ward offer one path to what we’re calling “sustainable preservation.” Nowhere else could it happen on such a scale as here: an entire community struggling to recover and rebuild (yes, STILL struggling) in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. As we plan our fourth annual Spring Greening event in New Orleans for March 16-24, 2011, we are strategizing on how to spread our impact to other places around the country.

Green homes. Green spaces. Green community. Historic Green is an unprecedented opportunity to integrate sustainable practices with preservation of a place.”

My primary objective for the week was building a loft with salvaged flooring at 5200 Dauphine, which is a PRC property that will become a community center for the Holy Cross neighborhood Association. So far, I have helped mill all of the sash, the flooring, and the trusses for the building from salvaged material, but still have much more on my list to do for the structure. I worked all week with John Hanson, who has come down with Historic Green for several years and owns a construction company in Philadelphia that specializes in historic preservation, so definitely a great fellow to work with on this sort of project. With the help of several other hard-working volunteers and John’s daughters, we were able to frame the loft, process all the salvaged material, and finish the install in three days.

I also was asked to teach a window restoration workshop, so I taught about twenty people the terminology associated with historic windows, the importance of existing windows in the identity of a structure, and how to do simple repairs like re-attaching weights and glazing. Everybody’s favorite part of the workshop, however, was cutting glass. There is something very pleasing about the sound of a cutting wheel scoring the glass and then breaking it cleanly. Try it sometime – a cutter is about $5 at the Lowe’s.

To top off an already busy week, Historic Green asked me to help fabricate a counter-top to replace a badly damaged one in the lower ninth ward village. The village was the center of operations for Historic Green, and the counter I was to help fix was about 15 feet long and was badly water damaged. I found some 1 1/4″ pine flooring scraps from the flooring I made for 5200 Dauphine for the top, but with all the other stuff I was working on, I had very little time to spend on the installation. Still, with the help of Luke and Sarah from Historic Green, we managed to install the counter top in about an hour.

My jam-packed week of work is par for the course with the way Historic Green does things. They had over a dozen sites that they worked on during Spring Greening, all of which showed substantial improvements at week’s end. Go to the Historic Green website to find out more and get involved.

Click to view slideshow.

*Special Thanks to John Hanson, Sarah Myers, Michelle Stanard, and all the folks at Historic Green for letting me use their photos for this post.

Graduation Day for the Prince’s Apprentices

jrtisan — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 19:53:55 +0000

We have graduated!

At 10 AM on March 10th 2010, we The Prince of Wales Building Crafts Apprentices came to The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment in London and were graduated by His Royal Highness Prince Charles. There were about 100 guests in attendance, and many of the program instructors were also in attendance. There were boards spread throughout the lobby area describing the work of both the UK and US apprentices, and we spent the time before the ceremony discussing our program with guests and teachers. When Prince Charles arrived, we stood as he was introduced, and then he gave a speech describing his reasons for creating the program and his gratitude for its continuance and success. We were then each called up by name and handed our diplomas as we shook hands with the Prince of Wales. We were not allowed to take pictures during the ceremony, but a professional photographer took photos which I hope to some day see. After the reception, the Prince circulated trough the apprentices and talked with them about their experience. He was, as he is oft reported to be, a very nice and approachable guy. Once he departed, we all went home to change and grab a quick bite, and then met back at the Builder’s Arms pub across from the foundation to celebrate our completion of the program.

Now the future is wide open. The UK apprentices will choose among the job offers they received for builders and contracters looking to utilize their newly gained area of expertise. The New Orleans apprentices go back home and back to work for the last 2 weeks of the program schedule, finishing up the projects we have been working on for the past 5 months. We all hope to use the skills we have gained to help rebuild New Orleans and Louisiana in a better, more sustainable way, but we still face the daunting task of finding employers who want to invest in preservationist expertise. In a world where construction is sought to be done as quickly and cheaply as possible, it is sometimes difficult to convince people of the merit of building to last generations, not just the next 40 years. We New Orleanians live in a beautiful city that is defined by its buildings. These edifices were built one hundred plus years ago and have survived floods and all sorts of weather because they were built by people who took pride in their labor and took the time to do things right, not just “right now.” We, the Prince’s Men, have been given a taste of those skills and that love of labor. I personally am grateful for the knowledge I have been given, but am still thirsty for more. Hopefully the future will continue to provide us with opportunities to learn, build and be proud of our labors. We should all be so lucky.

Day 7 – Stained Glass at Lincoln Cathedral

jrtisan — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 17:05:00 +0000

Today we learned how to make leaded stained glass. We were given a piece of paper with a simple flower pattern upon it, the same apprentice’s flower that we carved in the stone workshop, and were given a demonstration on the technique of cutting glass. I’ve cut glass before to re-glaze broken panes in windows, but I am self-taught and was excited to see the proper way of doing this. Sure enough, their way was better and in no time we were all slicing through glass like pros. After practicing our cuts, we chose from assorted colored pieces of glass and began to cut out the shapes needed to make the flower. The real challenge of this step came with keeping the cut inside the boundaries of the line on the paper, lest the whole of the parts not fit together correctly. It was immediately apparent that there is a touch to cutting glass well that must take lots of practice to get. That said, I still think that the glass cutting is easier than carving stone.

At lunch time, we were shown a brief presentation of the history of glass and how stained glass came to be a wide spread art form in the middle ages, and then fell out of favor during the English civil war due to religious persecution. Now, the stained glass experts of Lincoln Cathedral painstakingly repair the multitude of glass art at the cathedral, cleaning old glass, replacing broken pieces, and re-leading frail joints. One of the projects they recently completed was a giant circular window called “The Dean’s Eye” that depicted the Last Judgement. The entire stained glass window, dating from 1220, was removed, repaired, and then put back again.

After lunch, we took the lead fillers, which were shaped like little pliable I-beams, and bent them around the glass pieces of our flower. Starting at one corner and working outward, this process again took some forethought and patience, but we all got there with the help of our teachers. Once all the lead was in place, we soldered the joints and then filled the spaces under the lead filler with lead glazing. The whole process was easy to grasp and required a minimum of tools.

We finished our own works of art in the nick of time, and then headed down the hill to catch a train back to London. I kept my stained glass, but left the stone behind for packing reasons (I’ll take the knowledge, it weighs less and won’t cost me an extra $50 at the airport). Tomorrow, we graduate and meet the Prince of Wales.

Stone Carving at Lincoln Cathedral, Day 6 in the UK

jrtisan — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 19:36:40 +0000

Lincoln Cathedral

We got our hands dirty, finally, in a stone carving workshop in Lincoln Cathedral. Mike and Paul walked us through the cathedral, which is as massive on the inside as it seems on the outside. Paul is a jovial fellow from Nottingham and said that we were very lucky to be at Lincoln because it was the best in the world. I rolled my eyes a bit because everybody thinks that the church/castle/whatever in their town is the best, until he added this: “Cathedrals are like women – the best one is the one you are with at the time.” He kept us smiling throughout the day as we chiseled and he gave us pointers, saying things like “That’s the dog’s bollucks, mate!” which apparently means your work looks really good.

When we first saw “The apprentices’ wall” inside Lincoln Cathedral and were told we would be carving one of the flowers made up the wall, we doubted this would be possible with only one day’s tutelage. Our group is comprised of craftsmen of considerable skill in many different fields, but none of us had ever tried our hand at stone carving and we were intimidated by the amazing work scattered throughout the shop that mke and Paul had produced for the cathedral (check out the picture of Mike’s Gargoyle he is currently working on). The technique, once it was explained to us, seemed pretty straightforward and every single one of us was able to produce the flower out of stone.

After we finished our workshop, Paul was kind enough to show us a little more of the Cathedral. AS we ascended the narrow steps up one of the many narrow towers, he explained that the Cathedral was founded nearly 900 years ago, and that it has seen many different events and transformations. I’ve been to many different churches across Europe, and a lot of them start to blend together after a while. This one is by far the most impressive I’ve seen. We climbed a long way and still only made it about half way up, looking out over the city and countryside from the naive roof. There is so much history and information to write about for the cathedral, and I don’t think any camera can capture the massive presence of the place. What is most interesting to me about Lincoln is that there are stone masons and craftsmen out there like Paul and Mike who are working today to not only repair and restore a structure as grand as Lincoln Cathedral, but are actually making new pieces of their own design and working them into the building. Mike showed us a piece he carved that commemorates the laws passed banning the use of dogs in fox hunting. Though this just occurred in England a few years ago, it is a big part of the ever continuing history of a country and its people, and so becomes worthy or permanence and commemoration. Thereby, the tradition of a church existing as a living history and ever- changing center of social history continues. The writing is literally carved on the wall. Now that’s the dog’s bollocks, mate.

The Road to Lincoln, Day 5 in the UK

jrtisan — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 19:31:50 +0000

Our journey continued on northward today toward the town of Lincoln in Lincolnshire, where we will be taking a stained-glass making workshop and a stone-cutting workshop. We had a private bus to drive us the 4 hours, and most apprentices used the opportunity to catch up on any lost sleep. On our way, we stopped at Fountain’s Abbey in North Yorkshire which is a World Heritage site. The grounds house a series of water gardens and idillic lodges and buildings, but we were there to see Britian’s largest monastic ruin, founded in 1132 by Cistercian monks. Located on the river Skell, the abbey is a massive ruined stone structure that has saying “whoa” as you walk down the hill to the valley where it sits. Out guide, Henry, has been a stone mason for his whole life, most of it spent working on the abbey. Our tour was rushed, but Herny did a fantastic job of showing the bits of the abbey that builders like us appreciated. One of the points about the cathedral he hammered home was that you don’t have to be a genius craftsman to build a structure as impressive as the abbey. He said it was originally built by uneducated workers when there were no architects by putting one stone on top of the other and learning how to work the stone as you go. The abbey was a good thing to see before we took our stone-carving workshop tomorrow in Lincoln, in which we’d test Henry’s supposition that “it isn’t as hard as it looks.”

The Globe Theater and Around London, Day 4

jrtisan — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 07:28:38 +0000

BRE Innovation Park and Oxford, Day 3

jrtisan — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 22:54:54 +0000

We started our day at the Prince’s Foundation, arriving a little early to get a tour of the building, which used to be a fur factory and now has been converted to house several floors of offices, conference rooms, drawing studios, as well as wood, ceramic and printmaking shops. After the tour, we got on a bus and headed off to BRE Innovation Park, which is a sort of show place for the most cutting edge sustainable and innovative building techniques. There were lots of cool funky futuristic houses to look at, the kind of houses that stick out like a sore thumb on a neighborhood block and look like they cost a fortune to build and another fortune to maintain. The particular house we came to see, however, looked very much like any other house you would see in England, except that is was very unique in the materials it was built with. Our guide, James Hulme of the Prince’s Foundation, explained that they are close to completion on “The Natural House,” which seeks to achieve a low energy, low-carbon building through the use of natural building materials rather than high-tech gadgetry. The use of aerated clay brick, wood fiber insulation, lime plaster, and other relatively inexpensive building materials make for an innovative efficient building that can also be repeated easily, which is the key to its success. The foundation believes that for a building to actually make sense, it has to be something that a developer can afford to build en mass and can find labor that understands how to build it, as well as be attractive to a prospective market. “The Natural House” takes into consideration the modern British sensibility and taste of building design, making it blend in to the neighborhood rather than making it stand out, thereby being something that a developer would actually build in quantity. Anyhow, it was one of the few “Green” buildings I’ve seen that didn’t seem like it would look horribly outdated in ten years, like something out of a Jetsons cartoon. Check out the website for more info.

After we left Innovation Park, we headed over to Oxford where we took a tour of the campus led by Dr. Steven Parissien and Aidan Mortimer. Dr. Parissien is an Oxford graduate and had a wealth on knowledge about the campus, while Mr. Mortimer lent his expertise on the building craft that went into the structures, something he is amply qualified to do since his family originally build much of the University and has continued to build and maintain it since. A few things to note about Oxford: it is old. Lewis Carrol taught there and reportedly got the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland while sitting in one of the Quads and seeing a rabbit squeeze under a fence. There are around 50 different colleges operating under Oxford University. All of them are really hard to get into. Some of the Harry Potter movies are filmed there, but there are no floating candles. There are bicycles everywhere.

A brief explanation of the following photographs: We in the millshop section of the Apprentice Program have our own tradition that has now found its way here to England. We were told at the beginning to document our work, so we have taken many pictures of the things we’ve built. Phung Tran, one of our fine millwork apprentices, would often express his zeal for the craft by sticking his extended pointer finger in every photograph we took to make sure the viewer understood the value of the craft he was having the honor of viewing. Actually, he was just trying to be annoying, but it became so customary, that his finger is in virtually every photograph of everything we have produced in the shop, whether or not he even built it. And so, I give you Phung taking credit for all of Innovation Park and Oxford.

At the Foundation

James Hulme

Aerated clay brick

Insulation made from wool

Edith Platten gets the point, much to her chagrin.

Dr. Parissien and Aidan Mortimer

big vine

Vorizon?

Wee door.

pointing at a poser.

Head.

Some bishops were martyred here for resisting Catholocism.

Phung's pointing in his pocket.

There I am.

Phung Tran is available for modeling and can be reached on his mobile. His finger, however, is booked solid for two years and won’t even take Spielberg’s calls.

Day 2 in London

jrtisan — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 00:48:35 +0000

Today we woke and had our breakfast at the hostel, which was surprisingly good. The ten of us in our group hopped on the tube, which is quite an adventure at rush hour. The pushing and cramming on the central line left a few of the guys saying they would never again complain about car insurance payments. I told them about the tokyo subway and how they have officials on the platforms whose only job is to physically push people into the train so that the doors can close, packed like sardines. We made it to The Prince’s Foundation a little late, due to a closure of the tube station we were supposed to stop at. When we arrived, Noel Isherwood gave us a brief lecture on Poundbury, a town on the outskirts of Dorchester that has been designed and built using urban planning techniques that are decidely anit-suburban. The idea is to go back to the old model of a small city in which all major necessities can be reached by a maximum fifteen minute walk. The building practices used all sustainable construction, meaning the buildings are built with stone and brick and other materials, which will actually last for centuries, rather than for just decades. It was interesting to see such a grand-idealed project that has actually been brought to fruition. More info on Poundbury can be seen here. We did a lot of walking today, and I have a feeling we’ll do a lot more tomorrow when we go to Oxford. When we got back to London, a few of us did treat ourselves to a nice meal of Indian food on Brick Lane near my old neighborhood in East London, the stomping ground of Jack the Ripper. Seeing all the “Jack” tours reminded me of the Ghost Tours of the French Quarter. Boo.

Noel Isherwood

Malcolm at Waterloo

Scotty sleeps.

the price of the night before.

Thomas

Noel in Poundbury

Poundbury

and we're walking...

poundbury lane

the group in Poundbury, with some rogue puppies

Poundbury roofs

Dinner at Standard Balti on Brick Lane