In the late 1970s, when a friend handed Good a manuscript by the Finnish-born sculptor Heikki Seppa and told him that Seppa would be teaching a workshop at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Good knew he had to be there. That workshop, and the ensuing friendship, was the basis for his pioneering work in anticlastic raising, a name coined by Good and Seppa to identify the new way of shaping sheets of metal by compressing the edges and stretching the center. Good's ongoing anticlastic raising work -- earrings, bracelets, necklaces, rings, as well as sculptures -- is now shown and sold worldwide
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Eight people are Michael Good Designs, some family and -- this is important to Good that I say this -- all of them, "family": Michael, Karen, Avi, Anton, Carleton, Leslie, Sherry, and Marilyn. In a renovated house and barn on Route 1 in Rockport, they come together each day to laugh and celebrate and work damn hard to make jewelry that in its deepest movements speaks of connection and relationship and, always, beauty-simple, moving beauty.
You're a self-taught artist, right?
Completely, right from the start. Well, nobody's completely self-taught. You learn a little bit from this person, a little bit from that person. And as you go along, you begin to develop a facility. Many things happened at once, but when I took that workshop with Heikki Seppa, at that moment, I decided that anticlastic raising was going to be my life's work.
Why anticlastic raising as your life's work?
I knew immediately that it could explain a lot of elemental things about movement, how it operates, patterns of movement that are just like music, with implications in biology, with implications in physics, which is what makes this whole thing so incredibly fascinating. I don't think most people understood at all what I was doing, or even why, but, thank goodness, it translated into exquisite jewelry shapes.
What is it about a Michael Good design that makes it so identifiable out in the world?
I'm not sure what the answer is except maybe the consistency and the logic. In a way, it's like a language of patterns and rhythms -- everything on the way to becoming.
You didn't have all of this -- people, machines, space -- when you started out?
No, no. It started out as a stump and a hammer and a polishing lathe outside.
How did this whole operation come together?
The tools simply accumulate as the need to do a particular thing arises. We bought this falling-to-bits apartment house around 1985 or 6. And slowly, very slowly, over the years, we have taken over, and fixed up, a little bit of space at a time, until we now occupy all of it. The retail gallery is only four years old.
What materials do you work with?
The jewelry is mostly 18k yellow gold and white gold. We use platinum sometimes -- as little as possible because it's very difficult to work. And now, increasingly, with bronzes. Some of the jewelry is all bronze. They're really miniature sculptures, totally complete pieces with some very symmetrical, beautiful, elementary movements that come out from the simple stretching from the center toward the edge.
You work from flat sheets of metal. How do you start?
Well, first you have to give up your sense that you think you know something.
Your comfort level, you mean?
You don't get anywhere without doing that. The point is not to get frightened by it, but to deal with it. Your mind calms down and begins to really function. For me there's a real purity in all of this that's very important.
The sculptures, have you always made these?
It depends on what you mean by sculpture. I always did some. Often very primitive. Over time, they were presents. Quite a few years ago, I exhibited some in Switzerland. I ran smack into what anybody doing sculpture runs into, and that's the marketing problem.
And now?
In the last three years, I'm showing again. My daughter, Avi-she's my "boss"-decided that's what we should do. [He laughs and lifts a small patinated copper and gold sculpture up and hands it to me. It's so very light.] Look. Here. See, you can see more clearly how it develops very quickly from a flat sheet and from a very simple anticlastic curve into something much more complex.
When I look at your pieces, I see them as quests, as if you're looking for answers.
That actually has some kind of explanation to it, believe it or not. Once you go away from the center there's a tendency for all nondefinitive movements, which is what all movement ultimately is, to want to define themselves. The whole essence of gravity bringing things together, it's a little bit related to that.
Do other aspects of your life feed this work?
Depends on what you're talking about. These movements? I do these all the time. Without stop. Wherever I am -- in a kayak, on a plane. Under all conditions, [he smiles broadly] which pisses the hell out of a lot of people. The situation you happen to be in for that day is all you're going to get so you have to take advantage of it because you might be croaked the next day.
So how do you decide what to do in a day?
If you can only do one thing in a particular day, I say pick out the best thing-the most in tune with what you feel needs to be done and everything else can wait
