Conversation with Julie Schmidt

Several months ago, I had the pleasure of speaking with Julie Schmidt of Juliet Jewelry. Julie Schmidt designs and sells beautiful jewelry here in Chicago area. She launched her jewelry at the Mercedes Benz LA Fashion Week and has been featured in several fashion magazines in Chicago, the rest of the US. and even internationally including Daily Candy, Chicago Scene, Chicago Journal, Hong Kong Watch & Jewelry, Philadelphia Style, and Chicago Magazine.

On a perfect summer day at an outdoor restaurant, we talked about her inspiration for her jewelry. She told me: “I spend a lot of time walking really early in the morning, when no one is awake, like 5am. I experience the city in a different way than I would right now. I see a lot of white space, negative space, around shapes. I’m moving towards more geometric shapes in the past year. I do follow trends. At first, I felt I was more of an artisanal jeweler. I feel that  over time I’ve become more on trend, or more of a fashion designer. I like to stay on top of the trends or before the trend hits the Midwest, which is easy to do. I catch things really quickly. I have an eye for the fine detail of simple things that people would overlook. I think my mother taught me that. She taught how to sew when I was eight, needlepoint, crochet… anything to use your hands. She taught me proportions. She really trained my eye without knowing it. I attribute a lot of that to her. In fact, when I work, I look at my hands... [and] see my mom’s hands. I feel like she’s always with me when I’m working. It’s really wonderful to have that feeling. She has passed.

“I spend a lot of time looking at the opposite of things that the average person looks at. I look at windows, walkways, corners of buildings,and the brickwork of that building, let’s say right over there. I love linear things. I could make some jewelry; it would be so extreme no one ever want to buy it. As an artist, I have to make a living so that’s why I’m focusing on fashion... Even just looking at the way those lights are strung, the shape [it] that creates. Or looking at the sky, it’s a soft cloudy, and billowy. Or there’s the rooftops with the two triangle houses. I see whispers of beauty in common things like that.”

I reflected that her work had an architectural feeling to it. She said, “I guess it does. My father was a construction guy. He was a general contractor. Although,he never talked to me about architecture, I’ve discovered through the years that I’m drawn to that. I like how things come together or the contrast between the two. The peaks of that building and the sky. The contrast of the soft and the really defined angles, the planes. I’ve never studied art, other than high school. I have a really strong knowing of what works for me and my business. And I hope people get it.”

What a pleasure to talk to Julie Schmidt about her work!

Check out her jewelry at her website: http://www.julietjewelry.com/

The Lights, Sky and Buildings on the day of our conversation. Photo: Elisa Shoenberger

Discussing Silhouette Art with Nina D'Angier

Back in July, I had the opportunity to talk with Nina D’Angier, graphic designer, writer, silhouette artist, and much more. We had met previously at several historical reenactments including the amazing Chicago Poetry Bordello. She is one of fifty artists still working in the artform.

I asked her about her work as a silhouette artist.  Nina D’Angier told me, “Silhouette art sorta found me. I was already here in Chicago at the time. Just starting my life in Chicago, I was in school. My husband...is also a magician. We both share a love for history and people. We had watched a documentary on his favorite magician Dai Vernon. [Magic] was the thing that he eventually made his name doing.... Prior to that, he was a silhouette artist. I’ve always liked them. You’ve seen [silhouette art]. I grew up in Florida so everyone had ones from Disneyworld. I always thought they were nice…. That’s a really cool thing from the time period. How sad that’s not a thing people do any more. I never made the connection that ‘Hey, why don’t you do it’ until we watched the documentary.

“It’s a rather curious thing that I happened to be rather good with scissors. It came from being a careful child. When you gave me something, and you told me to connect the dots or cut on this dotted line, I wanted to cut directly on it…. I really appreciated the way stickers—I had a sticker collection as a kid, cause the 90s— I really appreciated how the image had a perfectly spaced white border around whatever it was. When I got into things like collage, later on, I liked being able to cut the 2 mm of space around whatever the image was that I cut out. I remember perfecting that as a child. I remember having this impulse as a child at 7 and then doing it forever. I could cut out a perfect circle by the time I was 12. It was this weird thing, it was not super useful, but a skill I had cultivated over time.

“Anyway, we had watched this documentary about Dai Vernon. Aaron looked at me and said: ‘I think you’d be really good at that silhouette cutting.’ I said, ‘I think you that you are crazy. That’s insane. Look how fast he’s cutting those people out and it’s perfect.’ He was, “Let’s just try it.’ He runs out of the living room and comes back with the giant bulky kitchen shears and the a piece of college ruled loose leaf paper. He said, ‘Just do mine.’ So I indulged him. I am looking at his face and cutting out this image. It’s very a subtractive sculpture art. All of sudden it felt just like sculpture to me in that it’s like I was taking out of the pieces of paper that wasn’t his face. And it just felt really natural. Afterwards, both of us looked at it and we said: ‘Oh my god, that’s your face.’ And he said: ‘I told you would be good at this.’ To be fair, I wasn’t very good at first. It was enough to recognize him but not striking.

“I worked on it. And then about maybe four months later, I booked my first gig; it was a graduation. It was great. It was a thing I’ve continued to do for the past five years or so. I’ve started studying other people who’ve done it, what little the nuances and tricks they used. How do they differentiate between a child head  and adult head... How do you cut out curls? That’s the hardest thing for me. It’s been very exciting. A fun art to learn and very immediately rewarding.”

That’s just a tiny taste of the longer interview and all of the amazing work of Nina D’Angier.

Check out her Instagram: @ninadngr

Interview with Amy Meadows

A few months ago, I met with Amy Windows, ‎Retail Design and Visual Merchandising Consultant, about her work and career. She was the Senior Manager of Windows and Marketing Events at Marshall Fields for 25 years. She teaches visual merchandising at Columbia College and runs a consulting business.

I asked her how she got into her career. She explained, ”I was doing set design working for a regional theater company in Richmond, Virginia. I loved it. I loved the people I was working with. A career in the performing arts requires a level of passion and sacrifice that I didn’t necessarily feel comfortable making. I was on a bus downtown, just thinking, “What I am I going do? I don’t want to scrap my degree. There’s gotta be something.” The bus stopped and I looked over to the display windows for MIller and Rhoads and thought “if that were over there a little bit…” So the power of naivety and youth, I just called the head of display for Miller and Rhoads. “Oh hi. I was wondering if you can tell me more about your job.” I’m a huge advocate for the value of the informational interview. People like to talk about themselves. Bring them coffee. It’s fifteen minutes. There’s no expectations on them. They don’t have to decide to interview or not. All you are asking for is fifteen.

“They had a job opening at a suburban store. I took it. A few years later, I came to Chicago to visit my roommates. She was going to be busy during the day. I figured I’ll set up informational interviews. I went into Marshall Fields, they said, “How do you know about the job being available?” I knew nothing about the job available. I almost passed out. The reason that job was available was because an architectural graduate had just called and said she couldn’t take the job after all. She got an internship with an architectural firm she really needed to take. 10 years later we discover through cocktail parties and all sorts of stuff, that that woman was one of my husband’s roommates. She was at my wedding. Seriously, thank you so much for turning down that job because that’s how I got it. She had no idea. I had no idea. But there you go.”

I asked about her time designing windows for Marshall Fields, later Macy’s. It is a tradition for my mom and me to visit the Christmas windows.

“The most challenging thing about the windows, the Great Tree, the main aisle, all of those traditions: How do deliver on a tradition? [There’s the] widely held expectation yet keep it fresh. That’s the thing. Because we think of Disney as a time capsule but it’s not. Everything gets refreshed and, rewritten. They want new things. If everything was the same exact same way it was, it could look just as nice, but you wanted to see brand right. We would say whose name is on the door. We knew our customers expected something that was over the top, that would satisfy a wide generational breadth, because you are going to have grandparents with grandchildren on the shoulders. It became more and more multicultural society evolved. We stopped saying Christmas instead we said the holidays. One of my first windows was the Nativity scene. Do you see any departments doing Nativity scene windows anymore? But even when we did Harry Potter, there were critics who felt that we were promoting Satanic worship or that it wasn’t Christmassy enough... Some are Christmas stories but there other stories that you had to Christmasize. There’s only one Christmas scene in Harry Potter when they get gifts. But you still want to see twinkling lights, the snow, that sort of stuff too. How to merge that and still have it work?

Let’s say we’re doing Cinderella. Along State street from Randolph to Washington, we’ve got 13 window spaces, all different depths. You look at the narrative arch. The high points? She comes to the ball. That falls in the two shallowest windows. Can’t speed it up or can’t slow it down. You still have to tell the story. It has to make sense. The narrative has to hang together. Costs are always an issue. This is where theatrical tricks come in. Instead of having three fully 3D mechanical figures, could you have two that were 3D mechanical and simply have  a bas relief or silhouette with simple movement without the viewer thinking we’ve cut costs...That’s because everyone tries to be careful and creative about it. Could you do flaps that were painted, could you do faux-finished backdrops/set pieces like in a theater, something dimensional or constructed. Canvas always cost less than wood. [There’s] designing the proscenium, the frame all that visual information passes.

“We also try to design for layers of viewers. Little kids up close, little kids on shoulders way far back, and there’s an adult who might be reading the story to the child on their shoulders as they inch their way up. With each step closer to the glass, you should be discovering another new detail. You don’t want to be like: “Oh, we waited for this?” There should always be that: “Ooooh. Look at that. I didn’t see that back there. It still looked great. But Now that I’m all the way up here in the freezing cold, it was worth the wait.”

That’s all for now. To find out more about Amy Meadows and her work, check out her website: http://www.windowsmatter.com/index.php