You won't meet a more creative or optimistic couple than artists Ed and Leah Tuter of Texas Creek, Colorado.
"I remember we sat down at the coffee table in the living room with pieces of paper on everything," Ed says recalling their initial experiments, and it was like, "Whoa, look at this. Wow! Look at this." It was fun actually. That was probably the most fun there ever was."
From those simple first creations in 1990, Ed and Leah have developed a thriving wholesale design and manufacturing company, Copper Gulch Design, featuring their beautifully sculpted art. Working with polymer clay, a relatively new art medium, they craft intricate landscape designs in forms of earrings, buttons, pins, and tiles. No two pieces of their handcrafted jewelry are ever exactly alike, and each one expresses their vision of an optimistic, sustainable future. This hope for harmony, for simplicity, is communicated through subtle blending, smooth lines, and the peaceful images and colors in their art.
"In the detail, they're incredibly complex," Leah explains. "I believe Ed's skill is to take the complexity of space and put it into something that is very simple and harmonious." Ed laughs, "Actually, there was an artist friend who said, 'You do well with chaos.' I've thought about it as actually being a chaotic interpreter."
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This world view is evidenced not only in their art, but in their chosen lifestyle. Living in the mountains, they've built a home and studio which is solar and wind powered.
"We're into this very optimistic sustainability. Not only of the environment, but mostly of the quality of life man should enjoy," says Ed. "You need to be practical about man's and the environment's future," Leah adds. "You can't take the environmental side of it without taking into account the human contribution."
Technology, they believe, is an essential part of that. For them, it means a lap-top computer and, as Ed emphasizes, lighting.
"Lighting is a key element, not only for artists using it to see their work by, but also for galleries who display the works. This goes all the way through the whole structure of art," he says.
A look at the complexity of designs and vivid color combinations they produce, and it's easy to understand the importance of light to them. For this, they use compact fluorescent bulbs which supply a constant, dependable daylight balance light for their studio.
They, with their (also exceptionally creative and intelligent) 12-year old daughter, Lena, balance diverse artistic, business, recreational, and personal lives into a harmonious atmosphere just as they create in their art. "That's another creative part of our lives," Leah explains, "how you create this whole thing so it works."
And work it does.
Ed sculpts the canes (a term for the 3-dimensional polymer clay blocks) by blending individual colors into 5" x 4" x 6" blocks which take about three days to create. One cane can make approximately 300-600 pieces of jewelry. Leah then spends about five hours reducing a cane's size through compressing it using body pressure. At ½" diameter, it's ready to be sliced or cut into jewelry and cured.
The result resembles porcelain or glass because polymer clay, though man-made, remarkably simulates many materials. Its fluid adhesive qualities mimic the behavior of molten glass for which this technique, called caneworking, was derived from European Renaissance glass makers. The beauty of Ed and Leah's art seems most appropriate for the New Renaissance of which they are a part.
"The feelings of space in a landscape is actually an abstract concept," says Ed. "It's an intuitive feeling; this combination of color and form. I have a real desire to bridge this unknown area. It's a figment I'm relaying. When the figment, the abstraction, works … it's delightful to me!"
The Tuters can be reached by telephoning Copper Gulch Design at (800) 942-4309 or by email cgdesign@ris.net
This
activity is supported by funding from the Colorado Council on the Arts, a
state agency funded by the Colorado General Assembly and the National
Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.
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