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Rethink Your Life! Finance, health, lifestyle, environment, philosophy |
The Work of Art and The Art of Work Kiko Denzer on Art |
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Cob: Counter-attacks(long article incl)Charmaine R Taylor tms at northcoast.comSat Oct 27 20:57:03 CDT 2001
Well wouldn't ya' know..Fine Homebuilding's annual Kitchen issue just
landed in my mailbox, all about countertops..dicusses every material
from butcher block to Corian, Fiber cement- stone-laminates- tile-hand
made and not...well done with lots of photos of the various counter
products sold, and covers the poured method I mentioned by artist Buddy
Rhodes who does "liquid stone" essentially cement poured in place.
One great idea I picked up was to pour the dang thing UPSIDE down..in
other words, plan for the bottom to be the "perfect side", and then the
top surface can be handled more, troweled, etc.
this would make sense if you had a mold with a preformed lip edge, place
a piece of pencil rod (as others mentioned) then pour, and let cure. As
a person with weird counters made of shelving (by the last owners) I can
tell you how important having a lip edge is for wiping crumbs etc...no
edge means everything tends to fall into the drawers or right to the
floor..such a small thing makes such a big difference in ease and
function of a working kitchen!
Charmaine
www.dirtcheapbuilder.com
The Master of Liquid Stone
by Brad Lemley
Buddy Rhodes scoops a heaping handful of
concrete, about 3 pounds, from the
wheelbarrow. The mass resembles cookie
dough: stiff, buttery yellow and studded with
chocolate-colored sand grains. He holds it
briefly, registering heft, viscosity, dimension,
color, even the muddy smell. Then, squinting
through homely horn-rims caked with concrete dust; he
carefully
presses the gritty material into a 4-foot-diameter mold
for a circular
tabletop. "Working with concrete is like playing God,"
he says.
"Making stone out of powder."
It's one thing to master a craft, quite another to
invent a craft and then
master it. Rhodes, 48, has taken concrete--generally
employed only to
raise structures out of the muck--and transformed this
humblest of
building materials into artful creations meant to be
seen, touched and
admired. His accomplishment is doubly satisfying because
no one
believed he could do it. For years, architects,
builders, masons,
engineers, the guys at the hardware store all told
Rhodes he was nuts.
They told him that his concrete dreams--concrete lounge
chairs,
concrete coffee tables, concrete wainscot, concrete
window trim,
towering concrete cones, concrete mantel pieces,
delicate
Japanese--style concrete benches, concrete that twisted
and turned
like an ocean wave, concrete that was warm and tactile
and
engaging--were unbuildable, unmarketable mud-pie in the
sky.
Rhodes listened politely. "I would say, 'OK, OK, I can't
do it. Now give
me the stuff.' I would lock myself in the studio, flail
away at it for a few
days, invent techniques as I went along and finally make
the thing."
Rhodes presses stiff, wet concrete against the sides of
a fiberglass
mold to shape and sculpt a 4-foot diameter planter,
above. He will
spend eight hours building the pot, which will sell for
$1,600.
An elegant fireplace mantel and hearth and a sleek
whirlpool bathtub
testify to the versatility of Rhodes's concrete
creations.
These days, the only impossibility seems to be to keep
up with
demand. Rhodes pauses to survey his hangar-sized
workshop, in the
Potrero Hill district of San Francisco. As the tejano
tune "No Vale La
Pena" ("It's Not Worth the Trouble") blares from a boom
box, a half
dozen sweaty Workers, each trained by Rhodes, trot
behind
wheelbarrows, feverishly
dumping buckets of concrete into molds, trying to keep
up with
backlogged orders. A client in Chicago wants a whole
Buddy Rhodes
house: bathtub, sinks, kitchen counters, tiles,
windowsills, shower
pan, architectural ornaments, the works. A chain of
upscale furniture
stores is screaming for baseboards, shelving and crown
molding.
Robin Williams bought planters, Cher purchased a coffee
table, rock
musician Todd Rundgren picked up some benches and now
another
rock star, who made Rhodes sign a confidentiality
agreement, wants
counters, tile and a threshold. Concrete, once reviled
as the utilitarian,
artless bane of urban life, is suddenly hip, and Rhodes
deservedly gets
much of the credit for the change. In San Francisco,
real-estate ads
shout "Buddy Rhodes kitchen!" even before they brag
about bay views.
"Buddy makes concrete sensual," says Los Angeles
designer Richard
Altuna, who has specified Rhodes work for more than 100
projects
across the country. "Over and over, he miraculously
comes up with
stuff that's so beautiful."
"Concrete is soft and warm--lots of personality," says
Rhodes. "People
come here because granite and marble are too machined,
polished,
sterile. People want craft in their home, the trowel
marks, the
hand-done look." Rhodes says he despises "faux"
concrete, in which
the substance is pressed into molds to imitate bricks,
rocks, even
wooden planks-usually unsuccessfully. Rhodes's work
evokes stone
but is still obviously man-made, manhandled,
man-caressed. "The fact
that it's handmade, that's my passion," he says.
Reaching into the tabletop mold, Rhodes uses only his
fingertips to
knead a mound of moist concrete. The kneading seems
random. It
isn't. Rhodes wants the tabletop to show a fissured,
frazzled surface
when he pops it out of the mold tomorrow morning. If he
presses too
vigorously, the fissures in the mound will close up to
form a featureless
plane. If he's too tentative, the gaps will yawn so wide
that the piece
won't hold together. His neoprene-gloved hands
alternately dig and
dance, pinch and separate, seeking the middle ground.
"It takes a
certain touch," he says, persuading the mix against the
mold's
2-inch-high sidewalls. "You roll the fingers gently. It
works as much by
feel as by sight."
Rhodes is 5 foot 7 and weighs 150 pounds but looks
taller and heavier
because the weight is concentrated in his arms and
shoulders. The
muscle accreted there because his movements-the scoop,
assessment, placement, kneading-are the same, year after
year. But
the gentle and relaxed rhythm of those movements matches
the
yielding nature of the moist concrete. It's so supple,
he says.
"Sometimes, I really get the feeling that it wants me to
work with it."
The last handful of concrete meticulously pressed into
place, he
pushes a square of steel diamond-grid reinforcing mesh
onto the
still-wet mound, then trowels on more concrete in
smooth, practiced
arcs. This process will lock the mesh into the table's
center, keeping
the piece from cracking as it cures.
The Craggy fissures of an unfinished cafe table await
color backfill.
A sink surround 2 feet deep and 7 feet long is one of
hundreds of
concrete counters Rhodes and his crews have installed in
San
Francisco kitchens. "I see these counters as art," he
says. "Art can
be functional. It doesn't have to hang on the wall above
the couch."
Leaving the concrete to set, Rhodes heads to a
workstation full of
cured tabletops. With quick stabs of an electric drill,
he unscrews the
sides of a mold, then smacks the base with a rubber
mallet to free the
piece. "I've done this a million times, but to me it's
always a great
moment when the mold comes off." No wonder. With a
grunt, he flips
over the 160-pound disk, revealing that the individual
clods of stiff
concrete are ringed and interlaced with just the
proportion of fissures
he was after. The effect is striking, like boiling lava
that cracked after
flowing into the sea.
Now comes the Buddy Rhodes signature touch. With a
4-inch drywall
knife, he smears a thin concrete mix tinted with ocher
pigment into the
fissures. Once that sets, he repeats the process with a
tan concrete
mixture, randomly filling cracks and pits that the ocher
concrete
missed. Then, with gray concrete, he fills the remaining
voids. Finally
he zigzags a diamond-impregnated grinding disk over the
whole
tabletop, stripping the glaze to reveal the surface his
clients crave:
veined, mottled, gently textured with swales and
hummocks but
smooth enough for rolling a piecrust or writing a
letter.
"The surface," he murmurs, rubbing it with his palm.
While Rhodes seems to have been born for this work, his
parents-particularly his father-never imagined their son
with callused
hands, laboring until his back ached and spasmed.
Kenneth Rhodes
was a successful entrepreneur on Long Island, New York.
He adopted
Rhodes as an infant, hoping the boy would someday take
over his
string of businesses including a paving-equipment
dealership. But that
dream shattered early. "I didn't want to sell tractors.
And I hated
school," Rhodes says. "The fact that I had no idea what
to do with my
life was really distressing. I kept looking for
something I could hold
onto."
The only high-school course that resonated for him was
mechanical
drawing, so he enrolled at the Rhode Island School of
Design and cast
about for a direction. At age 19, he saw a fellow
student throwing a
clay pot, and something stirred. "Here was this guy
centering,"
Rhodes recalls. (The term refers to the challenging
process of placing
clay in the precise middle of the potter's wheel so that
the Son
material can be shaped into a vessel.) To Rhodes, the
act was
metaphor. Once he tried centering, the world and its
myriad concerns
faded, rendered trivial by this single, immediate task
that focused his
attention.
"Pure concentration. That's what drew me," he says.
After that, Rhodes immersed himself in clay. For three
years, he
virtually lived in the studio of Alfred University's
college of ceramics, in
upstate New York, mastering the techniques of production
stoneware.
"I had zero social life," he says. "I made pots morning
and night. For
my English term-paper project, I made a clay pinball
machine. Clay,
raku, making multiples with molds, experimenting with
weird materials,
it was all I did."
Rhodes dropped out just short of graduation, built a
studio in a barn in
upstate New York and spent seven tenuous years hauling
his plates,
salad bowls and honey jars to craft shows in his
battered old pickup.
"How many people will pay $15 for a mug?" he says. "It
was a very
hard life. The phone was always getting shut off because
the bill was
overdue. It was cold nine months of the year.
Iconoclastic by nature, Rhodes increasingly longed to
see the "weird
San Francisco clay guys. I was working in this cold
studio to perfect a
teapot that wouldn't drip. Meanwhile, people out here
were making
couches out of clay, ripping chunks off of a clay cube
and firing them
as art pieces, just wacky stuff." Ultimately, in the
summer of 1979,
Rhodes headed west in the pickup; his $1,500 life
savings tucked in
his jeans, to study sculpture at the San Francisco Art
Institute.
Henry, Rhodes's 2-year-old yellow Labrador, follows his
master around
the shop, begging the guys who build shipping cartons to
play
fetch-the-stick.
Rhodes proved himself even more inventive than the
natives. At an art
show, he erected a 25-foot-long, 7-foothigh brick wall
of
gunpowder-laced mortar; before a cheering crowd, he set
the wall
ablaze, and the mortar lines erupted into a grid of
hissing flame. He
also peppered the downtown streets with quirky guerrilla
art: a
12-foot-tall clay man, a wedge that seemed to be
toppling a building,
installed at night to amuse and befuddle morning
commuters. "The
idea was that art shouldn't live in a gallery, where you
pay to get in and
see it and it's gone in a month," Rhodes says. "It
should be
everywhere, where you least expect it."
In 1982, ensconced in a sixth-floor industrial space, he
began
experimenting with concrete because the creations he
dreamed about
would no longer fit in a kiln. "I wanted to make larger
items-a giant pot,
a countertop, stuff that was too big to be fired," he
says. "I wanted to
make something that was functional but something that
would affect
the world."
Concrete proved far less forgiving than clay. "I had a
huge problem with
warping and cracking. And it didn't always happen right
away.
Sometimes I'd make something-it would be perfect for
three months,
then crack down the middle. I smashed a lot of stuff out
of frustration."
Advice was elusive. Concrete craft in those days was
almost unknown.
"There were no books, no formulas," he says. "People I
would ask
about it just thought I was weird."
He persisted, hanging drywall by day to support himself,
carrying
94-pound bags of cement up five flights at night.
Tinkering with
hundreds of formulas, he finally hit upon one that
combined white
cement, water, sand, an expanded volcanic glass called
perlite and an
additive he won't divulge. Rhodes is self-effacing but
doesn't deny the
significance of his creation. "I actually forged a new
material," he says.
Unlike normal concrete, his mixture was stiff enough to
stand up
against the vertical walls of molds. He began making and
selling huge,
hollow globes, cubes and cones that could serve as
planters, benches,
tables or garden objects. "I realized that this stuff
was almost
limitless," he says, scooping another baseball-sized
dollop of concrete
from the wheelbarrow, this time for a paver. "I could
make just about
anything you could make with wood."
In 1989, a designer specified Rhodes's veined concrete
for a
96,000-square-foot San Francisco law office's
secretarial cubes, floor
tiles and counters. Rhodes took a big gulp and bought a
$25,000
concrete mixing machine, hired a couple of helpers and
labored 12
hours a day, seven days a week for four months. "Since I
was such a
tiny operation, the contractor took out a bond on me,"
he says. "He
kept saying I could never do it. And working for
lawyers, man, I was
terrified." But the finished office-by turns sleek and
textured, formidable
but approachable-won raves from local designers and
interiors
magazine's award for best law-firm design.
Rhodes has been in perpetual motion since.
The reddening sun, visible through the loading-dock
door, slides behind
the warehouses on the other side of Oakdale Avenue.
Rhodes runs two
shifts to keep the shop humming-today he has worked
both, as he
often does. Now, he shoves a sheet of plywood through a
table saw,
over and over, slicing off 2-inch strips to serve as the
sides of molds. A
stratum of sawdust has settled over the dust and crusted
concrete on
his blue coveralls. Without pausing, he strides quickly
to one of the
shop's 32 casting tables and trowels a skim coat of
dun-tinted
concrete on a dozen baseboard molding pieces. Then he
cruises to
another table, snatches up a plastic bucket of acrylic
sealer and
brushes it on a countertop to render the normally porous
concrete
stain-resistant.
Although his motions are quick, he is always exacting.
The yard in
back of this workshop is Rhodes's boneyard, stacked with
benches,
globes and other works that were just a shade off in hue
or that
developed nonstructural hairline cracks. He sells flawed
work cheaply
to bargain hunters who stop in weekly. Sometimes,
though, he can't
stand to let a bad piece out at all and smashes it on
the trash heap.
"If it's not right, I obsess about it," he says.
He does wonder, sometimes, about this imperative to
sculpt and
knead, to create and innovate and make something
exquisite with his
hands. As an adopted child, he sometimes speculates that
the urge is
genetic, welded to his DNA in a way his parents could
never fathom.
"My father never 'got' it, that's for sure," Rhodes says
softly. "It does
feel like it's in my blood." When Kenneth Rhodes died
six years ago,
he and his son were estranged. The reasons are tangled,
but Buddy's
rejection of his father's enterprises, out of allegiance
to the craft of
concrete, was "certainly a big part of it," he says.
That gulf can't be closed now. And the work still
beckons. Rhodes
gathers the strips he cut earlier and carries them to a
drill press. He
begins to predrill each piece to make it easier to
insert the screws
when he starts building another mold. All around him the
second-shift
guys start packing up to go home.
[ Back to "In the News" ]
© 1997-2000, Buddy Rhodes Studio, Inc. All Rights
Reserved
2130 Oakdale Ave., San Francisco, CA 94124
-------------- next part --------------
<!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en">
<html>
Well wouldn't ya' know..Fine Homebuilding's annual Kitchen issue just landed
in my mailbox, all about <u>countertops</u>..dicusses every material from
butcher block to Corian, Fiber cement- stone-laminates- tile-hand made
and not...well done with lots of photos of the various counter products
sold, and covers the poured method I mentioned by artist Buddy Rhodes
who does "liquid stone" essentially cement poured in place.
<p>One great idea I picked up was to pour the dang thing UPSIDE down..in
other words, plan for the <u>bottom </u>to be the "perfect side", and then
the top surface can be handled more, troweled, etc.
<p>this would make sense if you had a mold with a preformed lip edge, place
a piece of pencil rod (as others mentioned) then pour, and let cure. As
a person with weird counters made of shelving (by the last owners) I can
tell you how important having a lip edge is for wiping crumbs etc...no
edge means everything tends to fall into the drawers or right to the floor..such
a small thing makes such a big difference in ease and function of a working
kitchen!
<p>Charmaine
<br>www.dirtcheapbuilder.com
<p>The Master of Liquid Stone
<p>
by Brad Lemley
<p>
Buddy Rhodes scoops a heaping handful of
<br>
concrete, about 3 pounds, from the
<br>
wheelbarrow. The mass resembles cookie
<br>
dough: stiff, buttery yellow and studded with
<br>
chocolate-colored sand grains. He holds it
<br>
briefly, registering heft, viscosity, dimension,
<br>
color, even the muddy smell. Then, squinting
<br>
through homely horn-rims caked with concrete dust; he carefully
<br>
presses the gritty material into a 4-foot-diameter mold for a circular
<br>
tabletop. "Working with concrete is like playing God," he says.
<br>
"Making stone out of powder."
<p>
It's one thing to master a craft, quite another to invent a craft and then
<br>
master it. Rhodes, 48, has taken concrete--generally employed only to
<br>
raise structures out of the muck--and transformed this humblest of
<br>
building materials into artful creations meant to be seen, touched and
<br>
admired. His accomplishment is doubly satisfying because no one
<br>
believed he could do it. For years, architects, builders, masons,
<br>
engineers, the guys at the hardware store all told Rhodes he was nuts.
<br>
They told him that his concrete dreams--concrete lounge chairs,
<br>
concrete coffee tables, concrete wainscot, concrete window trim,
<br>
towering concrete cones, concrete mantel pieces, delicate
<br>
Japanese--style concrete benches, concrete that twisted and turned
<br>
like an ocean wave, concrete that was warm and tactile and
<br>
engaging--were unbuildable, unmarketable mud-pie in the sky.
<p>
Rhodes listened politely. "I would say, 'OK, OK, I can't do it. Now give
<br>
me the stuff.' I would lock myself in the studio, flail away at it for
a few
<br>
days, invent techniques as I went along and finally make the thing."
<br>
<p>
<br>
Rhodes presses stiff, wet concrete against the sides of a fiberglass
<br>
mold to shape and sculpt a 4-foot diameter planter, above. He will
<br>
spend eight hours building the pot, which will sell for $1,600.
<br>
<p>
<p>
An elegant fireplace mantel and hearth and a sleek whirlpool bathtub
<br>
testify to the versatility of Rhodes's concrete creations.
<br>
<p>
These days, the only impossibility seems to be to keep up with
<br>
demand. Rhodes pauses to survey his hangar-sized workshop, in the
<br>
Potrero Hill district of San Francisco. As the tejano tune "No Vale La
<br>
Pena" ("It's Not Worth the Trouble") blares from a boom box, a half
<br>
dozen sweaty Workers, each trained by Rhodes, trot behind
<br>
wheelbarrows, feverishly
<p>
dumping buckets of concrete into molds, trying to keep up with
<br>
backlogged orders. A client in Chicago wants a whole Buddy Rhodes
<br>
house: bathtub, sinks, kitchen counters, tiles, windowsills, shower
<br>
pan, architectural ornaments, the works. A chain of upscale furniture
<br>
stores is screaming for baseboards, shelving and crown molding.
<br>
Robin Williams bought planters, Cher purchased a coffee table, rock
<br>
musician Todd Rundgren picked up some benches and now another
<br>
rock star, who made Rhodes sign a confidentiality agreement, wants
<br>
counters, tile and a threshold. Concrete, once reviled as the utilitarian,
<br>
artless bane of urban life, is suddenly hip, and Rhodes deservedly gets
<br>
much of the credit for the change. In San Francisco, real-estate ads
<br>
shout "Buddy Rhodes kitchen!" even before they brag about bay views.
<p>
"Buddy makes concrete sensual," says Los Angeles designer Richard
<br>
Altuna, who has specified Rhodes work for more than 100 projects
<br>
across the country. "Over and over, he miraculously comes up with
<br>
stuff that's so beautiful."
<p>
"Concrete is soft and warm--lots of personality," says Rhodes. "People
<br>
come here because granite and marble are too machined, polished,
<br>
sterile. People want craft in their home, the trowel marks, the
<br>
hand-done look." Rhodes says he despises "faux" concrete, in which
<br>
the substance is pressed into molds to imitate bricks, rocks, even
<br>
wooden planks-usually unsuccessfully. Rhodes's work evokes stone
<br>
but is still obviously man-made, manhandled, man-caressed. "The fact
<br>
that it's handmade, that's my passion," he says.
<p>
Reaching into the tabletop mold, Rhodes uses only his fingertips to
<br>
knead a mound of moist concrete. The kneading seems random. It
<br>
isn't. Rhodes wants the tabletop to show a fissured, frazzled surface
<br>
when he pops it out of the mold tomorrow morning. If he presses too
<br>
vigorously, the fissures in the mound will close up to form a featureless
<br>
plane. If he's too tentative, the gaps will yawn so wide that the piece
<br>
won't hold together. His neoprene-gloved hands alternately dig and
<br>
dance, pinch and separate, seeking the middle ground. "It takes a
<br>
certain touch," he says, persuading the mix against the mold's
<br>
2-inch-high sidewalls. "You roll the fingers gently. It works as much by
<br>
feel as by sight."
<p>
Rhodes is 5 foot 7 and weighs 150 pounds but looks taller and heavier
<br>
because the weight is concentrated in his arms and shoulders. The
<br>
muscle accreted there because his movements-the scoop,
<br>
assessment, placement, kneading-are the same, year after year. But
<br>
the gentle and relaxed rhythm of those movements matches the
<br>
yielding nature of the moist concrete. It's so supple, he says.
<br>
"Sometimes, I really get the feeling that it wants me to work with it."
<p>
The last handful of concrete meticulously pressed into place, he
<br>
pushes a square of steel diamond-grid reinforcing mesh onto the
<br>
still-wet mound, then trowels on more concrete in smooth, practiced
<br>
arcs. This process will lock the mesh into the table's center, keeping
<br>
the piece from cracking as it cures.
<br>
<p>
<p>
The Craggy fissures of an unfinished cafe table await color backfill.
<br>
<p>
<p>
A sink surround 2 feet deep and 7 feet long is one of hundreds of
<br>
concrete counters Rhodes and his crews have installed in San
<br>
Francisco kitchens. "I see these counters as art," he says. "Art can
<br>
be functional. It doesn't have to hang on the wall above the couch."
<br>
<p>
Leaving the concrete to set, Rhodes heads to a workstation full of
<br>
cured tabletops. With quick stabs of an electric drill, he unscrews the
<br>
sides of a mold, then smacks the base with a rubber mallet to free the
<br>
piece. "I've done this a million times, but to me it's always a great
<br>
moment when the mold comes off." No wonder. With a grunt, he flips
<br>
over the 160-pound disk, revealing that the individual clods of stiff
<br>
concrete are ringed and interlaced with just the proportion of fissures
<br>
he was after. The effect is striking, like boiling lava that cracked after
<br>
flowing into the sea.
<p>
Now comes the Buddy Rhodes signature touch. With a 4-inch drywall
<br>
knife, he smears a thin concrete mix tinted with ocher pigment into the
<br>
fissures. Once that sets, he repeats the process with a tan concrete
<br>
mixture, randomly filling cracks and pits that the ocher concrete
<br>
missed. Then, with gray concrete, he fills the remaining voids. Finally
<br>
he zigzags a diamond-impregnated grinding disk over the whole
<br>
tabletop, stripping the glaze to reveal the surface his clients crave:
<br>
veined, mottled, gently textured with swales and hummocks but
<br>
smooth enough for rolling a piecrust or writing a letter.
<p>
"The surface," he murmurs, rubbing it with his palm.
<p>
While Rhodes seems to have been born for this work, his
<br>
parents-particularly his father-never imagined their son with callused
<br>
hands, laboring until his back ached and spasmed. Kenneth Rhodes
<br>
was a successful entrepreneur on Long Island, New York. He adopted
<br>
Rhodes as an infant, hoping the boy would someday take over his
<br>
string of businesses including a paving-equipment dealership. But that
<br>
dream shattered early. "I didn't want to sell tractors. And I hated
<br>
school," Rhodes says. "The fact that I had no idea what to do with my
<br>
life was really distressing. I kept looking for something I could hold
<br>
onto."
<p>
The only high-school course that resonated for him was mechanical
<br>
drawing, so he enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design and cast
<br>
about for a direction. At age 19, he saw a fellow student throwing a
<br>
clay pot, and something stirred. "Here was this guy centering,"
<br>
Rhodes recalls. (The term refers to the challenging process of placing
<br>
clay in the precise middle of the potter's wheel so that the Son
<br>
material can be shaped into a vessel.) To Rhodes, the act was
<br>
metaphor. Once he tried centering, the world and its myriad concerns
<br>
faded, rendered trivial by this single, immediate task that focused his
<br>
attention.
<p>
"Pure concentration. That's what drew me," he says.
<p>
After that, Rhodes immersed himself in clay. For three years, he
<br>
virtually lived in the studio of Alfred University's college of ceramics,
in
<br>
upstate New York, mastering the techniques of production stoneware.
<br>
"I had zero social life," he says. "I made pots morning and night. For
<br>
my English term-paper project, I made a clay pinball machine. Clay,
<br>
raku, making multiples with molds, experimenting with weird materials,
<br>
it was all I did."
<p>
Rhodes dropped out just short of graduation, built a studio in a barn in
<br>
upstate New York and spent seven tenuous years hauling his plates,
<br>
salad bowls and honey jars to craft shows in his battered old pickup.
<br>
"How many people will pay $15 for a mug?" he says. "It was a very
<br>
hard life. The phone was always getting shut off because the bill was
<br>
overdue. It was cold nine months of the year.
<p>
Iconoclastic by nature, Rhodes increasingly longed to see the "weird
<br>
San Francisco clay guys. I was working in this cold studio to perfect a
<br>
teapot that wouldn't drip. Meanwhile, people out here were making
<br>
couches out of clay, ripping chunks off of a clay cube and firing them
<br>
as art pieces, just wacky stuff." Ultimately, in the summer of 1979,
<br>
Rhodes headed west in the pickup; his $1,500 life savings tucked in
<br>
his jeans, to study sculpture at the San Francisco Art Institute.
<br>
<p>
<p>
Henry, Rhodes's 2-year-old yellow Labrador, follows his master around
<br>
the shop, begging the guys who build shipping cartons to play
<br>
fetch-the-stick.
<br>
<p>
Rhodes proved himself even more inventive than the natives. At an art
<br>
show, he erected a 25-foot-long, 7-foothigh brick wall of
<br>
gunpowder-laced mortar; before a cheering crowd, he set the wall
<br>
ablaze, and the mortar lines erupted into a grid of hissing flame. He
<br>
also peppered the downtown streets with quirky guerrilla art: a
<br>
12-foot-tall clay man, a wedge that seemed to be toppling a building,
<br>
installed at night to amuse and befuddle morning commuters. "The
<br>
idea was that art shouldn't live in a gallery, where you pay to get in
and
<br>
see it and it's gone in a month," Rhodes says. "It should be
<br>
everywhere, where you least expect it."
<p>
In 1982, ensconced in a sixth-floor industrial space, he began
<br>
experimenting with concrete because the creations he dreamed about
<br>
would no longer fit in a kiln. "I wanted to make larger items-a giant pot,
<br>
a countertop, stuff that was too big to be fired," he says. "I wanted to
<br>
make something that was functional but something that would affect
<br>
the world."
<p>
Concrete proved far less forgiving than clay. "I had a huge problem with
<br>
warping and cracking. And it didn't always happen right away.
<br>
Sometimes I'd make something-it would be perfect for three months,
<br>
then crack down the middle. I smashed a lot of stuff out of frustration."
<br>
Advice was elusive. Concrete craft in those days was almost unknown.
<br>
"There were no books, no formulas," he says. "People I would ask
<br>
about it just thought I was weird."
<p>
He persisted, hanging drywall by day to support himself, carrying
<br>
94-pound bags of cement up five flights at night. Tinkering with
<br>
hundreds of formulas, he finally hit upon one that combined white
<br>
cement, water, sand, an expanded volcanic glass called perlite and an
<br>
additive he won't divulge. Rhodes is self-effacing but doesn't deny the
<br>
significance of his creation. "I actually forged a new material," he says.
<br>
Unlike normal concrete, his mixture was stiff enough to stand up
<br>
against the vertical walls of molds. He began making and selling huge,
<br>
hollow globes, cubes and cones that could serve as planters, benches,
<br>
tables or garden objects. "I realized that this stuff was almost
<br>
limitless," he says, scooping another baseball-sized dollop of concrete
<br>
from the wheelbarrow, this time for a paver. "I could make just about
<br>
anything you could make with wood."
<p>
In 1989, a designer specified Rhodes's veined concrete for a
<br>
96,000-square-foot San Francisco law office's secretarial cubes, floor
<br>
tiles and counters. Rhodes took a big gulp and bought a $25,000
<br>
concrete mixing machine, hired a couple of helpers and labored 12
<br>
hours a day, seven days a week for four months. "Since I was such a
<br>
tiny operation, the contractor took out a bond on me," he says. "He
<br>
kept saying I could never do it. And working for lawyers, man, I was
<br>
terrified." But the finished office-by turns sleek and textured, formidable
<br>
but approachable-won raves from local designers and interiors
<br>
magazine's award for best law-firm design.
<p>
Rhodes has been in perpetual motion since.
<p>
The reddening sun, visible through the loading-dock door, slides behind
<br>
the warehouses on the other side of Oakdale Avenue. Rhodes runs two
<br>
shifts to keep the shop humming-today he has worked both, as he
<br>
often does. Now, he shoves a sheet of plywood through a table saw,
<br>
over and over, slicing off 2-inch strips to serve as the sides of molds.
A
<br>
stratum of sawdust has settled over the dust and crusted concrete on
<br>
his blue coveralls. Without pausing, he strides quickly to one of the
<br>
shop's 32 casting tables and trowels a skim coat of dun-tinted
<br>
concrete on a dozen baseboard molding pieces. Then he cruises to
<br>
another table, snatches up a plastic bucket of acrylic sealer and
<br>
brushes it on a countertop to render the normally porous concrete
<br>
stain-resistant.
<p>
Although his motions are quick, he is always exacting. The yard in
<br>
back of this workshop is Rhodes's boneyard, stacked with benches,
<br>
globes and other works that were just a shade off in hue or that
<br>
developed nonstructural hairline cracks. He sells flawed work cheaply
<br>
to bargain hunters who stop in weekly. Sometimes, though, he can't
<br>
stand to let a bad piece out at all and smashes it on the trash heap.
<p>
"If it's not right, I obsess about it," he says.
<p>
He does wonder, sometimes, about this imperative to sculpt and
<br>
knead, to create and innovate and make something exquisite with his
<br>
hands. As an adopted child, he sometimes speculates that the urge is
<br>
genetic, welded to his DNA in a way his parents could never fathom.
<br>
"My father never 'got' it, that's for sure," Rhodes says softly. "It does
<br>
feel like it's in my blood." When Kenneth Rhodes died six years ago,
<br>
he and his son were estranged. The reasons are tangled, but Buddy's
<br>
rejection of his father's enterprises, out of allegiance to the craft of
<br>
concrete, was "certainly a big part of it," he says.
<p>
That gulf can't be closed now. And the work still beckons. Rhodes
<br>
gathers the strips he cut earlier and carries them to a drill press. He
<br>
begins to predrill each piece to make it easier to insert the screws
<br>
when he starts building another mold. All around him the second-shift
<br>
guys start packing up to go home.
<p>
<br>
<p>
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<br>
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© 1997-2000, Buddy Rhodes Studio, Inc. All Rights Reserved
<br>
2130 Oakdale Ave., San Francisco, CA 94124
<p>
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