If you can hit where you want with the amount of force that you want, then you can do anything.

Heather McLarty

Artist blacksmith

Looking back at my childhood, I did make stuff; I’ve always kind of made things. It never occurred to me growing up that that’s what I would end up doing. I always wanted to go to college, so I went to UC San Diego and I started out as a math major. I had a really terrible calculus professor and he was teaching out of a really terrible book. That was actually the last time they used that book in the class because it was so bad. I was like, “No, I can’t do this.” Then I was like, “Maybe classical studies.” I took Latin because I’m an oddball. That was sort of fun, but then I thought that I don’t want to spend my life in an ivory tower and that sort of seemed like the most obvious choice for a classical studies person. I was getting rid of the general ed stuff but I needed some electives and my friend Henry DeVries said, “Hey, I’m going to take this drama class, why don’t you it with me.” So I took it, and it was really fun. The next quarter, I signed up for a scenery class where you go in and help build the sets for a play. That was really, really fun. So I ended up being a drama major. At UC San Diego, at least at that time in the drama department, you had to take an acting class, even if you didn’t want to be an actor. I found out I really didn’t want to be an actor! We had to take a directing class, tragedy, comedy, epic, those sort of literature-based classes. And then you had to take a lighting class, a costume class, and a scenery class. I think during the lighting class there was also sound. I really loved doing the tech stuff, with the exception of the costumes. I hate to sew, just hate it.

I applied to a summer theater in Santa Maria, PCPA, and was accepted to that. There was a bunch of us from UCSD that ended up going. I applied to be in lighting because I thought that’s what I wanted to do, but I was put in the prop shop instead. I was like, “Oh no, I really don’t want to do this,” but after the first couple days I was like, “Yeah, I really do want to do this!” I ended up working in the prop shop and it was ungodly hours, just horrible and for no money — it was really fun.

That first summer that I was there in 1978 we did eight shows during the summer, in rotating rep in two theaters, which no one does because it’s insane. The shows would switch — the same show would never show twice in the same theater, it would switch back and forth from Santa Maria to Solvang. Some shows stayed only in Santa Maria or only in Solvang, but they would never play more than one night in a row. So the scenery was all built with thin wall steel tubing so it was lightweight but it was much stronger than normal 1x4 wood, and instead of muslin cover, it was covered with lauan usually or some kind of hard cover so it would stand up to the trucking and all that stuff. If you were a technician there, you learned how to weld, so that’s where I learned how to weld. I loved doing steel work, it was really fun. In the prop shop, you work with all different kind of materials in ways that normal industry doesn’t consider when they’re making those materials — using Styrofoam to carve giant birds, or whatever. I didn’t know how to forge, but I could bend stuff, super primitive, like put a long piece between the branches of a tree and bend it, just to get it done. So I messed around with a lot of steel stuff.

I worked in theaters up and down the west coast from Denver to Alaska; I worked at Alaska Rep for a season. I was always moving around, staying for a season, like six months or nine months. Eventually ended up at South Coast Rep in Costa Mesa and worked there for seven or eight seasons. I was always the prop person in those theaters who knew how to weld, so I would get all the steel projects, which was great. Usually I could weasel my way out of the sewing projects.

I met Troy at PCPA that first summer in 1978, so we had this sort of long-term relationship, sometimes living together for a few months, and then I’d get a job out-of-state and go somewhere else. It was kind of a slow ease-in to a relationship, which I think was actually really good. After working at South Coast for that more extended length of time… Troy is an actor and he was doing well enough in his career that we felt I could quit my job, and the idea was for me to design and build fabricated steel furniture. So fabrication, as opposed to blacksmithing; fabrication is cut-and-weld. It’s not much heating up… heating maybe to bend stuff but not changing the shape of the material that comes from the store.

I was used to not completely designing the pieces that I did. Working in the theater, I worked in LORT B theaters, so those bigger regional theaters: ACT, the Old Globe, Alaska Rep, Arizona Theater Company, Oregon Shakespeare. Those theaters are big enough that they have really excellent designers. They determine the design not just of the scenery but also the props, to varying degrees depending on the designer. Sometimes you get really specific drawings that you can absolutely follow and they want it to look like that, and sometimes it’s a napkin sketch, “It needs to do this and look kind of like that.” But I wasn’t starting from scratch, generally. So when it was like “Ok, I’m quitting my job, I’m going to make furniture,” and I also obviously wanted it to be bespoke original work… it was almost too broad of a situation for me. I was like, “I don’t know how to market anything, I don’t know what people are going to want to buy…” Finally Troy got fed up and said, “Just go out there and make anything and I will deal with selling it.” And I was like, “Ok!”

I was talking to a friend of mine who was a designer at South Coast Rep, and I was telling him my issue, “I don’t know what to design, I don’t know what I want to make…” and he was like, “Come to my house, I’ve got tons of books on design with lots of images and you can just peruse what you want.” I borrowed three books, all on some kind of metal working. One was actually jewelry. And this would have been like 1991 so there was no internet and I didn’t have a computer. Of the three books that I borrowed, it turned out that when I looked at the images, all of the stuff that was most exciting to me was all forged. Ok, I have to learn how to do that. One of the books had kind of some description of how to do it and maybe a couple pictures, but it was pretty sketchy, so I was trying to teach myself out of a book.

I happened to go to a craft fair in Santa Monica with a friend of mine who’s a scenic artist and we’re walking through and there’s a blacksmith there from Arizona. I started talking to him and he had normal craft fair sort of stuff, like hooks with long-horn steer heads and sort of cowboy-ish stuff, so I wasn’t particularly interested in the design of his stuff but he obviously knew how to forge. I was like, “How do you learn this stuff, can I take classes someplace?” He was in Arizona, so that was far, but he said, “There’s a thing coming up, the national organization is having a conference in San Luis Obispo,” and he told me when, it was in the summertime I think, and he said, “You should go to that.” So again, pre-internet, that’s all the information I had. I called up the San Luis Obispo Chamber of Commerce and said, “This guy told me about this thing, do you have any information?” They said it’s ABANA, the Artist-Blacksmith’s Association of North America, and they gave me the office number for the organization in the Midwest somewhere at that time. I called up and this really lovely woman answered the phone and I said, “Somebody told me about this thing,” and she said, “Oh yeah, I’ll send you information and send us a check.”

It was a three-day conference at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. At Cal Poly, they had a big teaching station set up with 17 forges or something, it was huge. I think I didn’t close my mouth the whole three days, I was just like, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe what people can do.” It’s astonishing, and people come from all over the world. There were Japanese blacksmiths that were demonstrating, there was a French blacksmith that I watched. Because I knew so little and I hadn’t seen anyone blacksmith besides myself trying to dink around, I couldn’t even follow what they were doing, it was so fast to me. But there was this teaching station for beginners, and you drew lots to get a spot. Well, most of the people were really experienced and they weren’t going to do that, so I kept getting spots which was great. That’s where I met Jay Burnham-Kidwell; he really was the first person who taught me hands-on how to do stuff. It cut so much time and energy out of bonehead newbie mistakes that they can quickly move you through. It was amazing and I obviously had met my people. Through that organization, I found the CBA, the California Blacksmith Association, which is the state-wide organization and I’m sure at the time it was the biggest in the country and I think it probably still is. Then I found a more local group in Orange County so I could get more hands-on help. And then I started making stuff.

I use a gas forge, it runs off a little propane tank like your gas barbeque. It’s really well insulated with space age material. Mine is really small and it has a door with an opening in the front so if it’s something smallish I can stick it in; if it’s bigger, there’s a port in the back so it can go all the way through if I want to heat the center of something. I can open that front door all the way to put something bigger in. A lot of people still use solid fuel: coal or coke or charcoal. I have never used it here because of AQMD [Air Quality Management District]. I have a friend who’s an incredibly good blacksmith in Redondo Beach and that’s all he uses is solid fuel. But he is on a first-name basis with everybody in the fire department because if somebody sees some smoke and they call it in, they have to go. They can’t say, “Oh, we know it’s Gary, it’s fine.” They have to go. I thought I’d skip that. The gas forge is as clean as a gas barbeque… or cleaner because it doesn’t have things that are melting or burning. To me, what forging is, is getting the metal hot enough that it becomes plastic — like clay, you just can’t touch it with your hands. Instead of squishing clay with your fingers, you’re squishing the metal — usually steel in my case, but I do sometimes use nonferrous stuff — between an anvil and another tool, usually a hammer, but you can use other kinds of top tools that are more precise to squish it in very particular ways. But that’s basically it. You can take this industrial, dead material and through heat and pressure you can completely change the shape and the form. It’s getting the metal to squish in the way that you want it to squish.

It’s fun. It doesn’t get old for me. There’s something primal about it. And I love that it’s really physical, I like the physicality of it. I probably am stronger than I look, but I’m not a big behemoth. Even if you don’t learn all the equations, you learn how physics works. A lot of it, I feel, is really about physics. For instance, increasing the speed of my hammer increases the work that I can do to a greater extent than increasing the weight of my hammer. Somebody who’s not necessarily up to swinging a five-pound hammer with one hand — which I am not — by increasing the speed, I can still get a lot of work done. You can learn how to become more efficient. I feel like the first maybe year that I worked was really about developing hammer control more than anything else. If you can hit where you want with the amount of force that you want, then you can do anything. If you have hammer control, that’s your baseline of, “Ok, now I really can make stuff.”

Through most of my career, I’ve done a lot of work that’s both forged and fabricated. Because I started as a fabricator, I’m comfortable with that. I designed and built a chair that has sort of Chippendale-style front legs except they end in horse’s hooves instead of lion’s claws, or ball and claw. And the back has a steer skull, and it’s a long-horn, so the horns come out and curl around and become the arms of the chair. I did a lot of cowboy-ish stuff partly because my husband’s from northwest Montana and we had a place up there and that was kind of a thing for a minute in the late 80s, early 90s. Troy was really supportive, and when he would go to work in TV or movies he would take pictures of some of my work and leave it in the makeup trailer so other people could see it. So I slowly started getting commissions and then whatever people wanted, I would try to make it happen.

Now I only take the fun projects. I will try to find another blacksmith who will take something that isn’t necessarily up my alley. Sometimes people will come to me for purely fabrication work and there are lots of people who do that kind of work that are really set up for that. It’s stupid to hire me to just do fabrication because I’m just not set up to do projects that are just that. I try to connect people to somebody else who’s maybe more suited to their project. About six months ago or a year ago maybe, I said in my outside voice, “Ok, I’m going to retire and not take any more commissions,” because we have so many projects here that my husband has waited years for. And then of course immediately I got commissions from three people that were either really fun or really great clients that I’ve worked for before. So now I take the really interesting, bizarre ones.

Someone will contact me and say, “I want a gate,” let’s say, and I’ll arrange to visit them on-site. That does a couple things: I’ll take my bag of tricks, small pieces that I can carry easily and put out so people can see it and touch it, because people don’t really know what’s possible. And it lets me get to know them, meet them in person, which is better, I feel. Also it lets me see a little bit about what their taste is. See what their garden looks like or if it’s something that’s going inside, what their furnishings look like, what kind of vibe they have, so that I’m working with what I’m seeing and not just what they’re telling me. Some people are better at that kind of design communication than others, so it’s great for me to be able to see where it’s going. I might take some quick measurements and then come back to my studio and do some sketches and send them sketches so that we can hone in exactly where we’re going. Sometimes it goes really easily and sometimes it takes a bit of mucking about. But it’s a lot easier to change on paper than in steel. Sometimes it will mean doing a sample or two so they can see what it looks like full-scale. And that varies a lot with the client.

I had a really wonderful client in Mount Washington. He was hiring me to build railings, but he actually didn’t want railings. His daughter thought he should have railings in his garden. He called me up and told me that and so I went over and looked. He was really an artist; I saw that he had some of his own sculptures outside and I saw the inside of his house — really beautiful but also he had some whimsical stuff, and he talked about how he loved Gaudí. I came back, and instead of doing meticulous drawings, I had a couple ideas and forged a couple pieces and then had him come over, I think for some other reason. He came over and I just had those out on the table, and it worked. He walked by and said, “What is this?” and I said, “I’m so glad you asked! I did this with you in mind.” And he said, “Yeah, do that.” That was easier because I felt like I had a pretty good idea of what he was aesthetically interested in and he was oddball enough that I could go pretty far outside the box. But that varies.

There was an artist blacksmith named Adam Leventhal who died right before 2000. He had his own studio, a one-person forge on West Adams. His parents owned his property and all his tools and all of the stuff that was left there from him. They wanted to do something in his memory; they had a hard time finding an organization. They were looking for a nonprofit or a school and they approached UCLA, I think. My friend Bob Cooper was on the CBA board at the time and they approached CBA and CBA was like, “No, we don’t want the responsibility of having the property.” So Bob approached them after the meeting. They were thinking they wanted to have a museum, and he said, “I don’t think a museum would be viable financially,” because it didn’t come with a giant endowment. But he said, “I think we could do a school and charge for classes.” And they said ok.

Bob started the organization [Adam’s Forge] and then we applied for our 501(c)(3) status. Eventually we got that — it took a while — and we started clearing out his studio. It was piled full of a lot of stuff — tools and materials, a lot of stuff. That took quite a while. We ended up having to move because of neighbor complaints even though he had been there ten or 15 years or something. It turned into kind of an unfortunate situation. So we sold the property and didn’t have any place to be, but we got an ok to move in the Armory Northwest, so the Armory Center for the Arts gave us free space outside in a parking lot and we were there for like a year. That was on city property, the Armory didn’t own that. So after about a year, we moved to another place that the Armory had.

Space has always been a huge issue for us, because you can’t just do it anywhere. We always tried to have enough space to have at least six people in a class and pretty quickly we could do ten, so it takes a little doing. We moved around several times, we were homeless for a while, had stuff in storage. Finally, we had to pay for rent, we just went, “We can’t move every year,” because pretty much we were moving every year because we were trying to find free space. So we found space on San Fernando and we were there for a little while, like partway into COVID and then had to move in the middle of COVID. The place that we moved into was in Lincoln Heights — once we left Adam’s place we had always sort of been in northeast LA, northwest Pasadena, Lincoln Heights, Glassell Park. But the place in Lincoln Heights was not ADA compliant at all. When we were on San Fernando, we had had classes with wounded warriors so we couldn’t do that at all because we couldn’t get anybody in a wheelchair in or out of the building. Our lease came up and we decided we had to look for something else.

A board member who was on our board at the time found the space [in Simi Valley], which is just over the edge into Ventura County. People from LA think “Simi Valley, oh my god that’s so far.” It’s not; to me, it’s not as bad as going to the west side. But in certain respects, it’s kind of starting over. Every time we move, making sure that people know and getting our footing and that kind of stuff. The grants that we had been getting had all been through LA County and now we don’t qualify for those because we’re outside of LA County. Now we have to start over with the whole fundraising thing, so that’s challenging. We are going to start a year-end fundraiser, like right now. And we have a couple of new amazing volunteers who I’m hoping to bring onto the board. I really want to bring one or two new board members on who are more local and more connected in that area and know that scene better. I’m looking forward to that.

Adam’s Forge is run by women, essentially. Mary Jane is the executive director and she runs things on the day-to-day basis and is really in charge of the curriculum. She is also a blacksmith, so that’s I think probably really unusual and really helpful because we speak the same language and I don’t have to explain things. I’m the board chair. One of the first instructors that we actually hired — because we have a lot of volunteer instructors — is Amanda and she just works part-time but I love having her as an instructor. She teaches a lot of discovery classes, which is our intro class. She’s tiny, birdlike. I really like that because for both men and women, when people come in, their introduction is seeing that you don’t have to be a gigantic brawny person to do the work. I really like that. The men that come in see that and also see that women in the profession are really competent and that they can take direction from a woman. I just like it all the way around.

I also belong to an organization called SIB, the Society for Inclusive Blacksmiths. It’s an organization that supports all kinds of people in blacksmithing that don’t fit the sort of stereotype of the big, brawny, bearded guy. People of color, LGBTQ people, women… people across the spectrum. When that organization was starting, I was lucky enough to be asked to go to Oregon to build a bench. There were 11 of us, all women, who worked together building this bench and talking about starting this organization and how dd we want to structure it and all that kind of stuff. So we worked during the day on the bench but we cooked and ate all of our meals together, it was really fun. We all lived on site. We would get together in the evenings and talk about our experiences and what we felt was missing, what we wanted, what we wanted to encourage.

One thing that I feel like came out through those discussions is that women’s experiences inside blacksmithing organizations varied a lot depending on where you lived. In general, those of us who lived on the west coast, so California and the Pacific Northwest, felt welcomed and supported in our organizations — CBA, the Northwest Blacksmith Association, those kinds of organizations. We didn’t feel like we experienced a lot of prejudice. But women from the deep south and some places in the Midwest had very different experiences, they were dissed in those spaces. One of the women is just a super powerhouse blacksmith. She works unbelievably hard, she’s an incredible designer and builder. She can kick ass. And she would go to meetings of her local organization and they were not interested in any of her input and gleaning any of her expertise. It’s just really shortsighted. I thought that was really interesting that that came out. I’ve talked to other people, like people of color who were up in the Midwest and felt the same way: they would go to meetings and they were just like, “You’re not a white guy? You can’t know anything, what would you know?” We’re hoping to change that.

Particularly, in those two situations that specifically I know about, one is an Asian man and he’s a very good smith and he’s a really good bladesmith, which tends to lean a little macho also. I just feel like why would he continue to go to those meetings when he’s actually more skilled than most of those guys? And the same thing with my friend in the south who is likely to be much more skilled and experienced, so why go back? Why fight to get into something that you’re not going to get really much out of? What’s the point? I feel really lucky, in a lot of ways, to be in California.

When I was in college and trying to figure out what I wanted my major to be, I had been told in high school, as I’m sure many people were at the time — I graduated from high school in 1975 and we were told, “Engineering. We need engineers.” Then when I was about a year or two into college, they were saying, “Oh my gosh, there are so many engineers, don’t go into engineering.” I thought, “You know, if the experts at the time couldn’t predict what the job market was going to be, how am I going to know?” How should I decide what I want to do and what I want my major to be?

The main thing for me is: how do I want to spend my time? Most people spend most of their waking hours at work. If I just decide to do something for the money, what’s the money for? I’m spending my time so that on my vacation, two weeks a year, I can do what I want to do? So I thought, “If I pretend that I have the same opportunity to get any job in the world, and if I pretend that every job pays exactly the same, what would I do?” That’s when I chose working in the theater. I worked in the theater for 18 years and I got tired of parts of it; I still really liked other parts of it, but I was kind of ready to move on… same thing. How do I want to spend my time?

That might not work for everyone, but that worked for me. I’ve never really wanted to have kids; marriage was not on my list of things to do. I am married, but that kind of happened organically. Neither Troy nor I have had regular jobs and so by not having kids, it allowed us to do that. My business plan in my business has been: I like to make shit and have it go away and maybe the fairies will feed me. And so far good, so I’m not going to change it. So that’s my business advice! It worked for me. Results may vary.