Zele Community Table: The Jewelry Of Ariane Paepecke Zurcher

June 30th, 2008 at 08:57pm Zele Community Table 117

June 30, 2008

Zele Community Table

Ariane Paepcke Zurcher with Michael Conniff

(Ariane Zurcher, the granddaughter of Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke, will be showing hundreds of her jewelry pieces in The Library of the Hotel Jerome on Main Street in Aspen from Wednesday to Saturday, July 2-5, 2008, from 10 AM to 8 PM.)

Michael Conniff: You grew up in part as a Paepcke in Aspen. Were any of the Paepckes creative?

Ariane Zurcher: We called Grandmother [Elizabeth “Pussy” Paepcke] Smooie. Smoo was really creative. She was hired  by Marshall Fields in Chicago to do all her windows. She actually did the maternity section. When Grandfather bought the Hotel Jerome, she went suite by suite and redesigned each one. She designed jewelry as well. So she wasn’t just design-conscious—she had a career at a time when women did not have that kind of career.

MC: What about your grandfather [Walter Paepcke]?

AZ: Grandfather wanted to promote Goethe idea of mind, body, spirit. That was one of the things he fell in love with Aspen as a place to physically do all the activities. He would then get businessmen to come to this physically beautiful setting, and then have these intellectual discussions. My Grandmother said: “Skiing is what is going to take over this town.” Smoo was the driving force behind the Aspen Design Conference. Her brother Paul Nitze did the skiing, my Grandmother did the design conference, and then my grandfather did the Goethe. They split it up organically.

MC: What was it like being here as a child?

AZ: My Grandmother would take us to these performances that would go all day. I’m a big Mozart fan, but this woman—she was in her 80s, I was in my 20s. It was hot. It was a lot to listen to Mozart all day starting at 8 in the morning.

MC: Your father also exposed you to art.

AZ: My father was in charge of Pre-Columbian and African art at Stanford Museum. He was extremely knowledgeable. My parents went to Africa, northern California. They had people they knew arrive in full tribal garb in Aspen with their San Francisco girlfriends with the Angela Davis afros.

MC: When was this?

AZ: In the late 1960s. Everyone was speaking French—my father’s speaking French. He was born and raised in Paris. He was Swiss.

MC: When did you get the urge to create art?

AZ: I wanted to be an artist in high school if not sooner. I studied with Nate Olivera, an artist on the West Coast: he did watercolors and oils. My mother has a huge silver thing hanging in her house that’s by him. I took a lot of drawing and wanted to major in art. My parents said: “That’s unrealistic.” So I chose fashion design—Parsons School of Design. I had a vague interest in. I ended up studying draping, color theory, then we’d work with a designer to design an ensemble. I did Fashion design. I went into it but always felt like an outsider and I don’t even know why. People are completely focused—they eat, drink, and breathe it. So I moved to London in 1984, had a very brief apprenticeship with Zandra Rhodes.

MC: She was a big deal?

AZ: A big deal. At one point she handed me the toilet brush and said: “My assistant does everything I don’t want to do.”

MC: “The Devil Wears Prada.”

AZ: I worked at Elle magazine, too. They were really like that?

MC: What then?

AZ: I tried to start my own collection, slogging through London with my samples, store to store.

MC: What did they say?

AZ: They said it was too expensive. Truth is I was not a very good clothing designer. I really wanted to draw, and that’s not a good reason to design clothes. I moved back to the  States working for Jessica McClintoch, designing gunnysacks for tweens, teenagers. I was designing there. I wasn’t good enough to be a fashion illustrator—that’s a whole ’nother field.

MC: Do you draw your jewelry first?

AZ:  I do sketch out design ideas for jewelry. The I modify it and it will become something else. I sketch then make something.

MC: When did you go to Elle?

AZ: After Jessica McClintoch, designing their hand-knit page. That was a little closer to jewelry. I’d design the hand-knit and write the instructions.  This was in 1989. That was rough. I didn’t have the confidence to really go for it. That’s the case with all this stuff. Now women in their 20s are really pulled together, I didn’t have a clue. I was a late bloomer.

MC: How did you get started with jewelry?

AZ: I knew someone, she gave me places to go to get material. And my husband Richard encouraged me. A year after our daughter of Emma was diagnosed with autism. I thought I needed to care for her, to find out about autism, what’s behind autism, find a thing to cure here. I was going to fix this. This was not unusual for my family. We have a strain of stronger women—you’re going to plow ahead, no matter what comes your way. Do what you’re going to do. And you don’t complain too much.

MC: So your daughter’s autism is tied to your designing jewelry.

AZ: We had this event. This thing, it happened. It shook our world. I won’t label it as good or bad. It shook our world. Everything changed. From that point, I can’t really explain it. You go along and you go along and you have no idea how you’ve taken things for granted. With our older son Nick, we took it for granted that he would talk, then Emma comes along and when she comes along, she doesn’t talk. You want to believe it’s going to be fine. Then the truth seeps in through the cracks, no matter how much denial. You’re sitting down there, you have to admit it. It didn’t take so long. At two-and-a-half years old, we got the diagnosis and she’s six now. So I got very Paepcke about it. I’m going to conquer this thing. Not just plowing through. There’s an arrogance to it. What happened was as I learned more. I read every book on autism that year. We had her doing this ABA therapy, the given of what you do, and I was horrified by it. I didn’t like what I saw: she was screaming, they were shutting her in a room. It was horrible. “There’s got to be something else.” I found this approach called Floor Time—he’s brilliant this guy. Stanley Greespan in Bethesda. He coined the phrase. And we started to feel better. It’s more organic: you approach the child as you would any other. ABA is about memory and flashcards. In Floor Time, you get on the floor and you follow them. You create a physical obstacle when they walk away. You force an interaction. And we’re seeing results. I’ve taken her to the homeopathic doctor, the cranial sacro-therapist. I don’t know what they did. She has all these GI track issues, so we took her to this GI specialist in Boston.

MC: When did you get started working?

AZ: I had some time after she went to a special-ed school. You’re an artist. You’ve got to get back to creating, so I started doing the jewelry and I fell in love immediately. I was terrified. I signed up for a class. I started meeting people, getting advice, opinions, contacts, and people were unbelievable. An Eastern European gentleman from Tiffany’s said I could come by his studio any time. I met another jeweler and designer, he’s Belgium, he won the DeBeers award. How did you get started, how do you get a client list, how do you mark up, how do you get your gems? I immediately had ideas of what I want to make. It’s an art to set a gem-setter. I’ll never be a professional, but I’m trying to learn. I went straight with gems and they were all drilled and I was stringing them. And almost immediately I started working in metal. I was so attracted to all the equipment and the machinery. They’re heavy-duty machines and I loved that. I had a boyfriend in my early 20s and he got me a drill. We were renovating in the Hague.

MC: A girl who loves tools.

AZ: Power Tools. My studio is in Long Island City. I have a flex shaft, it’s handheld, a polishing machine, soldering setup, tumbler. I bought a die-form press, a hydraulic press. You can make three-dimensional shapes. You can solder together. You can do anything. I have a fantasy of line of silverware. And making watch bands. I’m a little bit insane. Cufflinks, you know. If you can make it out of metal.

MC: Are you surprised by all this?

AZ:  I had no idea. If you told me I’d be a jeweler I’d say you’re crazy. When Emma was diagnosed, I was working as a creative director in an ad agency. I though photo shoots were my calling. I was good at it. I had written a play produced off-Broadway. All these things, I enjoyed them. The thing with jewelry there’s more control. If it doesn’t work it’s my fault. There’s also immediate gratification. I can have it done within a month. I started working directly out of metal, drew a couple of shapes. I’m attracted to filigree and I started designing these shapes, cutting them out, concave, a ripple. I’m amazed, and I’m always amazed. People say you’re in the zone, in the flow. I’m absolutely, completely present. I have a couple things going at once. I’ll move to different projects. I’m completely absorbed. I’m looking at the watch and it’s 5:30—and I used to hear about people like this. If Richard were here, he’d say the burst of energy was palpable when I created the jewelry. It was energy in a good way. I became easier to be around. To control your daughter’s autism is a losing proposition. So I let up on that and I focused to get to a different place with Emma. Now I have to make money to pay for the therapy.

MC: Do you think somehow her autism has something to do with your art?

AZ: I don’t.  Because a lot of those pieces—someone said it looked like a galaxy. To me it was a process you work with the wax and shoot it out. I had to develop a piece. I actually had to throw out the first two hundred pieces. The larger you get you have problems with a wax project. You have to work really fast. I didn’t want obviously floral shapes. My building in New York is covered in graffiti shapes, inside and out, they go before a guy, who reviews it and gives them permission to do it on our building. It’s near  PS 1. They call in the “Fun Factory.”

MC: Did that influence your art?

AZ: I wonder if it didn’t. The other part of it was I think growing up around art. I’ve had people say: “Oh that’s so Pre-Columbian or Oceanic.” We’d go to museums every weekend. Usually several. We had a playdate where we went to six museums in one day. Nick’s friend still talks about it.

MC: Are you look at shapes or specific things?

AZ: I’m just there to take it all in. I’ll bring my sketchbook, but I won’t sketch it. I was surrounded by art growing up. My grandmother had Miro and Chagall in the house, Picasso, a beautiful Calder that hung above the grand piano. My parents had modern art. I remember staring at. They had Henry Moore. It all gets tossed in the pot. All these things start coming out. I think I’ve always looked at the world visually. It’s like that play that Richard Albee wrote called “The Occupant” about Louise Nevelson. She says: “I spent 27 years becoming my art.” I loved it when she said it.

MC: I can relate to that.

AZ: And the joy of it. It’s like finding home. When I thought of home I thought of Aspen. We spent a lot of summers here, and came out for Christmas. Smoo was larger than life. My parents didn’t say: “Do you know who your grandparents are?” We didn’t have an inflated sense of who we were. It wasn’t up for discussion. I was so oblivious as a child of the [Smoo] myth, not the myth, the whole persona, and part of who she was. To me we were going to Aspen and it was this great space. We got to ski for free. I would nod my head. I knew there was a park, an auditorium with her name on it. Now we spend  three or four months a year here. Every school break, spring break, winter break, and part of the summer. Nick wants to spend the whole summer here. And Emma, when we bring her back to school, she takes a leap every time.

Entry Filed under: Art, Aspen, Women