As the first blind person to summit Mt. Everest, Erik Weihenmayer is already an inspiration. But somewhere in the process of losing his sight at age thirteen and then going on to climb the Seven Summits, Erik internalized an understanding of humanity that has now given his life even higher purpose. In addition to being an author, a highly sought-after speaker, and an award-winning athlete, Erik is an innovator who challenges how we perceive adversity. He helped a group of blind Tibetan kids climb to Mt. Everest’s advanced base camp, changing their own view of themselves and whole cultural perceptions. A highly creative thinker and visionary, Erik proves it’s not our eyes we see with.

Erik Weihenmayer on the cover of TIME magazine

Find an expanded interview with Erik Weihenmayer in my new book Field Trip:Volume One, available on Amazon here! Or read more about my new book here.

You’re someone who has been incredibly creative and tenacious in pursuit of your dreams and goals, which I imagine was in the face of well-intentioned advice from others. Can you share your own advice about evaluating strengths vs. passions in choosing a path forward?

Well, I think I will start by saying that I’m not a soundbite guy, because there’s no magic little thing that’s going to sound great in an answer here. For me, the excitement of life is that sort of journey of figuring out what your strengths are and what your passions are. There’s no way to separate it. You know, I’m a climber, and I fell into climbing. I only turned to climbing because I couldn’t play basketball anymore. And because I couldn’t do that and I wanted to be an athlete — my brothers were both athletes and my dad was an athlete — I wanted to figure out how to do it too. So I just stumbled upon rock climbing. I had no idea whether I’d be good at it or whether I’d like it, and so it was all about kind of reaching out and trying things and figuring it out. And so I would say my advice to people to find their strengths and their passions in life is to understand that the struggle of reaching out and trying things and stretching yourself really is an uncertainty about what the course of your life is going to be about. That begins to define your life and begins to help you understand what your course is. So it’s the struggles, it’s the failures where sometimes your strengths and your passions are ignited.

It’s awfully difficult to assess what your strengths and weaknesses are. You know, there are a lot of books out now that sort of talk about playing to your strengths, and don’t worry about your weaknesses. You know, kind of let go of your weaknesses, because you can exponentially grow your strengths, and with your weaknesses you might be able to get only incremental improvement and you might as well not waste your time. And that’s an ok argument. But any argument taken to the nth degree is almost dangerous. You can take it too far. So I think that you don’t really know what your strengths are until you’ve struggled and failed and failed again, and really gone through that process of exploration and pioneering to kind of figure out what they are. And through that experience, oftentimes those strengths and your clarity and your vision are formed. So you have to go through the pain to begin to clarify your life. It’s impossible not to.

It’s easy to write things off and say, ‘Ah, I’m not good at that.’ But you don’t really know — that’s the tricky part of that theory. And I think those theories of playing to your strengths — you know, just sort of inputting your strengths like a computer and then out pops your destiny in life — I think that’s a mistake. I think what you do is if you have a love of something or an interest in something that you’ve developed, or you think about the impact you want to make or the legacy you want to have in life, you start with that and then figure out how to get there. And you develop the strengths needed to get there. Some of them you have, some of them you have to struggle and develop, and then others, if you’re never going to have them, you just surround yourself with great people who will help you become more complete.

Watch the heart-stopping progress of Erik and his team as they work toward summiting Mt. Everest.

Were you always confident that you would achieve your goals?

When you’re young and you have done nothing, you have sort of this burning passion to do something, to make your mark in the world. And so I definitely had that passion, that drive. And sometimes that would get me in trouble. I remember training for Mt. McKinley. I lived in Arizona, which wasn’t the best place to train for mountains at the time, but my friend said, ‘So how are we going to start training for this? How about we do long runs through the desert?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I can do that, no problem.’ And I would run with my guide dog, but there were parts of the trail that were really narrow. And I think it was our first training session that I tripped and landed on a cactus and had to go to the emergency room. It was my first training session for my first big mountain. So sometimes that drive kind of gets you in trouble, but it also can motivate you.

And when did you determine this goal of climbing the Seven Summits?

Well, I lived in Arizona at the time. I was a teacher and I loved teaching — I taught fifth grade math and English, and I could have taught forever — and I told a friend of mine who was a teacher at the school that I’d like to climb, just basically rock climbing. And we’d go out climbing on the weekends, and we were climbing some rock face that was kind of hard. I got to the top, and he said, ‘Hey, we should try something bigger.’ And I said, ‘What do you think that should be?’ And he said, ‘How about Mt. McKinley?’ And that’s a leap going from rock climbing in the desert in Arizona to climbing a 20,000 foot, huge, glaciated peak in Alaska. But I got excited.

My friend had attention deficit disorder, so he was a guy who could take a big leap in life, but I couldn’t do that without being prompted. But once the idea was out there in space, I could then sort of figure out how to get from point A to point B, I could develop the plan how to do it. I have a bit of a linear mind, so I sort of developed our training plan, and we went out and trained on mountains all over the country — and failed on all of them! We never summited anything. But in that failure, you know, getting turned back on mountains in the Rockies, in storms, we kind of felt we had gone through a lot, that we’d tested ourselves, that we were ready. And I didn’t know if we were going to summit Mt. McKinley or not. You never really know if you’re going to summit a mountain or not. I mean, of course, you believe you are because that’s the way you have to proceed — you have to see yourself completing it — but you still never know. You just never know what’s going to happen. But you go forward totally prepared to succeed. So we were ready for McKinley, and we flew onto the glacier and faced a lot of storms, but we summited on our 19th day on the mountain. It turned out it was Helen Keller’s birthday when we summited, so that was pretty cool. But getting there, I worked harder than I ever had in my life. There were days when I was so absolutely wasted and felt like I could not take another step, so it definitely was a great learning experience. Because whenever you do your first big thing in life, you realize how hard you have to work and what a mental struggle it is. So when I look back — this was sixteen years ago — I still think that was my hardest peak because it was such a game-changer for me.

It’s funny, because there were so many times throughout that climb where I thought, ‘I am not cut out for this. This is miserable, what am I doing here?’ And I finished the climb and I slept for like three weeks when I got home — I just slept, I was so wasted, I’d lost a ton of weight. But it’s funny, because three weeks later, you wake up and you’ve forgotten all the terrible stuff and all the suffering. And all you remember was the great camaraderie between your friends, and standing on top, and going beyond your expectations. All the good stuff comes out, and all the bad stuff just sort of drifts away. That happens every single time you go to a mountain.

I knew Kilimanjaro wasn’t as hard — it’s one of the Seven Summits — so I was kind of on the Seven Summits course to climb the tallest peak on every continent. And I didn’t even know if I could do it, but I thought I’m gonna set myself on a trajectory and I’m gonna try and see if I can do this. And I thought, ‘Hey, maybe I’ll get five out of seven!’ But I was keeping my mind open to the experience and trying to grow and figure out how I could do this stuff and wrap my head around this stuff. And Kilimanjaro was not as hard as McKinley, but it turned out to be pretty hard, and I just kind of kept going. And it was only like a month before I was planning my next trip.

Erik Weihenmayer on Mt. McKinley, photo by Jamie Bloomquist

Erik Weihenmayer on summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro

Erik Weihenmayer on the summit of Mt. Cook, New Zealand, photo by Eric Alexander

You’ve written books and have done speaking engagements and so many other things now. At what point did you begin to internalize and share these larger lessons that have led to this part of your career?

I had had a lot of personal successes on big mountains before Everest, but I have to say, I think Everest was the paradigm shifter in my life. When I thought about climbing Mt. Everest, when I was training, I thought about all the massive hurdles and was realistic about all of them. When you go to a mountain and you can see it, you look up at that mountain, and you’re just so intimidated by this massive peak. And not only the physical nature of it but the folklore and the legend behind it, and Mt. Everest obviously has all that. You know, hundreds of people dying and struggling trying to get to the summit. So when I would think about climbing Mt. Everest, it almost defied my imagination to see myself standing on top. It really was quite a struggle to keep myself from going, ‘What the heck am I doing?’ It was a real mind game. So to go through the experience and actually reach the summit, it might have changed other people’s ideas of what was possible — well, first of all, it changed mine! So that was another big game-changer for me, because I now realized what it took to do something that seemed pretty near impossible.

So after that I got home, and life was totally crazy. There was paparazzi at my house, and Oprah calling, and I was on the Tonight Show, and all that kind of craziness. So the external life changed, but also I started to think, ‘OK, maybe I’ve gone through enough that I might have something to teach other people. Maybe I have some things that could help people.’ Kids in particular, and not necessarily blind kids, but kids who have challenges and who have their own struggles. And that’s pretty much everyone, almost. And that’s when I wrote my first book, which was more of just a memoir, just a book where I wanted to share with people. Because I think the best kind of writing is when you take people on a journey and you say to them, ‘Hey, look, I don’t have all the answers, but let’s go through this experience together. I’ll take you on this journey, and we’ll learn together.’ And so a kid sitting in English class who isn’t blind reads that story and finds a lot of common ground and says, ‘Holy cow, I’m not blind, but, man, I relate to this guy’s experience! I struggle in a different way.’ So that was really my goal for that book: not necessarily to teach people anything, but to kind of find that common experience.

It wasn’t until my second book, The Adversity Advantage, that it became more of a how-to book. I teamed up with this co-writer named Paul Stoltz who had studied resiliency around the world, and we wrote this book together about how to confront and harness adversity. He kind of came at it from the science side, and I came at it from the experience side.

Erik Weihenmayer and his team on the summit of Mt. Everest, photo by Luis Benitez

Erik Weihenmayer on Times Square billboard for Foundation for a Better Life

How do you assess risk?

First, I would say I’m not a blind Evil Knievel, you know, getting shot across the Grand Canyon. I’m not looking for a way to defy death. For me, the exciting part isn’t about the risk. The risk is not the end-all. But it is something you have to assess and work your way through in order to have great rewards in life, to see great things and experience great things and have success. So risk is like one of those necessary evils that you have to figure out how to master — or work with it, but never master. And it’s a struggle to do that. Climbers especially assess risk all the time, and a lot of the great climbers are dead. They say there are a lot of old climbers and bold climbers, but there aren’t old and bold climbers. So you’ve got to be careful. I’m not a big risk taker, but in a sense, you have to lay it out there. You have to know when to lay it out there on a mountain, because you’re never going to summit anything unless you’re willing to lay it out there. But, at the same time, you do it in a very, very careful and strategic way. And you don’t do it all the time. It’s a science and an art to know when to lay it out there. And it’s something you learn your whole life, and you make a lot of mistakes along the way. It’s a real balancing act.

You know, I’ve turned back on probably 50% of the mountains I’ve been on. And there have been mountains where I’ve said, ‘Come on, we’re a half an hour from the summit! I’ve got the summit fever!’ And my friends turn us back, and thank god they did, because things might have gone really bad, you know? And then I’ve been on big peaks where you say, ‘We’re almost there, let’s keep going,’ and the lightning’s exploding all around you, and you squeak through and you high-five it in the parking lot. So it’s so tricky to figure it out. And a lot of times it’s easy to say, ‘Ah, the mountain beat us this time,’ — and when I say mountain, that could be anything. But when you look at a situation, it’s so easy to relinquish control and say, ‘Well, the weather and the conditions weren’t right.’ So the point is that the elements, the environment, it isn’t going to change for you — it is what it is. The only thing you can change is yourself. So I’ve always thought, ‘OK, the mountain is what it is, and I have to adapt my approach to make it work for the situation that I’m seeing, that I’m experiencing here.’ And it’s a very sort of pragmatic and sort of brutally honest way of approaching life. You don’t see life the way you wish it were, you’ve gotta see it the way it is. That for me is the first step in succeeding in any situation and then adapting my approach to that situation.

Erik Weihenmayer climbing Ama Dablam, photo by Didrik Johnck

Erik Weihenmayer in Arctic Team Challenge in Greenland

Erik Weihenmayer climbing ice fall in the Himalayas, photo by Rob Raker

I love your examples of what you call positive pessimism: “You may be blind, but you sure are slow!” or “It may be cold, but at least it’s windy!” So in this economy, I guess we’d say, “It may have been a near catastrophe, but at least it’s long and drawn out!” Is part of harnessing adversity about keeping a sense of humor about it?

Yeah, it definitely is. Positive pessimism is sort of a bit of a dark way of laughing at yourself and saying, ‘Hey, we may be facing a tough time right now, and it’s hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but we’ll get through this together.’ It’s sort of like asserting a bit of control over your course. And there are big overwhelming challenges right now that we’re facing, but if you can make a joke about it, it’s sort of like you’ve pulled it into your control a little bit more than before.

And I also think that, yeah, we’re in a challenging time right now, but when people are facing challenges, that’s the greatest time of growth. So this is the time to really be making ground, rather than just kind of digging in and holding ground and trying not to retreat. When adversity strikes, it’s a very pivotal moment where you can make really great progress in your life. So I guess I believe the opposite of sometimes what you’re taught — that in a crisis you just sort of hang on. I think in a situation like this, this is like an earthquake. The ground’s moving underneath you, so use that energy to propel yourself forward.

In the following video clip, Erik discusses one of his early inspirations and his philosophy about harnessing adversity.

Your climbing entails life-or-death choices, which may seem a world apart from the theme of art and design. Though for the creative people I’ve interviewed, I think it does feel like a life-or-death choice, and many have taken enormous leaps of faith to pursue what they love. Do you have a philosophy, especially after experiencing so many different cultures, about what our purpose is in life?

One is that life is unfair, that it’s really unfair. You know, you’re a baby born in Africa and you live a month and you’re eaten by termites. Or you’re born blind, or whatever. I mean, life is just not fair — and, in fact, it’s terribly unfair. But if you are given a chance to live a decent length of time, then what I’ve learned is that in a way it comes down to everyone being born with certain challenges or hurdles or barriers. And I think maybe a bit of the meaning comes from doing the absolute best you can, maybe even better than you think you can, with what you’re given. So taking what you’ve been given and just squeezing every bit of potential out of that and making an impact in the world and making a difference.

Erik Weihenmayer with one of the blind Tibetan kids he led to Mt. Everest's advanced base camp, photo by Didrik Johnck

Erik Weihenmayer with teammate Jeff during Arctic Team Challenge

Erik Weihenmayer speaking at the Presidential Inaugural Conference

What is your involvement now with BrainPort, and what’s next on the horizon for you?

BrainPort is amazing technology. It’s basically a camera that I’m wearing on my head — nowadays it’s just a tiny camera mounted on a pair of sunglasses, it’s really come a long way. And it presents an image that tingles on my tongue. So it’s like 400 vibrating little dots, and when they light up in certain ways, they form lines and shapes and ultimately patterns and images. And so I can “see” certain things. So they’ve given me a BrainPort and asked me to test it out. So I can use it to read notecards. My son is adopted from Nepal, so he was learning English, and I could read the notecards faster than him. And playing games with my kids — I mean, that sounds like nothing, but to see what people are doing, to see your kids’ faces, and play little games with them and see what their hands are doing, it’s incredible.

I’ve been successful enough in life to have free time and to be able to make my own schedule and to be able to pursue things that I have no financial interest in. So BrainPort’s one of those — I’m just a happy volunteer. I like what they’re doing. I think it’s neat when you’re involved from the ground up with some of these things that twenty years from now that might totally make a person’s life different.

In the following video clip, Erik tests an earlier model of the BrainPort device that lets him see for the first time since he was thirteen years old.

On the horizon is lots of climbing. The ten year anniversary of our Everest climb is coming up in a year, and I’ve been organizing it. The guys I climbed with ten years ago, I haven’t lost touch with hardly any of them. We’re all still good friends, and we’ve done a lot of different climbs together. A lot of our lives were really transformed by Mt. Everest and that climb that we did. Like one guy went on to raft the entire Blue Nile from source to sea — 4,000 miles, and it had never been done before. And I think the team has gone on to climb Everest collectively eleven or twelve times since that first climb. So collectively the way the team has decided to give back is that we’re going to guide a team of injured military veterans to the summit of a peak called Lobuche, which is next to Mt. Everest. It’s 20,000 feet, so it’s 8,000 feet or so below Everest, but it’ll still be a good adventure.

What do you love about your work and your life?

I guess, what part of it don’t I like? I have a beautiful family. And I have a job where I work really hard, but I can make my own hours. And I get to travel and work with young folks on different adventures. I get to take people who sometimes might be pushed to the sidelines and teach them how to live in the mainstream of life, and that’s definitely fulfilling.

Erik Weihenmayer climbing in Thailand, photo by Charley Mace

Find out more about Erik’s speaking engagements, his work with teachers and students, his books and DVDs, or general information from his website.

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Sculptor Richard Calvin came to his art along a most unorthodox path. Originally trained as a sheet metal worker with British Nuclear Fuels, Richard learned to craft metals into precise forms of the highest standards — training that also sparked his interest in sculpture. He then traveled around the world, picking up his Jack Kerouac outlook on life, and later returned to London to study philosophy. Along the way, Richard never lost his interest in sculpture, and he now has a growing art career which he balances with more practical design work and other ventures in his ex-pat home with his family in Spain.

Sculpture by Richard Calvin

I see you have quite a varied work background and a clear entrepreneurial spirit, marketing rental properties in beautiful Spain and also flying off to tennis tournaments around the world to do a little tennis trading on the side. When did your interest in sculpture begin, and did you have formal training?

I have never had any formal training in either manual, hands-on, “this is how you sculpt” or in academic studies directly related to art. I did study philosophy at university in London while in my mid 20′s. I first became interested in sculpture during my apprenticeship at British Nuclear Fuels at the age of 17. My life has taken me to many different places around the world. I have always kept an interest in sculpture during those years, but it has never really been easy to combine my life and work and to find the time to sculpt at the same time. It is only over the last five or six years, since my wife Sara and I and our three young boys have been living in Besalú, Catalunya, that life has settled down somewhat and I find myself with some spare time to be able to devote myself to sculpting.

The tennis trading can be a bit complicated to explain, but I get to travel quite a lot to various tournaments around the world, which also gives me a slight time time advantage over those watching on TV. Over the last couple of years, it has become much harder to earn a living from this as a lot more people are doing the same thing. So, you can see my life is a little complicated, but together with the tennis, sculpture and Sara’s villa rental agency, we manage OK.

I understand your specialize in stainless steel. What do you like about working with this material, and did this preference come about from your sheet metal and welding trade work?

My first sheet metal instructor was from an era where true sheet metal workers used geometry to develop a pattern on a sheet of metal, then cut by hand and join together using traditional methods rather than welding. Now everything is automated. From learning how to develop obliquely truncated pyramids, twisted square transformers, and oval to circle transformers, I first became interested in creating unusual shapes and forms. Later in my apprenticeship, I was taught how to weld stainless steel to acceptable nuclear standards — which are pretty high! I have worked in many different places learning different skills along the way, which has put me in good stead to be able to transform a piece of sheet metal into my sculptures.

Sculpture by Richard Calvin

Sculpture by Richard Calvin

Sculpture by Richard Calvin

What were your early aspirations and interests as a child, and how have those evolved into the work you do today? Did you have any mentors that helped put you on this path?

This is a bit of a difficult one, really. Early aspirations as a child, I would say to be a hobo traveling bum! During my apprenticeship, I read On the Road by Jack Kerouac and listened to a lot of Bob Dylan. I couldn’t wait for my apprenticeship to end so I could go traveling and experience the world. I did leave my small town in Northern England and first went to London and then Devon in southwest England before saving enough money to travel to Australia at age 22. After 6 months traveling around Australia, I came back to Europe, where I worked, hitched across Europe, and bummed around before returning to university to study philosophy in London at age 25. I would say this part of my life has had quite a great influence on my later life and has helped the creative juices, so to speak.

Sculpture by Richard Calvin

Like many artists, you combine your work in art with more practical commissions such as kitchen projects and, as you joke, ‘repairs to your nuclear reactor.’ Do you like keeping a hand in everyday projects of this nature in order to stay grounded as an artist?

Absolutely. I am not yet quite at the stage where I can survive and support my family by solely selling sculptures. This is my aim, and one day I hope to be in that situation. But at the moment, I have to pay the bills and feed the children, and I find that more “normal” work is easier to find than selling sculptures.

When did you move from Cumbria in England to Besalú in Spain, and does this environment you live in now inspire your work in any particular way?

I left Cumbria at age 21 and moved to Catalunya when I was 33. The interim years were spent in various places around Europe and the UK. I met my wife, Sara, at university in London in 1993. She is a Catalan girl from Barcelona, and we lived together in London and Barcelona before buying our first house in Canterbury in Kent, UK, in 1998. We sold up and moved over to Besalú in 2001 and have never looked back! Catalunya has produced many artists over the years — Dalí, Picasso, Joan Miró, to name a few. There are plenty of ways to find inspiration here. The countryside is amazing, the coastline is fantastic, and just being here is a privilege.

Besalú, Spain

Gallery show by Richard Calvin in Banyoles, Spain

When clients approach you to do a commissioned sculpture, what sort of input do they give? Do you have a specialty within this realm?

Because stainless steel doesn’t rust, most of the commissions I do are for outdoors. The normal process is I meet the client, go to the place where they want the sculpture to sit, then through a process of sketches and talking to them and getting their feedback come to a basic agreement. If needed, I can make a rough prototype from card before starting in earnest.

Outdoor sculpture by Richard Calvin

Backyard sculpture by Richard Calvin

Outdoor sculpture by Richard Calvin

For your own sculptures, what inspires your designs? Do you do anything, go anywhere, or look to other art forms to seek inspiration?

Normally before I start, I have an idea of more or less what I am trying to make. This depends on what material I have available in my studio. When I have a chance, I love to visit art galleries and museums, but there is no one artist or sculptor who inspires me, not consciously anyway.

Sculpture by Richard Calvin

How are you promoting your work? Are you showing your work in galleries or are new commissions coming by word-of-mouth?

I have an exhibition on at the moment in Banyoles. This finishes on January 9th, and I don’t have anything else planned as of yet, although I am looking at exhibiting at the Curia Real in Besalú sometime in summer 2010.

Gallery exhibit in Spain of sculptures by Richard Calvin

What advice might you have for people just starting a creative career, particularly in this economy?

Tough question. One of the old answers to this is to come up with something which has never been done before. Easier said than done, I know, but originality is what will get you known. Take inspiration from artists but try not to copy, add your own touch or ideas and see where it takes you. A little bit like the road in Kerouac’s novel: the road is there — go down it and see what happens but remember to have fun while doing it! Keep your eyes and ears open, and be receptive to new experiences. Bit of philosophy in there somewhere as well!

What do you love most about your work and your life?

Another tough question. Well, I guess the things I love the most are my family, friends, and the place where we live.

Richard Calvin

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John-Paul Philippé finds his way through his art as nature finds genius in place and form. Born and raised in Oklahoma, John-Paul lived as a painter in London for over two decades, later moving to his current home in New York City. An almost comedic first encounter with Barneys creative director Simon Doonan led him not only to steady work for this artful retailer but also to his ever-widening exploration of other art forms. Inspired by motifs ranging from modernism to soap suds to the beauty that surrounds his rural cabin, John-Paul is forging a connection to his roots and his way forward.

Painting by John-Paul Philippé

The common thread I see among your various works are the organic shapes that at times seem to reference an aesthetic of the late 1940s and 1950s and at times seem to have a tribal look to them. How would you describe your overall aesthetic, and in what ways to you branch off of that?

Very much like what you say. When I was a child, being around modernism I think affected me. And the tribal thing — it’s interesting that you pick that up. I don’t think I was conscious in the beginning of the tribal look, but I am now. As a child I wasn’t like a lot of my peers, being an artist and caring about the way my room looked or whatever. And I explained it all to myself by telling myself I was actually — I called it an Eskimo at the time, not an Inuit — but I thought I might be one! So I wanted to find out about my heritage — my pretend heritage. And so I invented a whole world about an igloo and designed it all. And then through doing research as a little kid, I found out about totem poles and looked at all that a lot. And I just think it seeped into the work, and I’m conscious of it now.

But also things will inspire me like looking at the dirty dishwater. You know how the suds make these kind of swirly patterns and designs? I get motifs off of things like that. And I get motifs off of looking at incense smoke — all of that.

I’m much more in nature than I’ve ever been in my life being up here in my cabin so much, and that’s beginning to creep into the work too. I’m just welcoming it, you know? And I don’t quite know where that’s going to go yet, but I’m doing a new series of paintings for a show, and I think it’s going to come out.

Painting by John-Paul Philippé

Painting by John-Paul Philippé

Backlit panels for Barneys by John-Paul Philippé

I understand your were an artistic child growing up in Oklahoma, and later lived in Santa Fe and London before moving to New York City. What were some of your early memories of the visual world, and how has your creative sense and confidence evolved over time?

My early memories had a lot to do with decorative things at my grandmother’s house — she must have been an artist, but an unstated one. She used to do a lot of embroidery for the Catholic church and did all the vestments, and she would take tissue paper out of shoeboxes and have me draw designs she would transfer to tea towels, church altercloths and vestments, and so forth.

And my mom always had this story where I used to sort out colors as a little boy, like M&Ms and such. And my father and grandfather had a glass business, and they made and put in window glass and car windshields, but in the back of the shop there was a man who was a sign painter. He had all that equipment around him — the paints, the paint cans. And I used to get the cardboard from the boxes the windscreens came in, and he would give me scraps of paint. And I remember making abstracts — not thinking of them as abstracts — but I just loved the colors and manipulating the paint. And he would actually let me work on paintings on billboards with him. And also craft projects, like sometimes he would glue paillettes to make a logo sparkle or something. I remember doing that.

And I just mentioned the suds on top of water, and I’m sure I looked at that when I was a kid too. I remember saying something to my mother when I was tiny about the raindrops on top of hydrangea bushes outside my window. We were going to go to my grandmother’s house, and I ran around to pick one of those — I called it a snowball bush at the time. And I picked it, but then when I got into the car, I told my mom I could hardly pick it because it was so pretty. When we got there, I heard her tell my grandmother what I’d said, as if it was a strange thing. I think I was encouraged to be an artist, but then there were certain times when it had to be held back. And that was mainly because they didn’t think of it as a vocation. Once I got on my feet — and, you know, I went through difficult years — but once I got on my feet, it was fine. And now they’re so proud.

Are you working in gouache for all your paintings?

I work in gouache, which is just an opaque watercolor. When I was a kid, I worked mostly in watercolor, but then I started working in more of an opaque medium. And I know a lot of people don’t work on canvas with gouache, but the canvases are on wooden supports, and then I emulsify the gouaches. I learned from a mentor in London by the name of Peggy Angus that she would extend her paint with baking flour. And sometimes I do that to give it body and to rough it up a bit.

Painting by John-Paul Philippé

Painting by John-Paul Philippé

Painting by John-Paul Philippé

How long were you in London?

I was in London for twenty-three years. I got a job there right away just when I was traveling as a tourist. It was at a time when Charleston, the country retreat of the Bloomsbury set, was being restored. And I worked on that restoration, which also opened up all kinds of ideas about what could be done with my work. I freely admit my work has a design sense and a decorative sense, and all the applications I encountered in Charleston I never would have probably thought of if I hadn’t been working there, like wallpaper and so forth.

Mural by John-Paul Philippé

Textile (left) and mandala (right) designs by John-Paul Philippé

Were your paintings the launching pad for your other work in sculpture, murals, textiles and other creative pursuits?

Yes, I was always a painter and never really approached any of the other disciplines. Those things came about through working with Barneys. I was asked to do sculptural projects. What I did in the initial sculptural projects was I just removed the background of the paintings and kind of created the forms in 3D. So they existed in space that way.

Detail of metal sculpture for Barneys by John-Paul Philippé

Metal sculpture for Barneys by John-Paul Philippé

Since we’re on that train of thought, let’s talk about all the work you’ve done for Barneys throughout the world. How did they approach you, and how did your vision for this work come together?

I approached them! I was visiting New York and staying with some friends. It was before my career really took off, and I needed work. My friend Paul knew somebody who worked at Barneys, someone who shared an office with creative director Simon Doonan. And I didn’t know what Barneys was, but I called them up — just cold — and said I wanted to come in and talk with them about getting some work. And they said ‘Well, bring your portfolio in.’ And I said ‘OK.’ Then I hung up and realized I didn’t have a portfolio! So I borrowed an old-school Polaroid camera and just took pictures of objects. I thought it was all about display, and I thought what I would be doing is just arranging objects, which I do obsessively anyway. So I took objects that were in the apartment where I was staying and just arranged them on a tabletop and shot off a roll of film. I put them in an envelope and took them into the interview and put them out on the table. And Simon walked over and kind of looked at them and then went back to his desk. And then I got a call. We talked and they found out I was a painter, so they called me back and said, ‘We’d like you to do a little mural.’ It was out in Manhasset, and it was in the basement outside the women’s toilet! So that’s where I started!

It’s so funny how a little encounter, which seems inconsequential at the time, can lead to other stuff. And it’s through that I got a mentor in Simon. It opened up so many doors.

I was still living in London, and I didn’t want to pass up work. But I kept getting offers from Barneys to return and do things, and then from that it just got formalized into now where I have a contract with them. And the way my career seems to be going is that, you know, the trajectory is that I let it take over. It was a lot of work, and it’s enabled me to realize a dream of going to Japan that I’ve had since I was a child. Barneys has big stores in Japan, and I get to go exist there in, for me, an ideal situation where I’m working with local craftpeople and artists and living there for stretches of time and forming friendships. And then coming back here and just feeding off the experience, it enriches my life.

Exterior sculpture for Barneys Chicago

3D mural for Barneys Japan by John-Paul Philippé

Mural for Barneys shoe department by John-Paul Philippé

Mural for Barneys Japan by John-Paul Philippé

Backlit mural for Barneys by John-Paul Philippé

So this growing amount of work for Barneys, is that what led you to move to New York from London?

Yes, once I was contracted to work with Barneys, I moved to New York. I was still going to try to commute, and I got an apartment in the West Village. I was just going to break the lease and go back to London once this big body of work was finished. And once I got the key and moved in, I said, ‘I’m not going to decorate, I’m not going to decorate. I’m going back to London.’ But then I just couldn’t help myself, and I started decorating — and it became a home. And I stayed.

And my plan was never to get a little log cabin in the hills, but that was just something that evolved out of being in New York. Because a lot of my friends had places, and I realized it’s nice to have somewhere to go to escape the city. And I can’t say for sure at this point, but if I could figure out a way to make, you know, hay up here or something that would allow me to be up here more, I would. And so the need to pay the mortgage will mean that I’ll have to probably come up with some product with some local craftpeople I found working down by the river in a forge. And we’ve been making prototypes and furniture, and I’ve drawn them into the Barneys web where now they’re making sculptures for Barneys that I design. And that’s given me an excuse to be up here. So the glimmerings are there of how I might be able to make a transition with the economy being the way it is. Barneys has told me there won’t be any new flagship stores in the near future. In Japan it’s a different company, so they’re still opening up flagship stores there.

There’s a layering that’s interesting with your work — for example, sculptures that wrap around a corner, looking through your room dividers and sculptures to the space beyond, looking through retail merchandise to your murals, and so forth. When you first conceive of a piece, do you have a full sense of this layered relationship from the start or is this coming to fruition as you go?

Oh, yeah, we’re very conscious of doing that. When I first started working with Barneys, I was like a sponge absorbing whatever Simon was saying, because I loved his advice. You know, Barneys is pretty forward as far as visual merchandising goes and what kind of art they allow in the store, but it’s there to entertain an audience, really. And one of the ways we’ve made the work appropriate for a store is, as he said, ‘Once you do an eye, people have to look back at it.’ And it may not be a literal eye — it might be an opening, it might be an aperture, it’s a target. And people will focus on that, and you can direct their line of sight. So it’s something that’s very hidden in the work, but it’s definitely something that we plot out. First we look at the plans that the architects drew up and think about where we can intervene with art. And then once it gets to a state where we can actually go in and walk around — there may not even be walls yet — but we go through a whole series of looking at where we can put work. And how the traffic flow is going to go, and what they’ll see when they come around the corner, and all that. And so these sculptures have these holes in them so that you’re not blocking off views or you’re directing their gaze to look through it into another department. It comes instinctually now, but in the beginning it was much more plotted, much more pre-determined.

Interior steel sculpture for Barneys Japan by John-Paul Philippé

Backlit mural for Barneys Las Vegas by John-Paul Philippé

Sculpture for Kumho Asiana headquarters in Seoul, by John-Paul Philippé

3-story steel sculpture for Barneys Dallas by John-Paul Philippé

Partition for Barneys, design by John-Paul Philippé

Tell me about Cafe JP. This is your own restaurant?

That was someone who came into Barneys and saw the sculpture in the Ginza store, and they were opening a coffee shop/restaurant. And they just contacted me and said, ‘We’d like you to design a restaurant.’ And then it became, ‘Can we use your name?’ And then it became, ‘Do you want to do the menus? Do you want to do the music?’ And it became all about me. That totally just evolved. ‘JP’ happens to be two of the letters in Japan, so I thought, ‘Well, why not?’ I’m from the South, and they kind of wanted to play that up a bit, so we came up with a menu that reflects that. So there are things like Tempura Okra and all that. And so outside of my own home, that was someplace where I had complete control, and I also had to do everything, so that was very interesting. It’s in the Azabu Juban district of Tokyo. They made a little stamp for me with my initials that was copied off of how I sign a painting — it’s on the china, it’s on the website.

Interior of Cafe JP, by John-Paul Philippé

Interior of Cafe JP by John-Paul Philippé

Dishes at Cafe JP

I have to ask you about the private chapel you designed in the Dominican Republic. How did this come about?

That came about because Simon Doonan was at a dinner party with Edwina von Gal, who is a landscape designer. She was hosting a dinner party, and she was talking about a project that she was working on down in the Dominican Republic and lamenting the fact that she didn’t have time to attend to it all. It was a big project, and the client wanted a cliffside chapel. And she said, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to be able to get to that!’ And Simon Doonan piped up and said, ‘I know somebody who could do you a chapel!’ And, literally, within three days of him saying that, I was on a little plane with Edwina flying down to the Dominican Republic, having her tell me kind of what it was about and showing me photos on her laptop of the site. And I was doing the design for it in my lap, initial designs to show to the client. I came across that sketchbook really recently, and those designs were very close to what we ended up doing.

We had a small army of laborers down there, carrying things down the cliff. The design was affected because there was a natural blowhole with the marine caves beneath the site. So there is a point in the chapel where you look through a little window in the wall into a courtyard where this water spout comes up. And I spent probably a total of four months down there, maybe longer, working on that project. And my every need was catered to — it was a magical experience. It was a dream. And it’s not really that typical of my work, but it is in a way. The way I approached it was I’m making a little clubhouse. This was just like when I dug into the creek banks when I was a kid, except it’s gotta be permanent and withstand hurricanes. And it has withstood a couple of hurricanes, one of which devastated the property and blew everything else away. But it’s still there, and the family uses it a lot.

I’d live in it, if I could!

I wanted to! I didn’t have a home then, and I felt very kind of uprooted. I was just kind of staying with friends at that point, kind of between England and New York. And I just kind of fooled myself into thinking it was my own, so I just kind of created it as if I was going to be there. And obviously I wasn’t going to be there forever, and I never have been back since it was finished. But it was an interesting project, because I could revisit all that like building things as a child.

Private chapel in the Dominican Republic, design by John-Paul Philippé

Entrance to chapel in Dominican Republic, design by John-Paul Philippé

Where do you see your work going from here? Do you see yourself doing other architectural projects?

It depends. The last architectural project that I did was the Lehmann Maupin Gallery, and, again, that came through Edwina von Gal. I got a call from one of the gallery directors to say, ‘Edwina thinks you might be able to do the gallery for us.’ You know, my heart leapt up into my throat because now I know what these projects entail, and I knew I needed help. And so I asked Fernando Santangelo to help me, and we did it. And it was a dream project — the clients could not have been more accommodating — but I know what it entails now. It’s just waking up in the middle of the night and busting about in your head about a hinge. And I told myself, ‘I’ll never do this again!’ But it’s like childbirth — you forget about the pain! And you’d do it again in a moment’s notice if the right thing came along. I’ll accept other projects if they’re the right thing, if I’m feel like I’m able to do a proper job.

Lehmann Maupin Gallery interior, by John-Paul Philippé and Fernando Santangelo

Lehmann Maupin gallery space, design by John-Paul Philippé and Fernando Santangelo

You know, I’m not a trained architect, but all you need to do is listen to the space and have your antennas out and take on board the requirements that the space itself needs. Like that little ledge on the cliff — you can’t just put anything there. You have to watch the ocean, you have to see what the waves are doing, you have to imagine what a hurricane must be like there. I’m more of a hands-on, walk-around-the-place kind of guy, not drawing up abstract plans too much. Just listen to the space and try and get in touch with the genius loci — that’s the only way it works for me.

It’s like with the painting. Paintings tell you what to do. Putting a form down tells you what to do with the next form.

In terms of where I see my work going, I think it’s all about me being up here in the cabin. And I will be working with other people, like the people down here at the forge. I know there are artisans all around me, and I’m still new to this whole way of life up here. I want to find weavers, I want to find people who can make partition walls to hang from ceilings, all that kind of thing. I want to make rainchains. I had a gourd patch this year, and I got 300 and something gourds — like those swan-necky ones — and they’re drying in the barn. They fill up an entire wall, and they’re going to be something. I have a commission to do a partition wall in Japan in a bridal department, and I’m starting to mull over, ‘well, how could I make them attractive in a bridal department hanging from a ceiling in Japan?’

John-Paul's cabin in rural Connecticut

Barn on John-Paul's rural property

What do you love about your work and your life, and do you have favorite things that inspire you?

Oh, I just feel blessed, and sometimes I pinch myself. You know, in quiet times, I think it’s such a strange thing to be an artist. Maybe it’s because sometimes I felt different from my peers, and it felt like it was coming from the outside. And I’m just a cipher for what is coming from the outside, and so I try to still be aware of that and open to that. And I’m one of these people who doesn’t have an awful lot of plans as to what’s down the road, say, a year from now. Although having a mortgage, you have to. Or you should! And that’s why it all connects back to trying to find what I want to do next. And with the economy, I’m fine, but you have to, on some level, try and bring home the bacon. And I’m very confident things are going to be fine, and they are fine, but it’s an adventure to get to the next stage. And I didn’t expect to be here in the countryside, but I’m loving it. And if you weigh the city against here, this is where my heart is — going back to my roots, a little kid in the Ozarks.

All of my good friends, the people who are closest to me, they’re not artists. They’re people who work on the land, like my friend Edwina. And I’m on the land a lot. I’m a gardener, and I invite nature right up to my front door! I don’t mow the lawn. The tangle, the vines — it’s going to be in my work. And every day there’s a new phenomenon that I’ve never seen before. It could be the quality of the light, it could be a heron flying up out of the mist, it could be a shooting star lighting up the mountain — I mean, it’s extraordinary.

John-Paul Philippé

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