[nfbmi-talk] george wertzel in news

Marcus Simmons president at map-n.org
Mon Jul 7 13:46:35 UTC 2014


Vary good story!

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Subject: [nfbmi-talk] george wertzel in news


Blind woodworker has a magic touch: ‘You learn to see with your hands’

List of 2 items

Kristin Tillotson, McClatchy Tribune

Posted July 7, 2014 at midnight

list end

Artist George Wurtzel said his favorite piece is this jewelry box he created 
for his art show in Minneapolis. Wurtzel is blind. He gradually lost his 
sight

in his teens to retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease caused by 
mutated genes, yet is still able to work wood with the help of potentially 
dangerous

machines. (Elizabeth Flores/Minneapolis Star Tribune)



Photo by Elizabeth Flores



Artist George Wurtzel said his favorite piece is this jewelry box he created 
for his art show in Minneapolis. Wurtzel is blind. He gradually lost his 
sight

in his teens to retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease caused by 
mutated genes, yet is still able to work wood with the help of potentially 
dangerous

machines. (Elizabeth Flores/Minneapolis Star Tribune)

Artist George Wurtzel makes wood furniture and decorative objects.



Photo by Elizabeth Flores



Artist George Wurtzel makes wood furniture and decorative objects.



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George Wurtzel whistles “Camptown Races” as a high-powered lathe hums a 
quarter-inch from his thumb and forefinger.



Thread-thin streams of sawdust arc like an exploding firework off the small 
chunk of pine he is fashioning into a sombrero-shaped wine stopper, some of

them landing on his “Duck Dynasty”-worthy beard.



“As you turn wood, the sound changes dramatically with the shape,” Wurtzel 
says. “You can tell what’s happening by the chatter noise and feel of the 
vibrations.”



Suddenly the half-formed stopper pops out of the vise and rolls under the 
workbench in his south Minneapolis studio.



“Whoops,” he says, turning off the machine and bending to fumble for his 
tiny work-in-progress hiding somewhere on the floor. He gropes around with 
one

hand but doesn’t bother to peer under the bench.



It wouldn’t help, since Wurtzel is blind. He gradually lost his sight in his 
teens to retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease caused by mutated

genes.



“It’s very rare, but both my parents had them,” he says. “Better luck next 
time, I guess.”



A wry sense of humor, a ready, uninhibited laugh and a calm, worldly 
demeanor are all part of Wurtzel’s charming aura. So is the grace with which 
he tolerates

the incredulity of new acquaintances who marvel at his ability not only to 
create singularly beautiful furniture and art objects in utter darkness, but

to do it with giant whirling saws and other dangerous power tools.



“It’s the hands doing the work, not the eyes,” he says. “In woodworking, the 
visual is actually a very small part of the equation. It’s all about manual

dexterity.”



In his case, it’s also about an artistic mind that senses an abstract female 
form in a sheared-off strip of black walnut, or how markings left by fungi

on a piece of spalted birch can be the perfect embellishment for a jewelry 
box.



Prominent Twin Cities photographer Alec Soth recently chose him to 
collaborate on an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. The 
second annual

“People’s Biennial,” the show recognizes work by artists outside the 
sanctioned art world whose work is relatively obscure but worthy of note.



Wurtzel moved to Minneapolis from Michigan four years ago to teach 
woodworking to students at the National Federation of the Blind, but was 
fired two years

later following differences with his employer and decided to resume his solo 
career.



His workshop sits behind a pretty storefront in the Whittier neighborhood 
where he displays his creations, from whimsical wine stoppers shaped like 
hats

and elegantly whorled bowls to rustic coffee tables and shelves and cabinets 
whose pieces fit snugly into each other without needing fasteners.



“My grandfather used to make wooden puzzles like this,” he said. “You can 
take apart or put together my furniture in a few minutes, and there are no 
bolts

to drop and lose.”



Wurtzel has pondered whether he would do things differently if he could see.



“I’d like to be able to read blueprints and make preliminary sketches — I do 
all that in my head,” he says. “But I don’t think I’d be a better 
 craftsman.”

And on the plus side, “I’m not encumbered by other people’s designs in my 
head.”



In fact, he jokes, part of the reason he decided to grow that full-on beard 
is that “I get labeled as ‘the blind guy’ when I’d rather be ‘the bearded 
carpenter.’

I want to be judged by what I do as a craftsman, not be told I’m amazing 
because I can’t see.”



The middle finger of Wurtzel’s left hand is shorter than the one on his 
right by about a half-inch, the result of a late-night mishap in the 
workshop when

he was working on about 300 repetitive cuts.



“It had nothing to do with not being able to see,” he said. “I truly think 
that I just fell asleep. There are a huge number of carpenters out there who

are missing fingers.”



GROOVE IS IN THE HEART



Wurtzel’s favorite type of wood is “the free kind,” which usually means 
pawing through the firewood of friends like Lee Tourtelotte, a fellow 
wood-turner

whose backyard stash is a gold mine for a guy like George.



“You judge a man’s wealth by the size of his wood pile,” he said on a jaunt 
over to Tourtelotte’s place near Lake Nokomis. “Lee, you’re a wealthy man.”



As the two talked shop about the grain on various pieces, Wurtzel ran his 
hands up, down and around them. Though he often consults sighted friends on 
the

color contrasts and variegations in wood, he has learned to discern a lot by 
steaming the surface with a hot wet cloth or in a microwave, which 
temporarily

raises the grain, allowing him to feel its patterns. He can also identify 
different types of wood from their smell.



“I look for the curly stuff, the crooked grain, or a knot that adds 
character,” he said. “I’m pretty well convinced that when I put my hands on 
this, the

image I get in my head is close to what Lee sees with his eyes.”



Wurtzel recently sold nearly $10,000 worth of his pieces through a display 
in an empty downtown storefront, part of the “Made Here” project 
spotlighting

the work of local artists. But while he aspires to make a living entirely on 
his art, it’s his architectural work that pays the bills. He specializes in

restoring or reproducing the elegant, complicated kind of doors, columns and 
trim featured in many old Victorian houses.



Whittier homeowner Tamar Bagley heard about Wurtzel through her neighborhood 
association and asked him to submit bids on remaking some octagonal columns

for a porch and carport on her 1906-built home.



“The cost can get astronomical if you want things redone exactly as they 
were, but his estimate was very reasonable,” she said. “He came over, ran 
his hands

over the wood and remade them perfectly.”



FROM CAMP EHIF TO SKI JOCK



Beyond his artistic accomplishments, the 60-year-old Wurtzel has led a rich 
and varied life.



He grew up in Traverse City, Mich., where he opened his first woodworking 
business right out of high school. He attended the Michigan School for the 
Blind

at the same time as Stevie Wonder, for whom he made a one-third-scale wooden 
replica of a Steinway concert piano.



He later moved to North Carolina, where his business making triangular 
wooden cases for U.S. military burial flags was such a success that he sold 
it and

was able to travel for several years on the proceeds. He once ran a summer 
youth camp. (“Teenagers are like wires,” he quips. “You put two together and

they’re going to get tangled.”)



He used to train Arabian horses, taking 50-mile endurance rides on his own 
trusty steed. A skilled cross-country skier who was on the U.S. Paralympic 
team

in the 1970s, he has skied across Lapland as well as from Fargo to Lake 
Superior in 1980.



Best-selling author John Camp (better known as John Sandford) was part of 
the group on the several-day Fargo trek.



“George was a tough, athletic guy, and he’d kind of freak me out on some of 
the rough trails we took,” said Camp, who was then a reporter for the St. 
Paul

Pioneer Press. “I’d be behind him calling stuff like ‘right turn coming up’ 
but he had a preternatural sense for where the track was, and most of the 
time

he’d stay in it by himself, even down some pretty fast, twisty hills.”



BON VIVANT IN OVERALLS



Wurtzel is a familiar figure at many nearby hangouts, including the Black 
Forest and Eat Street Social, for which he made a helix-shaped case to 
display

homemade bitters.



A wine distributor from France who encountered him there bought up his 
entire stock of stoppers.



“George is very charismatic and a real straight-shooter,” said Nick 
Kosevich, a partner at Eat Street. “We enjoy his company. He’s always got 
something

interesting to say.”



Wurtzel gets around the neighborhood using a collapsible white cane he 
stashes in one of the cargo pockets of his daily uniform, a pair of faded 
Liberty

brand overalls. He says a guide dog isn’t a good fit for him: “You have to 
take care of a dog, and I’ve got too much to do.”



One project very close to his heart is the miniature pine sailboat he made 
for a terminally ill young woman he met last year named Maire Kent.



Inspired by a beloved book from her childhood, Kent wanted her ashes to 
travel on a small boat through the Great Lakes and out to sea. She died of 
cardiac

sarcoma last September before she could see the finished boat, but Wurtzel 
and a documentary-filmmaker friend — who did a test run on Lake Calhoun — 
plan

to fulfill her wish by launching the boat on its final journey from Lake 
Michigan in mid-July.



Then there’s the upcoming project with Soth for the Detroit exhibition, 
which opens Sept. 12. He plans to build a series of boxes that will each 
hold a

different aspect of his life. “When you look inside, each will give a 
glimpse of the things that shaped me into the person I am today,” he said.



He’d better get busy. He’s going to need a lot of boxes.



Source:

http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2014/jul/07/the/
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