Writing a page about your self seams to fall into two categories:
1 Self promotion and bragging peppered with arrogant claims to divine inspiration,
special skill and a mastery of secret or proprietary abilities coupled with a
vast store of lost knowledge.
2 Writing about yourself in the third person so it appears that someone else
has an equally deluded opinion of you and your abilities.
While avoiding the former pit fall and narrowly escaping the latter I hope to give you an idea of the type of person I am and how that is reflected in what I call Art.
My name is Erik V. Phariss
I have no formal education in design or engineering, in fact the closest thing would be playing with legos growing up. From about the time I was five years old I was drawing and painting. Most of my "masterworks" were not all that great but I was quite a legend in my own mind, at least until I turned 12 and realized that most of what I had made was not going to last more than a few years and was made out of paper.
It is worth noting that I started working with leather around ten years old when I bought some leather scraps by the pound and a hole punch from Sals tannery in Santa Cruz CA my home town.
I turned 13 and starting working as a freelance graphic designer which went well for me, The only down side was I was still better with a real pen than the one on the computer and this somewhat frustrated me.
Several years a few custom guitars and a successful skateboard business later I began to look into making things with my hands again. This ended up with me making a pair of sandals out of leather , then a bag , followed by more sandals and a belt. Things started to snow ball and for my fifth project I decided that a full length white leather jacket with an arctic fox collar was the best way to exhibit my newly groomed skills and six months later it was finished.
The jacket was stitched mostly by hand with some serious pattern making and sewing instructions form my mother who used to be a seamstress and did wedding dress alterations. Her knowledge of sewing, my determination, temper tantrums mistakes and zero knowledge of practical sewing created what I can truly call a masterpiece. I can not take credit for much more than the idea and the one piece of leather that I cut wrong as the majority of the work was in creating a new an fantastic pattern and most of the real work was done by my mother who painstakingly showed me how to measure and cut a proper shawl collar. Interestingly enough the leather I cut wrong resulted in on of my most iconic design features to date and just goes to show that great things can still happen even when you blow it.
In an interesting twist I believe that my lack of practical knowledge along
with my small budget and no compromise code of ethics did more to help me than
it did hinder. I subsequently became a better craftsman and over the coarse of
the last few years this has given me more artistic freedom and increased
determination .
I still do things differently in ways that would be hard to duplicate on a mass scale. The ultimate goal is to create things that are a reflection of the perfection we find around us every day, things that sometimes go unnoticed. (And no I didn't copy and paste that out of an art book like my sister thinks.)
If you would like to contact Erik about free lance design work please use the contact form on the order page.
(there I go talking about myself in the third person)
©2023 Phariss Design