“I’m very sentimental. That’s obvious enough all over my photos,” says photographer Roberta Delilo. Earlier this fall, El Taller Gallery & Cafe in Lawrence, Massachusetts featured her show, Livro de Palmas, a study of hands. Shots included hands washing a newborn baby, hands smoking an effusive joint, and hands holding flowers. Isolated in her small frames, the mundane body parts become vulnerable: “whatever you are thinking, the hands are the act of that.”

The show is over, but Delilo’s aesthetic lingers: “I probably will keep doing the hands thing.” Currently, she’s focused on another body part: hair. Instead of photos, she will use video to examine hair and identity. “It serves for so many identities like racial identity, gender identity,” she says. “We’ve been fascinated by it for as long as humans have been around.”

Delilo is a street photographer of sorts, so she doesn’t plan shoots. Sometimes, if something interesting is happening in the room, she’ll draw it out in order to “work with it more.” Her models are friends and people around her in Lawrence. This familiarity adds to their ease, and a congenial softness comes through in her photographs. When there’s nudity, it looks celebratory; when there’s food, it looks like it’s about to be shared.

She has a DSLR camera, but Delilo currently shoots all of her work with her iPhone. She also uses a phone app to manipulate her images, distorting some, and making others look like 35 millimeter film. The phone is key because it’s unassuming. “I definitely put effort into people feeling comfortable,” she says. “I never take that for granted.” The iPhone, so ubiquitous at present, fits naturally into social situations. As Delilo puts it, “phones are more discreet because you never know, is this just snapchat or is this photography?”

Photography is reciprocal for Delilo. She considers everyone she has photographed “collaborators.” When an image is finished, she says, “it’s my way of giving back to them, thank you for sharing this moment with me, and here’s it back to you.” The community of artists in Lawrence that she describes sound like minded. “They’re up to do it, be part of it. People just have that mentality of trying to help each other out.”

Roberta Delilo–photographer
Lawrence, Massachusetts
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All images courtesy of Roberta Delilo

The post The iPhone’s Secret Powers appeared first on Take Magazine.

The garage-top shop of luthier Douglas Cox has the climate and good humor of a screened-in porch. The door is left open, the windows arch out, and a yellow Lab named Sophie lounges on the rug. Outside, freshly varnished violins hang from their necks.

This might seem like a recipe for disaster since many luthiers work in climate-controlled studios, and humidity can affect the sound and weight of instruments, but the radical openness of Cox’s making space is key to his philosophy. “These instruments are gonna be out in an ever-changing world in all kinds of situations so they better get used to it sooner rather than later,” he says. Building in a weather-permeable shop forces Cox and his pieces to accept early that “the life of the violin is how it relates to changing weather conditions.”

Douglas Cox at work / image by William Dixon

And live these instruments do. The main body of the violin is includes a front, a back, and two ribs. The largest pieces are carved out of wood cuts that grew side by side in a tree. When they’re cut apart and glued together again in a new formation, they reveal a symmetrical pattern akin to a butterfly with its wings open. Thus, the violin’s body pays homage to the tree from which it came.

Then, there are the sounds: Cox keeps “fairly comprehensive acoustic records of the instruments.” While he knows what works well for him after 50 years of making, he doesn’t believe that humanity is anywhere close to an algorithm. In his mind, “the predictive making process,” won’t be available to luthiers anytime soon.

Cox muses that talking about a good violin with professional players “is like talking about wine or cigars.” When commissioned to build an instrument for an artist, consultations require that he “try to develop a language to describe something which you really can’t describe.” Where language fails, taste prevails: “When things go best, there is a falling in love process.” To date, he’s crafted over 800 violins, and his instruments are played around the world. Owners of Cox violins include Jaime Laredo, the current conductor of the Vermont Symphony Orchestra.

Cox began his studies at a trade school in Mitenvall, Germany where instrument-making classes were “parallel to those that train electricians and plumbers.” After school he returned to the United States and worked for a shop in Boston. “Ten years doing repair and restoration. That’s where I learned what a good instrument is, what good players are looking for, and what goes wrong.” Those ingredients, he says, are what established his independent business in the early ’80s and what have helped it flourish ever since.

“There’s a mystique about old instruments,” Cox reflects. “Most everything I do is antiqued… it’s made to look as though it’s been around a while.” Mystique duly acknowledged, organizations like the Vermont Symphony Orchestra hope to excite people about new instruments too. During the 2016-2017 season, Cox served as the VSO’s first ever luthier in residence, exhibiting a violin in progress at performances. “Trying to do some of the work there had its risks,” he says, but for a person who builds things that exist to be played, “putting things in people’s hands” was too exciting to forgo.

Douglas Cox–luthier
West Brattleboro, Vermont
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Top image courtesy of Douglas Cox

The post Vermont’s Violin Whisperer appeared first on Take Magazine.

The dark, depopulated landscape paintings of Dozier Bell have earned her a reputation as an elegist, but her work and her ideas are far more unorthodox than that. For the past eight years, Bell has been mining the landscape around Bath, Maine, to see “how non-traditional I could make a traditional landscape look.” The majority of her pieces show natural scenes, but she never paints outside. “I like painting from memory because I like using that filter,” she says. “It’s a back and forth between being outdoors and the studio routine.”

A descendant of farmers, Bell keeps bees, hikes, and kayaks regularly to discover new visual details. “I pick through literature the same way I pick through the landscape for what I can use.” For example, “in recent years I’ve been doing drawings and paintings of trees which I haven’t done before. I have a sense impression of what looking up into a pine tree might look like but I can’t always bring to mind the exact pattern of light and dark so I go out.”

Outcrop Flock, by Dozier Bell

After earning a B.A. in philosophy from Smith College, Bell studied under Neil Welliver at the University of Pennsylvania. She took two things from him that still inform her practice: “the necessity of tuning into one’s individual voice, and the importance of just putting in the hours in the studio that it takes to find that voice.” If you log the hours, Bell says, “you end up with a body of work.”

Bell’s own body of work reveals an abiding interest in German Romanticism. Recently, the threat of climate change has plunged her back into German stories where “the landscape, animals, plants, and the weather were characters in the drama,” and as such, capable of “retribution, spiritual solace, or some kind of divine purpose.” This concept of nature has “an inescapable moral dimension” that helps her to reckon with an increasingly unpredictable environment.

22:00, 2014. acrylic on linen, 30” x 50”, by Dozier Bell

While in Germany on a Fulbright Scholarship, Bell took stock of the landscape WWII had marked and also witnessed a new kind of religious questing. While volunteering at a local Lutheran Church she met East Germans who were beginning to explore religion again after reunification. “I saw these parallels between the fighting and finding devices like sonar and radar that were developed during the war, and the spiritual finding devices or process people were going through with religious training.” The conflation of these two very different kinds of human searching still moves her today.

Inspired as they are, Bell’s landscapes are omniscient and therefore slightly ominous. A number of her seascapes feature the geometric lines of remote sensing weapons, as if the viewer were training a rifle on the waves. The artist insists however that the lines of a viewfinder don’t always impend violence: “they could be weapon sights, they could be the crosses on a Réseau plate used in photographing an unfamiliar area like the surface of the moon…” With her paintings, Bell gathers together weapons, radar, and religious longing with the one sense they all share: sight.

Dozier Bell–artist
Bath, Maine
Website

Top image, Rising, acrylic on panel, 12″ X 16″, photo courtesy of Dozier Bell

The post Nature’s Morals appeared first on Take Magazine.

Since joining Green Mountain Taps in 2015, 3D designer Charlie Peckar has worked with 700 breweries. With nearly 5,000 craft breweries in the United States and draft culture growing, it’s likely Peckar will see that number continue to grow. Green Mountain offers designer tap handles as unique as the brews themselves.

Peckar cites both an expertise with wood and their U.S. factory location in Hinsdale, New Hampshire (the business was founded in Guilford, Vermont, and later moved across the river) as two reasons for Green Mountain’s success. “Most of our competitors source all their labor to China. We are the only company that makes 100 percent of our product in America,” he says. Craft brewers of New England, whose beverages and brands often trade on the importance of local production, find a kindred spirit in Green Mountain. The proof is in the pints: “We make pretty much all of the tap handles for the state of Vermont. We do Zero Gravity, 14th Star, Lawson’s. . .”

It doesn’t end with tap handles. “We do signage, we can source printed glassware. . .The idea is to be the one-stop shop for brewery needs.”

At McNeill’s brewery in Brattleboro, Vermont, shiny wooden tasting trays that Peckar designed sit in a stack behind the bar. “I was proud of that design. Not quite as ergonomic as I had planned, but I think they look pretty good.” Stumbling upon his work is common. Gigging around Vermont with his “folkgrass” band Pinedrop, Peckar often runs into handles he conceived.

Green Mountain Taps creates more than designer tap handles. Custom flight set anyone? | Photo by Charlie Peckar

What is work for a 3D designer? For Peckar, it’s overseeing a piece as it evolves from initial client call, through a computer rendering, and out to a finished product. “I’ve got all the assets for production. All the shapes and models and plans come from me.” Just like beer, custom tap handles are a scientific art. Peckar, who focused on glassblowing in college, “picked up almost all of it on the fly.”

Once hired, “I learned CAD software and how to use all of the machines that we work with.” Depending on client needs, the Green Mountain production team will use 3D printers, metalwork, lasers, and more to make a tap. Custom designs require willingness: “We will work around any idea. We’ve used things like tiny bells and rope. Some things have been welded together.”

Though the process is complex, and few handles alike, Peckar jokes that the mechanics lead to one place: “They all kinda work the same way. They screw onto the tap, and you pull.”

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Charlie Peckar – tap handle engineer for Green Mountain Taps
Hinsdale, New Hampshire
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Top image by Derek Sensale

The post Getting a Handle on Craft Brewing appeared first on Take Magazine.