I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want my business to look like. Seems like there is a lot of noise out there. There are a lot of people doing a lot of good work and it all looks the same.

When I started doing this in 2012 the online leather working community was new. There were old hands who knew what they were doing but mostly it was people trying things out and learning together. Now it seems like the culture has become codified. There are best practices and jargon handshakes. You know what Tokonole is, right bro? It feels like this has lead to a lot of closed mindedness. That there is a best way to do things. Where ignorance is something to be embarrassed of. At best this leads to a community all following the same guidelines to make the same work. That’s never good for any creative community. I’m sure you’ve seen it in other creative arenas. Don’t know the best kind of ink roller/ distortion pedal/ microphone? Then you don’t belong there. Its just another form of gatrekeeping. I’m not really interested in being a part of it.

So I’ve been turning my attention to other types of work. I’ve gone back to my photography roots and produced a bunch of work that I’m not interesting in profiting off of. I’ve been experimenting with cyanotypes. It’s been satisfying to learn something I’m too ignorant of to hold myself to much of a standard. I’ve done a few that I then painted over with watercolor. I like them a lot but they are still to new to share. Maybe after I get a little more confident with them.

I’ve been shooting a weekly pinhole self portrait. If you aren’t familiar with pinhole photography you take a normal camera, but instead of having a lens on it you use a black card or tin with a tiny little pinhole in it. Believe it or not this works as the lens. You get these really soft almost painterly images. The camera takes 6-10 seconds to shoot the image. So even though I’m standing still I’m going to be a little blurry because I have to breathe and balance and stuff. The other thing is that the pinhole doesn’t give me enough light to see through the viewfinder on the camera. So I have to guess at what I’m taking a picture of.

All this to say that I think 2022 is going to be about a lot more than leather work at W&R. I’ll still be doing plenty of that, but there is a lot more that I want to explore with this business. I don’t see any good reason not to. When everyone is doing the same thing it is time to try something new.

State of the Studio