Obit watch: December 29, 2022.

Daniel Brush, who the NYT describes as a “boundary-defying artist”.

He had become an artist known — at first to a small group of cognoscenti, but gradually to a wider circle — for one-of-a-kind works defined by their detail and the devotion that went into them. His jewelry was often intended not so much to be worn as to be cherished. His small sculptures drew comparisons to Fabergé eggs for their delicacy and their small-scale artistry. He made works inspired by rituals of the Tendai Buddhist monks of Japan and works inspired by watching his son dip animal crackers into milk.

…

He had a morning ritual of sweeping the loft for several hours, “just as a Buddhist monk might sweep the temple ground in meditation,” The Times wrote in 2020. The loft held antique scissors, an 18th-century lathe and assorted other vintage objects and machines, a testament to Mr. Brush’s self-taught mastery of techniques like the aforementioned granulation — visitors who took a magnifying glass to some of his jewelry and other pieces saw that they were adorned with strings of grainlike bits of gold.
“What struck me in his work is his demanding nature and his ability to work gold, aluminum and steel with absolute precision,” Nicolas Bos, chief executive of Van Cleef & Arpels, the French jewelry company, wrote in the preface to the 2019 book “Daniel Brush: Jewels Sculpture.” “He claims to be a goldsmith, a jeweler and a metalworker, but I think, before everything, there’s a sort of magician within him.”

…

“I am available, and people can come and they can look, and every once in a while they come,” he said. “So what happened in the past 30 years is I became immensely famous to 10 people, and five died.”

I wasn’t familiar with Mr. Brush and his work until I read the obit. There are some photos in the obit, and I confess: his art impresses me.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 29th, 2022 at 9:20 am and is filed under Art, Obits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to “Obit watch: December 29, 2022.”

  1. pigpen51 says:
    December 29, 2022 at 3:53 pm

    I have a friend here retired from my work, who worked for a wire company before coming to work with my company. The wire company shut down and so he and another man came to work for us.
    The wire company made some extremely unique wire, for many things. They were so proud of the wire they made, once they made wire so thin, they mounted a length of it on 2 pegs, with a magnifying glass, covered with an acrylic cover to allow viewing. They then sent it to a Swiss company to show them just how proud they were of their work. The Swiss company sent it back to them, with a series of holes bored into it.
    I have always been impressed with people who have artistic talents. My son went on the road with a couple of buddies playing music, eventually landing in California. They actually played at the Whiskey a Go Go, once. He then went to San Luis Obispo, where he got a job with a jewelry company, making jewelry out of decommissioned nuclear materials. Just the copper cables that run from the control room to the actual missiles. Some of the things the made were simply gorgeous. They also tried to be environmentally friendly, with Al Gore at the time writing them an “attaboy”.
    The Peace Corp contracted with them to do a medallion to recognize the 50th anniversary of the Peace Corp. It was also a neat thing to do, and to be proud of.
    I always wished that I could draw, but I am left brained. I actually had a doctor ask me once which was my dominant hand. I told him that I am very strongly right handed. He said that he was as well. That is the only one that I ever met who was the same way. I could throw a baseball almost 300 feet in the air, but I could not throw it left handed hardly at all.