[nfbmi-talk] George wertzel in news

Tue Jul 8 10:36:09 UTC 2014

I remember him from MSB when he had some vision; I'd like to hire him as an 
IA (Industrial Arts) teacher.

-----Original Message----- 
From: Marcus Simmons via nfbmi-talk
Sent: July 07, 2014 09:46
To: joe harcz Comcast ; NFB of Michigan Internet Mailing List
Subject: Re: [nfbmi-talk] george wertzel in news

Vary good story!

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "joe harcz Comcast via nfbmi-talk" <nfbmi-talk at nfbnet.org>
To: <nfbmi-talk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Monday, July 07, 2014 7:44 AM
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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Jim in Detroit
James A. Prather
Central Michigan University: 1980
Michigan School for the Blind: 1974
"Fire Up Chips"
"Ungh, ungowa, Raiders still Got the Power!" 