We recently connected with Rafi Ajl and have shared our conversation below.

Rafi, appreciate you joining us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

I am very much self-taught. I tend to have to make a lot of mistakes to work through problems, and really learn. This goes for things with my hands, but things with the practice and the business side too. There is craft in everything – in being a good boss, in running a studio, and of course in making things. I’ve always been super hands on – I love getting my hands into things and really working through the problem – learning with my hands. When I was in graduate school, I was allowed to experiment a lot. I was always doing things that were – untraditional – to say the least. I was dipping paper bags and wire mesh into porcelain slip, I was scanning things wrong – always playing and messing around – but learning the craft of curiosity. And that’s the heart of what I do and who I am – I’m endlessly curious. In a more direct way, I took a basic furniture making course at school, but outside of that, its been hands-on learning, and a real, significant tolerance and threshold of failure, and doing it again, and failing again, and engaging with that learning process. And to me – that’s the most important thing. I do of course believe that there is real value in learning through apprentice models, learning at trade and craft-specific schools. But the end goal of those kind of places and pathways is exactly that – to become a craftsperson. And my craft is my experimentation and my play and curiosity, so it always had to be this twisty, non-linear path.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am an artist and designer based in Berkeley, California. I make a wide range of work in wood, glass, and metal, and I’m always playing with new processes and materials. I’ve been creatively engaged my whole life – my mom is an artist, and I grew up learning how to sew and about color, and I was always drawing, and also always taking things apart and putting them together. I started my business and dedicated practice, if you want to call it that, when the company I had been working for changed directions, and laid off everyone… but let me rewind. The longer story is more interesting. Around 15 years ago, I worked for a landscape designer in San Francisco, Topher Delaney, Topher gave me an incredible education – in materials, in thinking about real, built environments and about problem solving, but also about images, brand, how to write an email and work with fabricators – in a way, working with her was and is a read bedrock of my creative experience and business. I still think about lessons I learned and how they still integrate into my life now. I also was a gardener and landscaper on the side too, and applied to and went to Harvard’s Graduate School of Design to get a Masters in Landscape Architecture. That path made sense, I loved the land and I was really interested in the work. I was also following a girl to the East Coast, as we were both living in California. My first year at the GSD was hand, and great and I learned an insane amount, but I always had this nagging thought that I was supposed to be becoming a “master” but I wasn’t sure if I was even a beginner yet. I did well my first year, got a great summer job with MVVA in Brooklyn, but also – the relationship collapsed. I missed my California home, and I also really felt that I wasn’t ready for school – I didn’t think I had the foundation. So at the end of the summer, I dropped out and moved back to California. I did odd jobs, and was trying to figure out what to do with myself, I also was obsessed with bicycles, and when I was at a bike shop buying some part or another, I met a framebuilder, Hale, who had a very individual way of working. We hit it off, I hung out with him a little bit, and soon enough said fuck it, bought some tools, and taught myself how to build bike frames. Now this was a foundational education – welding and brazing, machining, fabrication, and design. I had this business for about three years, doing some teaching at California College of the Arts as well – teaching some framebuilding courses. And towards the end of those years, I realized that I really liked being back in the educational, academic world, so I applied to the MFA Design program, ended my business, and went back to school, This time, i felt like I has really learned how to “work,” and was a beginner, and has a vocabulary of working. And so I played and worked incredibly hard and made weird and dangerous furniture and loved my time there. But while I was there, I thought to myself, do I have marketable job skills in Industrial Design, but ostensible focus? The answer kind of felt like a no, so while I was in school I started working at a hardware startup accelerator, kind of a bootcamp for hardware based companies. I first ran the shop, and then the hardware and design side of the program. I was always messing around on the side, but wasn’t totally ensconced in the practice. So now, going back up a ways, when this company disassembled, I had this thought that I would hybridize graduate school – the free thinking, design focused, experiential part of myself, with this new business and entrepreneurial side of things. So I started my business, which has grown and morphed over time. So now I have my personal artist and design practice, Rafi Ajl, under my own name, and also The Long Confidence, which makes built to order studio furniture. Long story!

I make work driven by curiosity, into exploring new things with the bedrock of quality and craft. It’s a very small business, I have two folks who work for me part-time, and we are all in it together. Everything is made by hand, in my studio, focused, driven work.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

In the beginning of starting my practice, I was working out of my garage, I had some small power tool, everything was on casters, and to work, I had to unpack the garage every day, roll things out, and get into stuff, and then re-pack it at the end of the day. While I was working on furniture designs and prototyping and learning, I was also doing some Industrial Design consulting, and then also teaching a full course load – actually more then a full load – at California College of the Arts in the graduate MFA Design program, and at UC Davis, in the undergraduate Industrial Design program – I was actually teaching basically 4-6 classes a year for about three years. So I worked a ton, because my business wasn’t immediately profitable, and I needed the income to survive! This was before I had my kid, so I could work a lot. But it wasn’t easy. I was constantly task switching, constantly doing whatever hustle I needed to do so I could keep my work and my dream going. About two years ago, I had to stop doing outside work, because things were busy at the studio, and it needed all my time. I really miss teaching, and I hope that one day, it can integrate into my practice as well.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

Getting to work with my hands, following my curiosity and my creative energy, feeling my way through things. Balancing the chaos, seeing beautiful, compelling things from their inception to birth in a world. Being incredibly engaged and in love with my work. I couldn’t have it any other way.

Contact Info:

• Website: rafiajl.com and thelongconfidence.com
• Instagram: @the_rafi_ajl and @long_confidence
• Soundcloud: x

Image Credits

Image credits are in the image name