We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Robert Dancik a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Robert thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with 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 believe that my path to being an artist and, more specifically, an artist making jewelry, sculpture, and occasionally furniture started the first time I took apart one of my favorite Matchbox cars – around age 6. I was both amazed and fascinated with how all these seemingly random and unrelated pieces of “stuff” went together and when arranged in a certain way, made a car. The idea of taking a material, manipulating it in various ways, fashioning it into various forms and combining those forms to yield a completely different form became the bedrock of my artistic career. In fact, this fascination has only become broader and deeper as I learned about more materials and the possibilities for putting those materials together to form not just an object, but an object that could allow me to express myself about the world in which I live as well as the world I create in my mind.

To bring this into my present endeavors, I had to learn to decide what I wanted to say in a piece of artwork, select the materials that would allow me to say it, and then learn how to manipulate those materials. I also found it invaluable to realize that the prescribed processes and procedures for using any given material may not serve to allow me my full range of expression. That means that I have to be willing to abandon the established paths of proceeding and explore other possibilities with materials. This willingness also led me to realize that the expressive qualities of any material may be altered by changing the process used with that material. That, in turn, multiplies the narrative and expressive possibilities of a material. For example, if I mix water with plaster of Paris, it will harden and I will have a solid object with all the references that sort of object carries with it. However, if I mix the same plaster with motor oil, it will never harden, it will have a completely different appearance and thus, a different set of references that I can employ to express a completely different idea.

Looking back, I’m not sure there would have been any way for me to have formulated these ideas or to have learned to proceed this way any sooner. Actually, I’m not certain that earlier recognition of these would have served me better than coming to them as I have. Each step along the way has revealed its own value and I now have the result of each step to call upon and use in my work as I go forward.

Perhaps the only obstacle in my development in this arena has been time. Not the time it took to get here, but just not having the time to devote to these pursuits during various periods of my life.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

While I have been a practicing artist for all my adult life, I have also been an art teacher. Upon graduation from graduate school at 21, with a master’s degree in sculpture, I immediately began teaching art in a public school district in White Plains, New York. There I taught kindergarten through 6th grade as well as numerous (what were known at the time as) “special education” classes. I did that for 15 years and then moved to the high school when the district decided to start offering jewelry classes in addition to the other art classes already running. I taught jewelry making and sculpture at the high school level for the next 20 years. One year after grad school I also started teaching sculpture classes at one of the local collages. I continued teaching at various colleges and universities for the next 40 years – even after I had retired from full-time teaching in public school. The last 15 years of my college teaching was teaching graduate education courses at Pace University for people getting a master’s degree to become art teachers. About 20 years after starting to teach in the traditional academic arenas, I began to teach workshops and classes at various arts venues around the US and overseas.
I include my background in the various educational fields here as it has played an important role in my development as an artist. Having the privilege of working with students who had no experience with the tools, materials, processes, and procedures involved in making jewelry (I will concentrate on my career making jewelry going forward) afforded me the opportunity to observe students as they acquired more information and experience and became more comfortable making their jewelry. Watching upwards of 100 students a day as they pursued their work, I was able to see problems arise, suggest possible solutions, and make the appropriate adjustments to ensure success. While working with high school students, I began to design projects that focused not on technique but rather on narrative. This was a significant change for both me and my students. The idea of starting with what one wants to “say” or express in a piece of work opened up a whole new way of looking at art-making.
During the last several years of my high school teaching and ever since, I have been involved in exploring the use of materials, tools and techniques that were not usually employed in the designing and fabrication of “jewelry” and body adornment. This led me to explore and ultimately develop new materials that could be used for jewelry making as well as small sculpture, artist’s books, tool making, and more. I brought two of these materials to market receiving a copyright and trademark for each. One is an industrial plastic that I altered to yield a safe, non-toxic material that can imitate and be used to replace numerous other more toxic materials such as bone, ceramics, ivory, and many more. The other is a proprietary formulation of concrete that allows artists to make objects that embody all the expressive references that concrete brings with it but can be completed in a matter of hours rather than days. Upon retiring from full-time teaching in public school and my university jobs, I established my studio that was designed for making, and teaching and have also continued my exploration of alternate forms and materials for artistic expression.
Along with making and teaching, I began writing for several arts magazines, contributing how-to projects, and articles about materials, techniques, and design. This writing led to me penning a book about amulets and talismans including projects, history and techniques. While working on my book, it became evident to me that I was integrating idea, technique, material and expression in all the artwork I was making. It is this integration that has become the foundation of my present teaching, consulting, and making. Whether sitting at my bench with a hammer in hand addressing a piece of sterling silver, helping a student with their first project in art-making, or discussing a development plan at a meeting of one of the boards of directors I sit on, my ability to synthesize even seemingly disparate elements and see connections is what I am able to bring to any situation.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

I believe that the goal and mission at the heart of all my artistic and creative pursuits is curiosity – both being and remaining curious. “What if ……” is my favorite beginning to any endeavor. As my involvement in creative pursuits has widened and deepened, as I have learned more, as I have been exposed to more, and as I have made and written more, I have found that my curiosity has grown in proportion. I have also found it fascinating that there is virtually no limit to my curiosity, nor is there a limit to the rewards I reap upon pursuing those curiosities. To paraphrase Alice (In Wonderland), not only is it getting curiouser and curiouser, but it’s getting interestinger and interestinger. For me, it’s also getting funner and funner. I consider myself incredibly fortunate and have unbounded gratitude for being an artist and having creativity (and curiosity) at the core of my life.

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

As I have grown older and have the luxury of looking back over more and more time, it has become abundantly evident that my life as an artist has been filled with various and sundry rewards. My artistic life has certainly had its challenges, disappointments, and failures however, these have been greatly overshadowed by the benefits from a continued involvement in the arts. Looking back, I cannot separate my artistic career from my teaching career. When I think of the most significant, rewarding events and happenings in my life, there are several that immediately come to mind. The first happened and continues to happen when I have the privilege of witnessing the formation of an expressive idea in the eyes of a student that I’m working with. My experience is that this ideation is obvious and is unlike any other aspect of my relationship with my students. When working on my own, I am always taken aback and left nearly breathless when having made an object, it embodies just the feeling, idea, or concept that I was attempting to express in that object. Basically, what I have is the physical manifestation of the conceptual. This translation from idea to object is central to my work and has never waned in fueling my creative life. It fuels, as well, my desire to keep making objects that allow me to express myself as an artist and to better understand myself, the world in which I live, and the unseen but experienced world that surrounds me.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://fauxbone.com
• Instagram: Robert Dancik
• Youtube: Robert Dancik

Image Credits

Douglas Foulke – photography