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Charles Mulford
1.1k Plays1 year ago
Charles Mulford is a sculptor based in New Jersey. He holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts and a BFA from Rutgers University, Mason Gross School of the Arts. His sculptures have been exhibited in the New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, NJ, the Attleboro Arts Museum, Attleboro, MA, the Bruton Museum, Somerset, UK, and The Center for Contemporary Art, Bedminster, NJ. Mulford apprenticed at the Seward Johnston Atelier, specializing in metal chasing and fabrication. His work is part of the special collection of the Vanderbilt University Library and Temple University Library.
Charles Mulford’s sculptures explore the complex emotions surrounding anxiety through the lens of humor. Cartoon figures, 3D-modeled objects, and scans of human heads act as vehicles for theatrical narratives. Mired in tragic circumstances, the characters express their feelings about illness and death. Exaggerate scenes capture a sense of unease, reflecting the stress and vulnerability of anxiety. The result is a visual representation of a tortuous and sometimes humorous world.
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:01
Speaker
you are listening to something rather than nothing. Creator and host Ken Vellante.
00:00:09
Speaker
Editor and producer, Peter Bauer.
Introduction to Charles Malford
00:00:16
Speaker
This is Ken Vellante with the Something Rather Than Nothing podcast, and I have Charles Malford, artist, sculptor, and reaching across the US from Oregon over to New Jersey. Welcome to the program, Charles.
Exploring Sculptures and Emotions
00:00:36
Speaker
Yeah, thanks for having me on. It's great to be here.
00:00:39
Speaker
Yeah, hey, I don't do this too often, Charles, but I'm gonna read a bit from, you know, your bio and give folks a little bit of background, because there's a couple pieces I really like. Charles Mulford's sculptures explored complex emotions surrounding anxiety through the lens of humor. Cartoon figures, 3D-modeled objects, and scans of human hands act as vehicles for theatrical fairness. Mired in tragic circumstances, the characters express their feelings about illness and death.
00:01:09
Speaker
Exaggerated scenes capture a sense of unease, reflecting the stress and vulnerability of anxiety. The result is a visual representation of a torturous and sometimes humorous world. I noticed, Charles, when I was looking before I had read any of the words about your stuff, the words I heard in the description, I was like kind of
00:01:32
Speaker
anxiety, these situations, trapped, sly humor, comic book, fantastical, all these words. And so it's really super to look at that and to really get the feel of the world that I was looking at. I kind of jumped
3D Printing and Artistic Evolution
00:01:53
Speaker
right in. But I know what I was looking at as far as the 3D sculptures,
00:02:01
Speaker
is newer in your development and I was reading a bit about that. I don't know anything about how you do that and pull that together. Tell us about this sculpture work. Sure. The 3D printing started during the pandemic and we had
00:02:25
Speaker
something like a toy 3D printer that was just kind of sitting around and not getting used. It was brand new. And I just thought maybe it's time to take this printer out and see what it can do. And so it was very small scale. And I started just learning the process of 3D printing. And I was making these.
00:02:52
Speaker
very simple flat figures. They were geometric in shape. And you can take an image like a JPEG and you can import it into the printer. And it will make like a cookie. It'll make the elevation of it taller than the drawing. And I thought, boy, what could I do with all these little flat characters that I had created? And about the same time,
00:03:20
Speaker
during the pandemic, all the galleries were closed down, but a number of them were having mail art exhibits where you actually mail, you know, you send your artwork through the mail to the gallery and then they have an exhibit and they were posting it online, all the images from the show. And so I thought, boy, this could be a good match where the figures would fit into an envelope.
00:03:50
Speaker
just your standard envelope and cut out a window and made it like a picture frame. And I would place the little characters inside and use that envelope as the work itself. So that's how they would exhibit it in the show. And that really started to take off where I was doing a pretty good amount of male art.
00:04:16
Speaker
having success with it and really enjoying it. And as I made more pieces, I started to learn more about 3D printing.
Learning and Influences
00:04:26
Speaker
And I realized, boy, I really have to move on from this tiny little printer that only makes pieces that are like four by four inches to something a little bit more upscale and professional. So I eventually went and
00:04:44
Speaker
bought a decent 3D printer and started to explore what I could do with this as a sculptor. And I was also working with 3D modeling. So there were just a number of modeling programs where it's a very long process to learn how to draw three-dimensionally with 3D modeling, and you can get
00:05:11
Speaker
very in-depth with it. So I mean, I started that journey. And I also started to scan my own 3D objects with my phone. And I was bringing these things all together and trying to make sculpture out of them and see what I could do with it. It was quite a journey. Yeah. Thanks for digging in there.
00:05:39
Speaker
talking about the development and I really enjoyed hearing that distinct piece about sending the art in and just that in the time of trying to get your art out there of course I did a lot of interviews during the pandemic and such but I hadn't heard about that particular
00:05:56
Speaker
Uh, peace. So it's great. It was really great to hear, uh, Charles. So for you to talk about in general with, uh, being an artist, um, was there a point in your life? I talked to a lot of people, uh, was there a point in, in, in your life where you're like, there was that click in, in you were an artist or what, what was that?
00:06:21
Speaker
Yeah, there was. I mean, it really started out with my father and he was an engineer. And he was a guy who had this kind of do it yourself attitude, where he was always building and repairing things. And, you know, he taught me a lot of that. He taught me how to use power tools. And we had a basement workshop and we were always doing repairs together.
00:06:49
Speaker
And it was a great environment to really raise a sculptor because I can remember going down to the basement and looking at all the tools in the workshop on the wall and, you know, the supply of scrap metal and thinking, what, what could I make? You know, what can I do with, with these tools and these materials?
Teaching and Finding Inspiration
00:07:12
Speaker
And at that young age, I really didn't know what to do, but there were two, there were two times that I remember, um, before I was really a sculptor that I look back and I'm like, boy, you were making sculpture at a pretty young age. And, uh, the, one of them was I built in grammar school, I built a robot and it was pretty much like a six foot tall stick figure.
00:07:39
Speaker
And in the house behind ours where we had, there was a, our neighbor had a barn and next to the barn was a scrap pile of plywood. And it was just cast off stuff, all these rectangles. And I can remember going back there and just collecting all of this wood, bringing it into my backyard. I ran into the basement and I got a can of nails and a hammer.
00:08:08
Speaker
And I just went to town on it. I started nailing this thing together. And I knew right away, I'm like, yeah, this thing could really be a quite sizable robot. And let's see what we can do. And so I got it to stand up. I propped it against a tree. I nailed in a smiley face, little mouth of nails, and some nail eyes on it. And it was really one of the first times that
00:08:37
Speaker
I got real satisfaction out of building anything that I had done completely on my own. Yeah. And I'm like, well, this is quite, quite an accomplishment. And so, um, yeah, that was like created, just in drummed it up into existence. Yeah. That was really like an early, an early memory where I just had the joy of building something.
00:09:02
Speaker
Let me ask you this question. I don't know for myself whether I've sculpted something or deliberately sculpted something. I'm an art appreciator. I'm fascinated, particularly by what I don't understand and don't know. It's not like I don't have any contact with sculpture.
00:09:25
Speaker
In the doing, can you tell me just as like a simple, with you as a teacher, simple, basic type of thing of you take somebody like me who hasn't done a sculpture, what's like a really basic activity to have your mind move in that type of way?
00:09:46
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I would wreck as a teacher, I mean, I've been a teacher for a very long time, I would recommend to my students to look at other art and find some other art that they really love. And then not quite copy it, but get some inspiration to try something similar. And then the next step after that,
00:10:10
Speaker
After you've tried that a few times, you might want to think of, is there a material or a medium that you're really attracted to? Or is there some kind of idea that you really feel compelled to share?
00:10:28
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Now, as far as the material, one of the things I think is even with the tactile, what maybe what you like to feel in your hands or, you know, use. So I appreciate that because for me, it's that elementary, the question that I that I wanted to ask. Yeah. Right. Right. And there's some people who are just attracted
00:10:50
Speaker
to different mediums, whether it's some ceramics or working in wood, or for me, it started out with photography. That's how that was the first thing I tried in college. And then it led to working in steel and welding and casting metal. So, you know, it can be
00:11:17
Speaker
It can be a long path to find out what your true interest is in the arts. You've got to try everything. You've got to see what works for you.
00:11:29
Speaker
One of the things that I found, I had interviewed a sculptor, Christopher St. John, and for me, it's all seemed fantastical and new, but there's this really strong connection to kind of like emerging animalistic energy in the ceramics where maybe I'd exposed a lot more to more forms or steel, that type of thing.
Art as Communication
00:11:55
Speaker
This was like, it just kind of transformed my thinking of what it is and how these objects had like a life unto themselves. These animals had a life unto themselves, like really kind of dropped into it. Charles, one of the big questions, what is art? What is art? Yeah, this, you know, I've been thinking about this and I'm going to
00:12:24
Speaker
come at this from a personal point of view. For me, what art is, it's really, especially in the last couple of years, it's just a form of communication. So with the 3D printed work, I really had ideas that I wanted to express visually that I just didn't think I could with words. It was just something that I couldn't speak about
00:12:53
Speaker
And I didn't feel comfortable sharing verbally, but I could get those same ideas out through the figurative sculpture. And I really wanted to tell a story. I wanted to have a scene and some type of narrative. And I wanted to make a connection with the viewer in a way to say, have you ever felt like,
00:13:21
Speaker
this, or can you relate to this idea in any way? And I've had some interesting feedback where some other artists have said, even the simplest thing, were looking at one of the pieces and said, I've felt like that too. I've been in that situation, or I've had those same feelings. And so that felt really good.
00:13:51
Speaker
There was a, and I wanna talk about this just to get into the specifics of your work. That was the piece when I was looking, there was an absolute immediacy to the feeling, to the feeling. And it wasn't what I saw that I was like super familiar with, like looking at the face or whether it was like the shape of the face or the, it wasn't like I know that person or anything, it was capturing
00:14:18
Speaker
Like, oh yeah, that's me stuck in the office and it's two and a half hours and I can't, you know, like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like that in art, when that, you know, I think of painting, I'm very sensitive to painting. Sometimes painting has that where I'm like, ah, it's right there. That's exactly it. And that was the piece, that was what, in seeing you works, was that immediacy to the feeling. I got it and then I'll just enjoy it from that point on.
00:14:46
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, that reminds me of one of the earliest truly three-dimensional sculptures I did was called Stuck in a Foot. And it's a scan of a person's actual foot, a 3D scan of it. And then it's got a cartoon figure that's kind of stuck inside the heel of it.
00:15:13
Speaker
This was a time where I was kind of collecting 3D scans of objects. And I wasn't quite sure what to do with them. And I was also at the same time modeling these cartoon figures. And it really came together where I wanted to convey this feeling of entrapment. So I just literally took the figure and stuck him inside the foot like he's trapped there.
Storytelling Through Sculpture
00:15:43
Speaker
And so that was a theme of some of the earlier pieces, combining scanned objects with the model figures. It mentioned the word. I had seen the word in the description, i.e. comic book or that. Yeah. Not just to finish.
00:16:05
Speaker
I'm a huge, I adore comic books. And I saw that in there immediately, but I thought about this last night. I couldn't quite get at why that word, why that sensibility, why I felt that. Talk about that piece of it, what's in there. Yeah, sure. The comic books were a big thing for me when I was a teenager. And I think that's where all the cartoon figures come from.
00:16:35
Speaker
I just had a true I think it was some of my earliest art exposure was through comics comic books as well and so that's That's where I trace back the cartoon figures and also the idea that I wanted to tell a story and so I thought these these little cartoon guys would be well suited to tell all different types of stories to create a complete world of
00:17:04
Speaker
where they could really express any ideas that I had at the moment, anything that I really wanted to get out. And yeah, I always go back to that. The comic books were definitely, I think, the basis for a lot of that, a lot of the way I think about storytelling and figurative artworks.
00:17:32
Speaker
Yeah. And the, there's even the corporation of objects. I would see like, uh, Pez and the type of, um, um, you know, medicine, uh, prescription, like just embedded in, in there as well. You know, what's the malady? What's the cure? Yeah. Yeah. The Pez that's actually a very recent piece I did, uh, it's called pill dispenser and it's a scan.
Photography's Influence on 3D Art
00:17:58
Speaker
That's an actual PES dispenser, so it's a scan of the container of the candy. And then the head, it's just got a human head stuffed on top of it. That was all modeled. And the same thing with the pills. It's got a pill shoved in the mouth of the head, and it's got some extra pills on the sides.
00:18:23
Speaker
Yeah, I'm trying to have the pieces have a little punch to them to have a little impact. And it's worked out where I continue to combine these different scan things that I find around and then with a lot of different modeling incorporated into that. And that there's the story right away. It's about somebody who
00:18:49
Speaker
It looks like they're almost made up of medicine. Like they're made, their whole body is just made up of pills and that's what's keeping them going. Yeah. Yeah. It's very concise. I mean, it's, it's very, it's very concise and that's one of the, it's, um,
00:19:09
Speaker
It's a trapped world. It's a scene. I would even see in some of those that when you mentioned photography and starting out with that, because some of these, particularly of a scene, I think maybe of a cell prison, it's a snapshot. It's a picture in a particular way. So when you said that, I was like, oh, I was able to see the framing. Yeah.
00:19:31
Speaker
in what you do. Yeah, that's a very good point. I like that idea that you said it's a snapshot because it really is just trying to capture that moment. And I spent a long time doing photography. I went all through film photography and printing in black and white and color and having my own dark room. And this 3D printing, it really reminds me of photography in the sense that
00:20:01
Speaker
You can do it at home. You can set up a space just like a dark room where you have your 3D printers and you can model the figures on a computer or even an iPad. And it just has a similar feel to it. It really works in the same way.
00:20:23
Speaker
In looking at just a little bit more in the photo, and looking at the photo, say there's a basis of what you're using from a photo, and that connected to the 3D, the main thing I would think of right off the bat is
00:20:41
Speaker
the creation of worlds with 3D. I would want to see that bigger, see that in this little piece or a totem in real life that comes from the photography. Do you ever see that type of connection and have that type of attraction to have the photo come out through the 3D?
00:21:08
Speaker
Technology is getting to the point where you can actually pull things out of photographs, make them three dimensional, and then make them into 3D prints. Another aspect of the photography that is similar to 3D printing is the scanning is just like a three dimensional photo. So that idea of grabbing and capturing objects, like you can take your
00:21:37
Speaker
phone and just with an inexpensive app, you can scan a water bottle, a pair of glasses, anything that's in your environment, you can scan it and you can incorporate it into a piece, something that I'm working on. To me, that was very similar to photography where I'm looking around for subject matter.
00:22:04
Speaker
And it's almost like one step further where you're actually recreating the object that you're photographing.
00:22:21
Speaker
these things can come to be in that way. One more bit on photography with your deep interest. I have a strong interest in photography over time. For you, maybe this is the influence question. For you, the photographers that influence you that just stand out. These are the photographers.
00:22:44
Speaker
who are those folks oh yeah yeah it's been many years since i've done photography or so it's a good question then it's a good question you know one of my very favorite photographers was um ralph eugene meat yard i don't know if you know him but
00:23:01
Speaker
Stop right there. Stop right there. That is the reason why I asked this question. I'm going to stop right there. We don't know each other. We're just interviewing right now. And the reason I asked that question was to see if if you see Ralph Eugene. And I've heard his name pronounced Meat Yard, but I've also said Metroid. And I don't know if it sounds pretentious, but that's who we're talking about. Tell me what you think.
00:23:25
Speaker
So he was like a Southern Gothic photographer and he used to take all these pictures in very dilapidated settings, whether it was in a house or in a yard. And many times he would use his kids as the model in the photo and they would wear these masks. And he was interested in
00:23:51
Speaker
the blurred image so you'd have lots of masks that had blurred faces with them. He had created some really compelling work and he was very inspirational to me when I first started and I was learning black and white photography.
00:24:12
Speaker
Yeah, wow, it's exciting. One of the things for me as a thinker that I didn't know but I found out much later was that he was friends, very close friends with Father Thomas Merton, a Franciscan monk in kind of like a
00:24:32
Speaker
Do you know much about Merton, Thomas Merton? Just quickly for folks and everybody, Thomas Merton was a Franciscan monk, a very atypical, idiosyncratic, think-punk monk. And he was an extremely deeply lived experience in understanding of Christianity and compassion. He also had a
00:25:00
Speaker
very deep understanding and practice of Buddhism and in particular Zen Buddhism. And I can't do Thomas Merton justice, but it's been a very influential figure for me because of being idiosyncratic, being spiritually seeking, but informed in different atypical ways.
00:25:24
Speaker
They were close friends and they used to hang out over there in the hills of Kentucky and I've done I got to read more about this You know, I did some basics and learned about it But if there's one relationship and one story I would want to know all the details about because it just it's just connecting two central figures in my thinking it is their close friendship, uh metronome
Art's Purpose and Personal Growth
00:25:49
Speaker
and thomas mertens so just absolutely fascinating to me and it's an example that that would be his buddy they can tell you thomas mertens you don't expect your local monk to be into that photography let's say right right yeah that's great we have that in common uh wonderful wonderful uh great great to be able to to chat about photography we're talking about our and um i think
00:26:16
Speaker
Uh, not to repeat it, but, uh, one of the questions asked is, is, is the role of art. And I heard the term communication from you around that. Um, do you relate it to that question with the role of art? Do you think the role of art through, you know, human history has been the same or do you think that, uh, the situation now, however you may define it has changed the role of art?
00:26:48
Speaker
I'm not so sure about that. I think things are so up in the air right now and that you could actually do anything you really want. And I'm not sure how valuable criticism is, our criticism is at the moment. So I'm not quite sure how I would approach that.
00:27:12
Speaker
I can talk about this from a personal point of view, like what the role of art is for me. It really gave me a sense of purpose in life. I really wasn't sure what to do. In your 20s, you're not quite sure what you're going to do with your life. I had a true love of art, and through teaching, I was able to share that.
00:27:43
Speaker
And there were just moments over the years where I thought you could see in someone's eyes when I was teaching them how to make a piece or work on a project where there's that moment where something just clicks and they get it and they do two things. They think I can do this.
00:28:08
Speaker
This is something I can do. This is something I can do well. And it's a spark. You can really see it. It opens them up to something new. And I've also, I mean, I taught for 27 years, studio art classes and art history. And I know over the course of that time, I've had a positive influence on the
00:28:37
Speaker
lives of some some of my students and and there's a real satisfaction in that that you know Just that I could share with them something I love and and kind of pass it on and so now that they also love it yeah, I uh I I love the power and then I love that like that when you're talking about the moment too because that's really what you know philosophy and kind of like the program tries to get at is like how do you how do you explain how you explain the
00:29:06
Speaker
the moment or the feeling or what you're sensitive to, for me in general, a painting that does that. How am I crippled temporarily or why when I see a particular painting,
00:29:27
Speaker
I take whatever the limits are of the gallery and I push myself up to the absolute limits to be able to see as close every single detail that's going on without being a creep, without, you know, rate up your limits to like get in and see that. Yeah, that's how you look at it, right? That's how you look at it. That's how you look at it. That's how you see it.
00:29:52
Speaker
It's so funny because the behavior is automatic. And I wonder about the magic of the one that I see from across the gallery. I'm like, and going right in and then doing it with that. Like, you know, in the background, the question is why exactly that one, but it doesn't matter. And it does. Yeah. The one that draws you in. Certainly.
00:30:13
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Super talking about art and I wanted to take advantage of just kind of like in asking the question too about art. One of the things that I've thought about for myself and you know I'm creating the art and philosophy podcast shows increasingly popular and have all these wonderful artists in this but
00:30:37
Speaker
What I find amazing or different about my history in relation to this is I've always had just a deep interest in art, but I never
00:30:49
Speaker
developed it in any particular way over time until I did and concentrated on it. So for me in the art experience or talking to folks or being in the scene or whatever's going on with art is all recent in my life. I'm 51 now is really the last five years of being an active participant in actively creating and showing.
00:31:13
Speaker
And I never took art history courses. My entire knowledge is self-studied and in conversation. So I found it really fascinating to kind of go into the river where I am right there and not have industry stuff, not have all these hang-ups about it and just to kind of jump in.
00:31:43
Speaker
When you're working with students who are coming in and exploring the art, how many folks are really truly trying to find their place in art as an artist? Like how many? Yeah. Yeah, that's difficult to say. You know, they're there.
00:32:13
Speaker
whatever the course, whatever the studio course is, if you think about undergraduate students, even if it's an elective, that these students are there, they're there for a reason. They might not even know exactly why they took that course, but there was interest enough to be there in that seat. And I think it's important that they may discover something about themselves
00:32:44
Speaker
just through the journey of participating. Being in the right spot. Yeah. And so you say, well, from an outsider's point of view, I'm not exactly sure what's going on in the student's mind over the course of a semester.
Transformative Art Experiences
00:33:03
Speaker
But what I'm hoping for is that there is some type of self-discovery
00:33:09
Speaker
and that they become more interested in the subject matter and they become more familiar with art history. And it's also helpful that if you're familiar with whatever the materials are, that that can also make you better at viewing art, right? Like if you do
00:33:35
Speaker
If you work with clay a little and you know the process of creating something in clay, then when you go to look in an exhibit and it has ceramics, you have a little more insight into that type of artwork.
00:33:53
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I get excited about the process or thinking about the process of art. I did have one pivotal class. And many years ago when I was an undergraduate at the University of Rhode Island with Dr. Cheryl Foster is one of the most influential people my entire life. I didn't know why, but I popped into a philosophy art class because she was teaching it honestly. And she said philosophy of rocks, I would have been there as well. Right.
00:34:23
Speaker
I'll tell you how I got into art in a deep way and knew I could just jump all the way in. The class started with three particular fascinating things. First of all, she started the class, first class, played the Sex Pistols, Anarchy in the UK, and danced to it. Wow. That's great. Welcome to class. When we got into film study, we wanted to go into deep study
00:34:49
Speaker
of very particular films and they were completely disconnected. And it was Silence of the Lambs and Saturday Night Fever. So what's the connection? One of the things we studied with Saturday Night Fever was
00:35:07
Speaker
What's high art at the time, massive tragedy, disco story at the time, but removed outside of that, it's high camp. It's intention in their disco, disco is life.
00:35:26
Speaker
love, be doing what you want to do. Disco goes away and camp. And the other piece was we did Silence of the Lambs. It's kind of like a launching pad at the time. It was best movie of the year. It's fantastic. How does a horror movie win?
00:35:42
Speaker
Best Picture, Jonathan Demme, we go into a deep study of that. And we just kind of was studying kind of like the idea of horror and just using something that was very contemporary and maybe anticipating the questions of
00:35:58
Speaker
the durability of, say, The Silence of the Lambs. And so Sex Pistols, Saturday Night Fever, and Silence of the Lambs by Jonathan Demme. And that's how it started. And then I knew in art, I'm like, once that was my intro to kind of formal, high-level education of the dual philosophy of art, I'm like, oh, shit. It's all open. Yeah.
00:36:25
Speaker
That's amazing. I mean, that was your, you had that moment, right? And I had something similar. I could tell you a little story about it. This was in undergraduate school at Rutgers University. And it was when I was moving from studying photography over to sculpture and they had a very large
00:36:53
Speaker
metal shop and they also had a foundry for casting metal. And I had a professor there I worked with, his name was Melvin Edwards, and he was the best role model day to day on how to be an artist. And the days that he wasn't teaching his class, he would come in, pull his sculpture out of his car,
00:37:21
Speaker
go over to the metal shop, do a little welding on it, go over to the forge, heat it up, bend some metal, incorporate that back into the piece. We would sit and we'd work at the forge together. It was just a great example at that time, how to be an artist on a daily basis. For me, I had no idea what to do.
00:37:51
Speaker
And it was just something in the back of my mind. And I'm like, here is someone who's doing this. And he's just showing you how it's done. And it was one of the best experiences I've ever had.
00:38:09
Speaker
that that transformative that moment and That's why that's why I love talking about this. That's why it's great to talk about like cuz it's like that's where the jazz that's where the jazz is All right, uh Really tough question then an easier one really tough
Challenges and Inspirations
00:38:28
Speaker
question. Why is there something rather than nothing? Charles Mulford. Yeah. Yeah this is
00:38:37
Speaker
something I really thought about. And then if you take it from the point of view of an artist that, um, it made me think of graduate school and the first, I guess it was like the first week of graduate school, we were assigned studio spaces and they're like these, uh, little rooms, they're completely empty, all white walls.
00:39:02
Speaker
There's just nothing there. You'd get a folding table and chairs. You'd sit in there and you have to figure out what to do. What am I gonna do? What am I gonna make? And you really do start from nothing. And so for me, I thought, you know, you've gotta create your own world and you have to try something before you get stuck.
00:39:29
Speaker
Before you're frozen, you've got to try something at all. For me, it always came from the materials and I started experimenting with materials. I try to improvise. I was always someone who I would try to take advantage of mistakes or anything that would come along. I would say maybe this is an avenue that I can work.
00:40:00
Speaker
The process of being an artist really goes from you've got to figure out what you're going to do. And for some people, that may be a little bit easier because they can latch onto a medium that has a familiar course. But for me as a sculptor, I was just always thinking
00:40:27
Speaker
I'll go back to the material and I'll start from there and we'll see what can I do with this and whether it was working with rubber and sewing or welding metal. That was always a jumping off point into an idea.
00:40:51
Speaker
and the idea would come after the material. And it was the same thing with the 3D printing. The ideas came later. It was a bit of, how does this technology work? How can I use this printer and this 3D modeling? And what can I do with it? And once I realized the potential of it,
00:41:14
Speaker
then the ideas started to flow, and I started to get into it a little bit deeper. So yeah, I think that's really the process of being an artist, that you start whether it's with the blank page or an empty room, and then you have to figure out for yourself what you're going to do.
00:41:35
Speaker
I really like, I really like your, uh, description and, you know, I mean, maybe like that. And that the insurance of like the whole journey, not in a cliche cliche sense, but a whole like, uh, discovering, um, one more particular question to that too. Um, in those points within that, right? Um, it can be difficult work, soul searching work. What do you do when, um,
00:42:02
Speaker
What do you do when you feel like too frustrated in that? What do folks do? What do you do? Yeah. My advice would be to take a break. And there's always, for me, there's a point where you go for new input, right? So you go for other inspiration. And whether that's looking at doing art or going for a bicycle ride,
00:42:29
Speaker
It's just doing something else, some other activities, and then coming back to it. Sometimes when you're in the studio, you just can sit there and daydreaming, stare out the window, and you wait for something to come with
00:42:52
Speaker
to come to you. And if it doesn't come to you, then you just start working anyway. And through the process of working, you're hopeful that you'll come up with something new. And so that's, that's the way I go about it. Yeah. I, um, I, I appreciate that too. And there's somewhere around this question that we're talking about that I've tried to, uh,
00:43:18
Speaker
personally, I've tried to think at a dow of the situation of what's going on there and in that obstruction obstacle to go through and you're in a new better land or not. And, you know, it's like, to keep being like, well, if I didn't do these things, then
00:43:35
Speaker
that road would have never been there. So it's still, it's tough though. And it's tough and it's frustrating. Charles, I want folks to, you know, obviously see your work and it's been great to talk about folks. Those are the things I'm describing in my reaction to you, see it in person, which I haven't done, but see images of. But Charles, where do listeners go to, you know, get into contact with the, you know, your work?
00:44:02
Speaker
Sure, well my website is charlesmulford.com and that last name spelled M-U-L-F-O-R-D and then I'm on Instagram as well, that's just Charles Mulford and I currently have a show at Five Points Art Center which is in Connecticut and you can get all the details about the show on my website.
00:44:27
Speaker
Good, good, good, good on that. Good for you. I saw, I did notice in some of the places where your work was listed as a place I live right next to, was over there in Attleboro, Massachusetts. And I lived just a few minutes down the road across the border in Rhode Island at that time. So it was really kind of cool to see that and be like, oh, that's cool. And very glad to represent Rutgers or Rutgers.
00:44:55
Speaker
It depends, you know, wherever you are. And getting, reaching you over there in Jersey from the woods of Oregon. I gotta tell you, Charles, I mean, I reached out to you in checking with you. It's great to have this conversation to be able to allow me, like myself, in conversation to think,
00:45:19
Speaker
know more deeply about
Where to Find Malford's Work
00:45:20
Speaker
this. We will do research and follow-up. I got to put something in the show notes about Ralph Eugene Meachard. Ralph Eugene Meachard will both admit that our lack of dispositive knowledge on this, but also I'm going to investigate or see what might be available for listeners. I mean, that's something I'm fascinated about, of how these
00:45:45
Speaker
two guys were so close. And the combination of elements is just so glorious to think about how there was within that. And with Ralph Eugene, the famous work, I believe, is the family album of Lucy Bell Crater. And there's some, I have a small collection of different type of
00:46:12
Speaker
They're not the easiest to find, but you can find them. Collections and volumes and reprintings that have been done of that great work, but definitely drop into some of that. So great to chat with you and really hope to keep in touch and in particular for me to be able to see at some point your work in person and to get as close as I'm allowed to it.
00:46:42
Speaker
Well, it's been great to meet you and talk with you. I had a great time and I hope we can do it again sometime. Absolutely, Charles. All right. This is something rather than nothing.
00:47:07
Speaker
The proper pronunciation for the famous Kentucky photographer discussed in this episode is Ralph Eugene Meachyard.