BIOGRAPHY
Ron Garner
About the artist:
My Grandfather was a builder. He started me working at an early age, and I really took to it. Building is a dirty job. It’s a hard job. Even so, it is a rewarding job. I enjoyed building homes for people. As I got older, I started to have a real interest in custom designing homes and experimenting with shape, size and space. I started taking architecture courses in university and enjoyed that field. I moved into a career working much larger projects from building homes to working construction on hospitals, office buildings and even some work on railroads. I hired and worked directly with architects and engineers on a daily basis. I enjoyed the process of intelligent building.
For me, whether it’s making a piece of art or raising a building, it’s the same feeling. It’s an amazing thing to take and idea in your mind, transform it to paper and then convert it to something tangible. It’s the act of creating something appreciable in a world that seems to be more interested in debasing and deconstructing beauty, that gives me the satisfaction and the drive.
The process for all pieces:
Each piece starts with a design. The design is in vector format. This is the same format as Autocad, which is a program used to generate building plans. I have used Autocad for my work in the past, so I am somewhat familiar with the process. (I was a General Contractor). You can also use adobe illustrator. I found illustrator to be more productive so I taught myself to use it. Each design, depending on the complexity of the piece, can take from a couple of weeks to a month or more to complete. The process is complex. Each layer of the piece must fit the next like a puzzle. Each line in the drawing is a set of commands to the laser. For instance a line drawn in black may tell the laser to cut at 70% power and a speed of 25mm per second. A line drawn in blue may tell the laser to cut a line at a lessor power and faster speed so the end result of that line is rather like drawing instead of cutting. Another color line will command the layer to etch rather than cut. You can see how each drawing for each layer will contain multiple line colors giving different commands to the laser for differing results. In designing architectural pieces the proper size and scale of the actual buildings you want to represent also play an important part. In addition, utilizing plywoods gives you constraints on the size of the cuts, as anything narrower than 1/16” will break when you try to sand or stain the piece. This represents a whole new challenge in giving a realistic view of a building that is 300 feet tall in a piece that is scaled down to 18” tall. Once the design is complete you must send the drawings to the laser. Depending on the complexity of the design it my take an hour or more to cut each layer. Once the layers are all cut and you have a prototype complete, you start making corrections to the drawings. They rarely come out perfect the first time as there are literally thousands of lines to account for. Once the revisions are complete and the finished design is cut, you must clean the smoke left from the laser cutting from the piece. This takes about an hour to complete. Once the layers are all cleaned, dried and sanded, the staining of each layer takes place. Upon finishing the staining the layers must dry overnight.
Once the stained layers are dried, each layer must be glued to the next. The piece is then placed in a press I constructed for this purpose and the glue must set overnight. The piece is then sprayed with polyurethane. I lay on at least four coats and this process also takes a day to complete and dry.
About the artist:
My Grandfather was a builder. He started me working at an early age, and I really took to it. Building is a dirty job. It’s a hard job. Even so, it is a rewarding job. I enjoyed building homes for people. As I got older, I started to have a real interest in custom designing homes and experimenting with shape, size and space. I started taking architecture courses in university and enjoyed that field. I moved into a career working much larger projects from building homes to working construction on hospitals, office buildings and even some work on railroads. I hired and worked directly with architects and engineers on a daily basis. I enjoyed the process of intelligent building.
For me, whether it’s making a piece of art or raising a building, it’s the same feeling. It’s an amazing thing to take and idea in your mind, transform it to paper and then convert it to something tangible. It’s the act of creating something appreciable in a world that seems to be more interested in debasing and deconstructing beauty, that gives me the satisfaction and the drive.
The process for all pieces:
Each piece starts with a design. The design is in vector format. This is the same format as Autocad, which is a program used to generate building plans. I have used Autocad for my work in the past, so I am somewhat familiar with the process. (I was a General Contractor). You can also use adobe illustrator. I found illustrator to be more productive so I taught myself to use it. Each design, depending on the complexity of the piece, can take from a couple of weeks to a month or more to complete. The process is complex. Each layer of the piece must fit the next like a puzzle. Each line in the drawing is a set of commands to the laser. For instance a line drawn in black may tell the laser to cut at 70% power and a speed of 25mm per second. A line drawn in blue may tell the laser to cut a line at a lessor power and faster speed so the end result of that line is rather like drawing instead of cutting. Another color line will command the layer to etch rather than cut. You can see how each drawing for each layer will contain multiple line colors giving different commands to the laser for differing results. In designing architectural pieces the proper size and scale of the actual buildings you want to represent also play an important part. In addition, utilizing plywoods gives you constraints on the size of the cuts, as anything narrower than 1/16” will break when you try to sand or stain the piece. This represents a whole new challenge in giving a realistic view of a building that is 300 feet tall in a piece that is scaled down to 18” tall. Once the design is complete you must send the drawings to the laser. Depending on the complexity of the design it my take an hour or more to cut each layer. Once the layers are all cut and you have a prototype complete, you start making corrections to the drawings. They rarely come out perfect the first time as there are literally thousands of lines to account for. Once the revisions are complete and the finished design is cut, you must clean the smoke left from the laser cutting from the piece. This takes about an hour to complete. Once the layers are all cleaned, dried and sanded, the staining of each layer takes place. Upon finishing the staining the layers must dry overnight.
Once the stained layers are dried, each layer must be glued to the next. The piece is then placed in a press I constructed for this purpose and the glue must set overnight. The piece is then sprayed with polyurethane. I lay on at least four coats and this process also takes a day to complete and dry.