Artist's Statement - Biography of Hershel Mutka Weiss

I can see the spires of the San Felipe Neri Catholic Church from my third story window. It's been in almost continuous use since 1706 on the plaza in Old Town, Albuquerque New Mexico. I live behind the museums in a cool new subsidized housing project called “The Sawmill Lofts”.

My workspace is three miles north, a quick flat bike ride up Rio Grande Boulevard. It’s in the corner of a converted army barracks, part of a synagogue called "Nahalat Shalom", which means ‘Inheritance of Peace”, or “River of Peace”. These buildings once belonged to the old Boulevard Baptist Church.

An oil painter and a potter have studios in the old barracks, right next to my woodshop. A wild pheasant and a roadrunner live in the field out our windows. The Rio Grande River is less than a mile away.

In my father’s way of talking, if you were a ‘good mechanic’ it meant you were a skilled worker. It applied to anyone who worked with their hands: cooks, taxi drivers, pipe fitters, dentists and surgeons.

His father was a tailor. He had few tools: a treadle sewing machine, calibrated heavy black cast irons, a pair of shears, a wooden yardstick. My father had a pair of cross-pein hammers whose heads he himself had cast, and rip, crosscut and coping saws and a brace and bits for drilling holes.

As a child, all these tools were holy. They held a promise and a fascination. Tools are ritual objects.

Wood is a material that is yielding but not malleable. Wood will have its way, shrinking and swelling through the seasons, constantly absorbing and shedding water. Each plank is unique as the tree it came from. Even within the same tree, each plank has its own distinct personality. From specie to specie the variations in color, graphics, density, and character are as vast as the differences between a person and a tiger.

As any artisan knows, practicing the craft polishes you. The greatest tool of all is the human hand, capable of the minutest perception, the most complex and fluid manipulations. Our hands are the most exquisite armatures.

My tools are sharp and clean and in order. The wood is a gift from nature. And skill is the rhythm in the treadle.