There is reverence that happens
Over the flame
for the food
my body
the love of my materials

Connection.

Stone
Earth
Plant

Stirring

The attention it calls
feels like
a deep grounded bond
to activate
to infuse

In alchemy
The peacock phase
a rainbow
the transformation

Into purification

Releases a nourishment
in that
provided through mixing

Over a flame.

A pile of flour on the counter. Her hand hollowing the center of it, a well for the egg. Salt. The egg cracked straight into. A handful of grated Parmesan. Ricotta. And then her hands moving in from the edges, a mess, folding the flour into the egg a little at a time, the well disappearing, the ingredients becoming a dough. Gnocchi.

Soft under her palms, then under mine, the dough rolling into threads, something you could work. Cut into pieces. The fork held just so, her thumb pressing and dragging in one motion, a small practiced flick at the end - rolling each piece down its tines to catch the ridges - hers quick and even, mine slow and lumpy. Gnocchi.

Sometimes ravioli, sometimes empanadas, we pinched the dough to close one at a time, an assembly line. Nobody timed. Nobody wrote it down. The recipe lived in her hands, and for a few hours at a time, in mine.

On the stove behind her, is simmering.

Tomatoes cook down slowly, hours with the whole house smelling like her “salsa” (sauce). Oregano crushed between her fingers before it went in. Garlic. Olive oil poured without measuring, by the sound of it hitting the pan. The acidity of it in the back of my nose, sharp before it turned sweet. The low bubble and hiss of the pot, a sound I could pick out of a crowded kitchen. A splash of dry sherry … her secret.

When I was home with her, we were always in the kitchen. Cooking. This was simply how we lived.

Food, in her hands, always came with family. Curiosity. Taste. You did not eat alone in her house. You did not eat all at once. You sat. You passed around the table. You stayed. Talking.

I did not know, then, that I was being given a language.

She could not have known what she was planting. I was a child at her elbow, not yet someone who would grow up to love this - the standing, the stirring, the improvising. She gave it to me before I had any use for it. It waited in me for years before I understood what I’d been given.

I know it now. On the days when I felt lost, I have tried many ways back. Only one has never failed me.

I start something in a pot. Tomatoes, if I want her close.

It is not eating. It is the making, standing over heat, my hands moving before my thoughts catch up, the small trust it takes to add before you’re sure, to taste before you’re ready, to let something become itself instead of forcing it. Somewhere in that space, I find her again. Not a memory of her. Her close, her present, in the room with me. The way she was when I was young enough to think this was simply what love looked like.

Later in life, far from any kitchen, I have stood over different fire. Grinding, calcining, watching raw earth give itself over to flame and come back as something else entirely. Cobalt into glass. Stone into color. Plant into dye. I was not looking for chemistry. I was reaching for something older, the artisan’s way of knowing, the kind that lives in hands and repetition long before it lives in language. The bones of old recipes, not the equations, the bones of making.

I watched glass change. Glowing orange, then red, then a deeper red, then purple, then midnight blue, and finally, slowly, a rich, bright cobalt. Something sparked in me that I still can’t name.

But I knew this waiting. I knew the same patience underneath it. The same standing over something too slow to rush, the same watching for the moment when change happens. My hands knew what to do before I did, because they had done this before, at her elbow, with a wooden spoon instead of a muller.

I found her anyway.

Because underneath every recipe I broke apart - culinary or alchemical, hers or some long-dead master’s - was the same secret. Nothing new is made by staying separate. Something has to be willing to be undone first, held over heat, trusted to become, rather than controlled into becoming.

I recognize the trust instead of understanding the chemistry. I had learned it years earlier, at a counter dusted in flour, from a woman who never once called what she was doing a lesson.

When I stop thinking and start mixing, something in me opens that stays closed the rest of the time. There is a particular spiral the spoon makes, again and again, the same slow circle, and somewhere inside that circling my own mind stops. The same something that opened at her side over the salsa, the gnocchi, the ravioli, the empanadas pinched shut with our four hands. The same something that opened over the cobalt fire. The same something that opens, still, every time I stand over heat and let a thing become what it wants to be.

I am not cooking to remember her.

I am mixing because some part of her is still the one stirring in me.

My studio has been quieter these past few months. Slower than I would like, if I am being honest. The kind of slow that carries its own weight, not stagnant, but accumulating. There is something moving beneath the surface, and it has been asking for patience I have had to learn how to give.

What I can tell you now what began as an idea in 2020 as a virtual exhibition has become something I could not have anticipated. It has become a printed publication. And it is finding its final form.

Artist Epistemology, Volume 1 will debut as the founding publication of thrift, the art journal. The website is forthcoming.

I think of it less as a book in the conventional sense and more as an exhibition in print, a piece of artwork on its own. You can hold it in your hands, return to it, annotate it, pass it across a table. I describe it as a recipe book. Not for cooking, but for a way of living and making that has existed across all cultures and centuries.

The collection brings together essays on fifteen artists, spanning from the 1580s to the present day. Twelve are written by me; three are contributed by Susan Harris, creative director of thrift. Some you may know. Others have been waiting in the margins of history, patient as compost. These are the artists I know most intimately, rooted in my own research, my own experience, my own formation. There are many more. That is precisely why this is Volume 1. What draws them together is not medium, not geography, not era, it is a practice. A sensibility. A way of moving through the world that I have come to understand as the very definition of thrift: to manage, to respect, and to make full use of the precious resources given by nature.

To thrive through thrift. Not austerity. Not scarcity. But something closer to attentiveness, a devotion to what is already here.

This publication has grown out of my work as a design historian and specialist in what the historian Pamela Smith, in her book The Body of the Artisan (2004), called artisan epistemology — the knowledge that lives in the hands, in the body, in the act of making itself. It is a kind of knowing that resists being fully captured in text, and yet here I am. Fifteen essays, fifteen lives, fifteen ways of demonstrating that the practice of making and the practice of living have never been separate things.

My thinking has been deeply shaped, too, by the historian Simon Werrett’s Thrifty Science: Making the Most of Materials in the History of Experiment (2019), which traces how thrift — far from being a virtue of poverty — has been a sophisticated intellectual and material practice threading through scientific and artistic culture for centuries. I have had the privilege of conversations with Werrett about this very convergence that the core practice of thrift is the practice of being an artist. To be genuinely attentive to material. To reuse waste not from scarcity but from care. To understand that what you are given by land, by light, by inheritance, by accident is a gift.

Those of you who have read my first Substack, Why Thrift?, recognize the roots of this publication in something closer to home in how I was formed.

I was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, inside a culture that carries this practice in its marrow. The back-to-landers. The woodbutchers. The Beats. The funk artists. The Bay Area’s extraordinary ecosystem of fiber and textile arts, affectionately known as its own Vatican City. What drew me, even as a child, was not any particular ideology but something older and quieter underneath it all. A genuine hunger to learn from heritage craft traditions, from indigenous relationships with material and land, from the knowledge systems that had always understood making as a form of stewardship. As a first-generation American, this world strengthened what I already carried, a living connection to my two heritages, and the understanding that thrift was never foreign to me. It was home.

What research gave me was the full length of that lineage. The mid-twentieth century subculture I grew up near was not inventing something new. It was honoring, celebrating, and embodying something ancient. And the artists who have most fascinated me in writing this publication reach back much further. The historical artists in this publication range from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth, four from the mid-twentieth century whose practices laid the very groundwork for the movements I grew up beside, and nine contemporary artists based in the United Kingdom, all of whom are living proof that this thread has never broken. Artists who never needed to rediscover these ways of making because they had never lost them. Who simply lived, and made, in the fullness of what was given to them.

That is the conversation I am most interested in. Not thrift as a movement, but thrift as a thread. One that runs through all cultures, all centuries, and belongs to no single one of them. This is a publication for everyone who has ever felt that the way we make things and the way we care for the world are, finally, the same.

So here is why my studio has been slower.

Because I have been writing. Passionately, carefully, sometimes discouraged and always with the particular pleasure of discovering a new voice. Writing, for me, has been a lifelong challenge. I am dyslexic. It has become another form of making. Another practice. Another way of paying attention to what is already here and asking what it might become. As Martina Margetts said to me once “writing is a craft of its own.”

The full announcement will follow in the coming months. What I will say here is simply something is coming. Something I have been tending since 2020, in the way you tend anything worth keeping… slowly, with attention, and with the faith that what you are building will eventually tell you what it is.

thrift, the art journal, begins here.

More soon.

Eva-Maria Spampinato, the Historical Artist

What is it to make a self portrait?

For some, the answer is practical. A model is not always available. The self becomes the most immediate subject at hand, ever present, ever waiting.

But there is another reason. One less spoken about.

To paint another person is an act of intimacy. The long hours of looking. The slow accumulation of knowing, how light finds a particular cheekbone, the way a mouth holds its silence. It is quiet. Something passes between painter and subject in that time.

A trust.

A tenderness.

A connection.

And yet there is a boundary that observation alone cannot cross.

Your own face offers no such distance. It looks back. It knows everything you have not yet allowed yourself to see. It has been waiting, perhaps longer than you realized. What it holds is something only you can know from within.

I have spent years in devoted study of the human figure. Drawing. Sculpture. The body as architecture,

as weight,

as life.

These lessons do not end. But portraiture, I confess, I ran from it long ago. Something in its closeness unsettled me. The requirement not just to observe, but to be seen.

And yet, artists have always turned to themselves.

Rembrandt did it across a lifetime. From a confident young painter to weathered old man, returning to his own face again and again. Not out of vanity, but out of witness. Each self portrait a quiet reckoning with time. A man documenting his own passage through it, without flinching, without flattery.

Frida Kahlo turned the self portrait into mythology. Her face became a landscape of pain, identity, and defiance, dressed in cultural inheritance, in flowers and thorns, in symbols that declared who she was and where she came from. For Kahlo, it was not discovery so much as declaration. A refusal to be unseen.

Helene Schjerfbeck kept returning, but toward something different. Over decades she stripped her self portraits back until the face became almost spectral, technique dissolved, surface dissolved, what remained more interior than likeness. She was not constructing. She was excavating.

Egon Schiele looked at himself raw, exposed, uncomfortable in a way that still unsettles. His self portraits feel less like looking in a mirror and more like opening a wound. Not discovery, yet … something closer to compulsion.

Four artists. Four entirely different relationships to the same act.

Which asks the question: is the self portrait always an act of discovery? Perhaps not. Perhaps it is sometimes witness. Sometimes myth. Sometimes excavation. Sometimes compulsion.

And sometimes, all of these at once.

For me, it begins long before the first brushstroke.

The materials.

I make my own paints for my work. Ground by hand. Mixed with intention. It is a conversation with time
my lineage,
my voice,
my narrative made physical.

Touch is my first language.
And perhaps that is why this is the truest way I know to make a self portrait. Not only to look, but to hold.
To cook, to calcify, transform over the fire.
To wash.
To grind.
To feel the earth become pigment. The paint carries both its own ancient history and the particular pressure of my hands.
It becomes its own self portrait, one that tells mine.

Something happens in the making that cannot be planned or said. The slowness reveals something. The repetition. The attention the materials demand
not conceptual,
not symbolic,
but physical,
present, and bodily.

The self portrait does not begin in the mirror. It begins here. In what I choose to carry into the work. In what the earth offers and what the hands receive.

I am earth. The Virgin and the Goddess. The sacred and the elemental. The one made from the same substance as the painting itself.

I am becoming.

Simplicity is my poetry.
Being in the silence
          in the studio
          & nature’s surroundings
          is my symphony.

Subtle crackles of fire,
          its warmth,
          its silence
          grounds me
          in a wholesome weight
          and light.

Daily Chores become creations.

Living becomes my Art.

I find myself quietly eager to sweep the floor
without instruction,
without hesitation several times a day.

It feels like a childhood dream materializing.
All those years imagining myself sweeping my mentor’s studio,
caring for a space of making.
Justin may not be the mentor I once sought, but his openness
his invitation into his studio
has been its own kind of gift.

Silently, I mull his paint,
learning his way.
Bees wax & lye
becomes his particular language.

I collect branches, twigs, logs
outside to fuel the fire.

The stillness is rich, dense with silence.
In it,
there is a forgiveness of being
allowed in the space
in flow,
hearing one’s own instinct
to respond.

I step outside,
onto the worn terracotta tiles,
shaving vine branches
that once clung to the railing
returning them to flame,
where they will darken, charring slowly becoming charcoal.

The wind moves subtly,
the wooden door swings open and closed
in a soft rhythm.

At the edge of my vision,
a small green lizard climbs the stone wall.
Below the patio,
I see a grass snake - biscia d’erba -
that threads its way on top of the tall grass.

They remind me of the simplicity
and quiet harmony
of working in a studio
rooted in the land.

They pull me into reflections on the cyclical nature of how earth’s materials become paintings, sculptures and more.
How these ancient processes echo the alchemy of early modern painters, and beyond.

Bernard Palissy’s molded lizards and frogs
earth pressed into form,
life captured in material, and yet still carrying motion.

His work reminds me of the quiet inquiry
I am experiencing
that underlies observation and transformation.

The silence gives me a harmony of comfort in my pace of being.
How I flow.
This brings me confidence.
Reassurance.
I am on the right path.
Trust my pace,
I hear myself quietly saying,|
”trust that my chores ARE part of my creations.”
The small rituals.

I have spent my life navigating interruptions
adjusting, re-pacing, shifting.
Insecure, not knowing that … this is the way.
Yet here,
I recognize these transitions as portals,
openings guiding me
into my own flow.

It changes me to understand this.
It grounds me.
It affirms me that my ethereal tools
intuition, rhythm, and presence
are aligned.

Time spent working
around the fire
has ignited something in me.

A fire of my own.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

It is attuned to the lunar rhythms of the moonlight phases & the tidal waters
that form the shell’s unique oblong shape,
while simultaneously gently
encouraging it open & close,
filtering water
to feed on plankton.

It is the womb of our sea gem,
the pearl.
The source of life,
creator of wisdom,
and the making of earth’s divine reflection of the moon.
Rebirth.

Like the oyster,
there is great wisdom here if you can sit in your own space
patiently
quietly listening to what flows to you.
There is a great secret for anyone who leans in
and let go to the rhythm reflecting upon you.
                                                                                          - Eva-Maria Spampinato, 2023

---

At its core, the oyster shell is almost entirely calcium carbonate.
It shares this substance with marble, limestone, chalk, and eggshell and yet stands apart as the only common source born of water. Not quarried from mountains nor lifted from strata, but assembled grain by grain from tides and minerals, shaped by breath, and lunar pull.
A purity not of isolation, but of circulation.

When fire enters this story, transformation begins.
Calcined, the shell yields a luminous white powder, refined, reactive, receptive. A material long used for plasters, gesso, pigments, inks, dyes, glass, ceramics, and the strong repair pastes that once restored fragile wares. Found in old recipe books and preserved in oral traditions, shell powder moved easily between disciplines: medicine, agriculture, architecture, and art.

Crushed and returned to soil, it tempered acidity and restored balance.
Ground finer still, it entered frescoes and grounds, Japanese gofun and ink, laked pigments and fluxes for molten glass. It stabilized, bound, clarified.
Man imitated nature not by invention, but by attention.

This is a material that travels between the sacred and the practical,
between chemistry and myth.
A mineral that remembers water.

Wherever land meets sea, oyster shells accumulate and are adaptable.
Prehistoric coastal communities turned to them when game was scarce, drawing sustenance and minerals from tidal abundance. In Roman markets, their perishability transformed them into luxury: costly and symbols of elite appetite. By the Western Early Modern period, abundance returned them to the table of every class.

Long before “circular economy” had a name, its practice was already embedded in daily life. Shells were reused, repurposed, folded back into walls and mortar, glazes and soils — not from ideology, but from knowledge, thrift, and tradition.
The shell’s afterlife was assured.

Entire structures rose from this quiet residue.
In the Pearl River Delta of Guangdong, oyster-shell houses stand layered with memory walls built from abundance, breathing with the sea’s imprint. Elsewhere, archaeologists uncover dense middens crushed into plaster and cement. Everywhere oysters were eaten, their shells became something more.
Human ingenuity begins with what lies closest at hand.

In early modern paintings, oysters entered the visual imagination as both symbol and sensation. Clara Peeters’ still lifes first set them upon the table; Heda and de Heem rendered them as emblems of taste, luxury, and touch. Later, Sargent’s fishermen and Draper’s water-born infants returned them to labor, fertility, and myth.
Always, the shell oscillates between nourishment and desire, between body and symbol.

Today, it resurfaces again.

UK artist, Emma Witter gathers restaurant shells into illusionary architectures. Designers shape shell composites into future materials. Cambridge PhD Candidate, Tomas Bean Nicholson Brown examines forgotten repair pastes now re-emerge from archives into laboratories his thesis titled 'New Making: Cultures of Earthenware, Stoneware and Porcelain Mending in the Long Eighteenth Century'. This renewed attention is no coincidence. In an era seeking material honesty and ecological clarity, the oyster shell offers both lineage and possibility.

It remains what it has always been:
a vessel of transformation.
A record of tides and hands and fire.

To study the oyster shell is to follow a lineage of patience.
To work with it is to enter the same rhythm that shaped it.
Slow, attentive, lunar.

A reminder that materials carry memory.
And that if we, like the oyster, can sit quietly and listen,
we may discover what has already been flowing toward us.

In the last week of October, I was deep in the countryside outside Civita Castellana, just north of Rome. An ancient landscape once known as the final stop on the Grand Tour before entering the city. For centuries painters like Turner, Ingres, and Corot made their way here, drawn by light, the cliffs, the silence. Now I walked the same land, spending a week working alongside the artist Justin Bradshaw.

We first met in Los Angeles in 2024 at DOSA Studio, where I demonstrated how to make Maya Blue pigment while Bradshaw was exhibiting checks & stripes. I had no idea then that the following year I’d step into his studio in Italy, living out the childhood dream I’d carried for three decades, one shaped by the longing to be an apprentice in the old sense: learning through presence, repetition, through the patient rituals of the hand.

Origins of a Painter

Justin Bradshaw is an English artist who has lived in Italy since 1994, making his life and livelihood in Rome. Not long after arriving, he was taken under the wing of Carlo Sestieri, one of Italy’s great antique dealers - an echo of Renaissance patronage. Sestieri recognized Bradshaw’s potential immediately, encouraging him to stay, to experiment, and to immerse himself in Italy’ s vast classical traditions. After Sestieri passed, his children honored their father’s vision, continuing to support Bradshaw through exhibitions across the city.

Bradshaw’s work carries this lineage forward. His influences are rooted in the classical tradition, drawing from Rembrant (1601-1669) and the Flemish school - particularly the still-life genre - as well as the textural portraits of English artist, Lucian Freud (1921-2011). While his earlier works have been described as figurative or even hyper-realist, he now turns his attention to objects and the quiet narratives of everyday life, exploring themes of absence, the lingering trace of a human presence, and the subtle passage of time.

A Shift Toward Material Alchemy

A turning point came in 2019, when Cennino Cennini’s Il Libro dell’Arte (late 14th century), and the so-called Bologna Manuscript (15th century) became a treasure trove for Bradshaw. After experimenting with the recipes, soon his practice transformed. What began as curiosity evolved into a desiccated pursuit: he sources and makes nearly all his materials directly from the land surrounding his studio - an old farmhouse on agricultural grounds near Corchiano.

The farmhouse arrived almost as if magic. “It was rather serendipitous timing,” Bradshaw calls it. Oak trees, madder root, earth, tree resin, wild boar hair, branches and logs - everything around him became his ingredients for his palette - inks, varnishes, pigments, lye, paintbrushes and the fireplace that fuels his entire practice.

The Rhythm of a Day

Bradshaw’s daily rhythm unfolds with ritualistic consistency. He enters his studio, makes an espresso, lights a hand-rolled cigarette, and empties the water from reused ceramic bowls that keep his handmade oil paints hydrated. He moves around the space, stepping outside for a moment, returning to pick up a vessel - whether glass, plastic, or metal - each one tied to a specific stage of material transformation. In a moment he’s scooping cooled ashes from yesterday’s fire, where we made cobalt pigment and charcoal, into a bucket of ashes and residual water. Throughout the day, he is decanting the drips of water and ash into another bucket, letting them settle, making lye.

He sits. Quietly.

At some point lunch comes around, followed by another afternoon espresso then the painting begins.

Bradshaw’s day has a purpose. What may seem idleness, procrastination, or distractions, in fact, are essential parts of the day for an artist in their studio. Chores are Rituals. Every gesture is necessary. Nothing is wasted.

The Space

The studio is entered through a wooden plank door into what was once the farmhouse living room, now the central heart of his workshop studio. He paints, conducts his alchemical experiments in the fireplace, and with tables, chairs, pigments, tools and walls filled with drawings and paintings in progress. On the left side, is an arched inlay wall with paint test swatches adhered to french doors that lies a narrow hallway leading to rooms, each with its own function.

One side room is a compact library of jars of homemade pigments and ingredients: stack white, lapis lazuli, cinnabar (vermillion), terra di Soriano, calcined bones, resins, copper carbonate, vitriolo romano sit besides notebooks filled with Cennino’s teachings, and Bradshaw’s experiments. Opposite, on a table, is a large marble slab, using his hand designed basalt muller - sourced from the landscape - to grind and mull his paints, using oil and beeswax. The walls are bare except for a lime green funnel, a blue protective mask, and two sheets of paper, one handwritten backwards in black oak-gaul ink. One is an extract from Cennini on how to make tinted paper. The other is The Lord’s Prayer in Latin which was used in many recipes for timekeeping - let the pigment settle in water for one paternoster and then pour the water into another vessel. Internally recalling Leonardo da Vinci’s mirrored notebooks, I ask him why. Bradshaw simply answers: “I’m left-handed. It keeps me from smudging. It just makes sense.” I smile.

Beside this space, is a still-life room. Where he also paints. Large sheets of black paper are stapled to the walls, creating an isolated environment that absorbs and directs the natural light from the window. The result is a dramatic chiaroscuro - depth, mood, and shadow - an instrument rooted in the Renaissance, reminiscent of Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and other Dutch still-life masters of the era.

In the end, what stayed with me was not simply the paintings or the pigments, rather the atmosphere of the practice itself. The way each movement, each material, each pause connected into a kind of living dialogue between artist and place. Justin Bradshaw’s studio is not merely where work happens; it is a breathing, shaped by fire, soil, ritual, and the slow intelligence of craft. In watching him move through the day, I was reminded that art is created long before the brush touches the surface. It begins in listening, observation, reflecting, and the willingness to be shaped by what surrounds you. Living art.

Justin Bradshaw has two current exhibitions going at Galerie Sardine opening 9 December 2025, in Amagansett, New York, and Spazio Aminta opening 3 December 2025 in Rome, Italy.

Thrift is inspired by my upbringing, art practice, & research. Born in Berkeley, California, I am the first generation of my multicultural immigrant family, & I grew up surrounded by the cultural & spiritual revolution of the 1960s & ’70s. It was the epicenter of when Eastern philosophy met the West Coast that birthed the countercultures of the Beatniks, Hippies, free love, drug experimentation, free speech, the Black Panthers, & where psychedelic & funk music proliferated. This is my story, my childhood embracing the fusion of the Bay Area’s cultures & my heritages with the notions of thrift - from the past & into the present.

From the grassroots to craft & back-to-the-land movements, the earth-centered Berkeley flourished in its community & the arts. They opened artisanal businesses such as the prized spice shop Peet’s Coffee and Tea on Vine Street, & located around the corner was the first farm-to-table restaurant, Chez Panisse.

Down on Ashby Avenue was the practical home & garden goods store, Whole Earth Access, where my family shopped often for the household & our cabin near Mtn Lassen, was also the extension of the Whole Earth Catalog. Amongst my thriving city, regional artists immersed themselves in experimenting with natural resources, found objects, established community-centered collaborations, whilst embracing heritage crafts from around the world in the arts.

Such prominent & influential collectives that impacted my childhood were the movements of Funk Art, New Basketry lead by Ed Rossbach & the Textile and Fiber Art with the epicenter of Fiberworks Center for Textile Arts (1973-87), that was founded by artist Gyöngy Laky, with national treasure contributors: Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada, Ana Lisa Hedstrom & Jack Lenor Larson.

When driving down HWY 80 in our white VW 1978 bus, I’d always seek out the latest Emeryville Mudflats Sculptures (1962-1997) that remained from high tide. The project was inspired by a course at the California College of Arts & Crafts (1908 - 2003) students who collected driftwood from the bay to create ephemeral sculptures.

And lastly, my favorite — the myriad back-to-land collectives & UC Berkeley students who gathered in the Northern California redwood forests to build salvaged redwood dwellings for alternative lifestyles that supported the preservation of the natural ecosystem. I am the next generation of these movements.

Thrift: My Family

The particular historical context of my youth & my unique home life is foundational to who I am as an artist & historian. My entire family is highly creative, curious, hands-on, & deeply innovative. They taught me how to care for & respect objects from problem-solving & fixing common items with many different materials using standard household tools. My elders passed down the wisdom of material knowledge – the old way – from their homelands.

My mother immigrated from Sweden, & was raised with a frugal lifestyle, a byproduct of Sweden’s poverty lifestyle from pre-WW1 through WW2. Raised in Stockholm & the countryside, she was always concerned about water waste — saving dishwater to water the plants, collecting rainwater for washing hair (much softer on hair & didn’t need to use conditioner), & not flushing the toilet after every use (particularly during droughts). She taught us how to respect what nature had to offer us, it was a lifestyle.

Her love for nature, & being practical, set the path for her aspirations to become a furniture designer in Sweden. She learned about design, different woods, & how to care for them, from the trees to the household. Her move to the United States in 1962 led to an early career in Scandinavian furniture working with Mobilia in Berkeley.

My father & his family immigrated from Argentina in 1966. He & my grandfather owned a very successful auto mechanic business, Tony & John’s Foreign Car Service on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. Where there were hippies, UC Berkeley students, police with tear gas & Hari Krishnas walking by every day was my family busy working in the shop.

Our auto shop was unique. While most garages purchased parts from manufacturers, my father & grandfather were inventing, & engineering repurposed steel parts into new car parts in the garage workshop. It was our business model to make services affordable for the customers. My father respected them & their wallets. He was ingenious, an inventive man with the biggest heart. There were many times his inventions proved more robust & sustainable than newly manufactured parts at higher prices. This was their craft of automobiles, my father & grandfather were the Masters.

Growing up in an international multi-generational family amidst the diverse underground countercultures of the Bay Area taught me the universal way to respect materials, & objects, to thrive by making what you have last, & to love the outdoors. Little did I know at the time, that this way of living would become a central foundation of what I would pursue in my journey as an artist.

How did thrift start?

By age nine, I was diagnosed with dyslexia & I knew being an artist was my path. I struggled in school & it was my paternal grandmother (an artist herself) who discovered my passion when she gave me a Da Vinci drawing to draw during her painting class. I became enamored with how Renaissance artists were able to capture the human figure hundreds of years ago. My strong desire to learn the masters & their traditional techniques transformed into a craving to learn the skills & make my art materials & surfaces, by sourcing what I already had.

Due to the lack of heritage craft programs in the United States’ linear academic system, this became my lifelong solo route toward becoming a journeywoman.

I created my apprentice pathway, one step at a time, based on what programs & life experiences were available to me. At the different stages of my life, I leaned into academic undergraduate studies of art history, sought out an art conservation career with internships, lived abroad in Europe, lived in the mountains for 7 years & then art school at Florence Academy of Arts. But I still wasn’t satisfied. It wasn’t clear to me what I was doing until I attended the History of Design post-grad program at the Royal College of Art/V&A Museum. There I was finally able to communicate through academic & practical research in my dissertation, where I am now a specialist in the theory & practice of early modern artisan epistemology & art materials (1400-1850).

The notion of early modern thrift was introduced to me at an RCA presentation by Professor Simon Werret, from the history of science department at UCL to speak on his then-upcoming book: ‘Thrifty Science: Making the Most of Materials in the History of Experimentation' in 2017. Werret’s book highlights that early modern experimenters & scientists transformed their households into laboratories by using the practice of thrift as they recycled, repurposed, repaired, & reused their material possessions to learn about the natural world. This resonated so deeply with me. In one word, I was able to synthesize my creative practice, my love for early modern artists, my multi-cultural heritages & how the Bay Area countercultures thrived in the late 20th century.

‘Thrifty is how to manage what you have […] to thrive, respect & make good use of what the world provided to raise riches in morals & values […] made most precious resources given by nature [...] whilst express gratitude for the gifts of the range of materials & its possessions.” (2)

This practice of thrift is an innate part of human development in response to living with nature. Practiced all over the world for mankind, to be thrifty is survival & respect at the same time. And to be thrifty is thriving, inspired by limited sources that create ‘restrictions’ that funnel curiosity into creativity, & lead to discoveries. By merging the practice of thrift with empirical values - the practice of observational and experimental studies - is the act scholars call the inquiry of nature. And this also is the foundation of art, craft, design & the evolution of the Western modern age of science, technology, institutions, & the systems that support capitalism.

What does being “thrifty” mean in your art practice?

I embraced being thrifty in my practice long before I consciously understood the influences my family & community had upon me. Being thrifty in my art practice gives me the breath of creativity that becomes an experience, connecting me to the source through my tools, and materials in my house & those I forage. To be thrifty is very similar to an artist working with a limited palette of colours. When I source ingredients & objects randomly available in my house, I improvise with them as tools & materials, which in response increases my impulses. The act brings me back to being a child, fully surrendered, responding to my curiosity, my senses, & my imagination. The making experience can transmute a whole new perspective that opens my eyes to the mysteries of life, & our beautiful natural world. And in return, the experience generates a great amount of respect, energy, & sensitivity to what resources have been given & provided to me. In all, the whole practice builds my confidence & trust in the unknown.

thrift is a way of being, & it operates, to some extent, outside of capitalism. Outside our dependence on money & power. To that end, thriftiness is a type of freedom about staying humble as your authentic self, one with all, & with nature.

What do you believe the value thrift has to offer?

As a design historian, I am trained to see patterns, design change, evolution & human behaviors through the historical lens of consumption, art, technology, science, economics, & politics. It is my belief that the value of practicing thrift IS the bridge to a holistic, earth-centered lifestyle, & the balance we are seeking as a solution for the future. This is much like my childhood in the Bay Area. The return of thrift appears clear to me that harmonizing heritage crafts & infusing contemporary practices - from nature, the studio & industry - will expand, resolve & discover outcomes. May they be new, old or modified. It’s a matter of finding balance through research in both narratives of the past & present - gratefully we are already on this journey - now globally. It is an interesting time we are living in. Before the pandemic it was a rapid age of makers, designers, bespoke, artists & scientists experimenting with materials & technology - much like the late 18th century ‘chaotic’ transforming age of the industrious Europe. However this time it is for the sake of climate resilience, a climate renaissance.

(1) Online Etymology Dictionary, Accessed October 25, 2023.

(2) Werret, Simon, Thrifty Science: Making the Most of Materials in the History of Experimentation, Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, (2019), pp.23- 25.