Welcome to Chris Hyde Online!
Do What You Love...
"Do what you love and you will never work a day in your life." I've heard this attributed to various people including confuscious and Gene Autrey. Regardless of who created this phrase it has always resonated with me. I try to dangle this concept in front of my nose so I can live a happy life and avoid "working" as much as possible.
What I love:
I have found that I am not truly happy unless I am being creative. Throughout my life this has taken many forms. I have been a performing musician, a composer, watercolorist and woodworker. All creativley satisfying activities, but none of them really ever paid the bills.
After spending a few years selling vintage, well, junk on ebay I rekindled my childhood hobby of knife collecting in the form of a website called www.worldknives.com.
The company took a few years to get up and running, but it is now my bread and butter and has a worldwide following. World Knives allows me to be creative with web design, writing, photography and graphic design and has allowed me some free time to work on my art.
Art and creative expression is increasingly important to me. As I update this page in December 2009 and I am working on an interesting form of "intuitive drawing" and have started stone carving. I hope to have some examples of the drawing and the approach I use before long.
What I do:
I spend my professional life buying, selling, designing, collecting and researching knives and developing my World Knives, Ltd. website. In addition I do consultation and appraisal work about exotic and antique knives.
As my career has developed my interest in selling knives has decreased as my interest in the knifes historical, social and cultural significance has increased. At the end of 2006 I decided to document the history I was researching on film. Please click the link-tab at the top of this page to learn more about my first documentary (in progress) called the THE SOLINGEN PROJECT
The Solingen Project is ongoing and currently exhists as a series of documentary shorts.
Micro Mandalas:
After designing a piece of jewelry for a museum project I was left with a load of beads and jewelry parts ... and Fimo. I hated to waste the "leftovers" and began pushing beads into Fimo in designs. Before I knew it I had become obsessed with the little "Micro Mandalas" I was creating. After a time they became more thematic and intricate. The ones I am creating now can take from 25 - 45 hours and include beads, micro beads, studs, found jewelry parts and anything tiny that serves the piece. Click here to see the art.
Intuitive Drawing:
I am still working on an appropriate name for the drawing process I have come up with but for now I am calling it "intuitive drawing". I found the tiny detail work of some of the art I was doing did not really tap into the dynamic creativity that I felt inside.
I spent a few weeks warming up on cheap newsprint and then moving on to better paper to draw some more refined pieces. This worked fine. But as the weeks went by I noticed that the drawings I was doing on the cheaper paper had more natural lines, better flow and were more engaging. The process of the warm up drawings allowed me to shed any stress about making mistakes and also seemed to tap into something a little deeper.
At the same time after spending weeks on these stream of consciousness warm-ups I started to think about the art a sort of a team effort between me and the esoteric pool of creative energy that can't be understood consciously. As this idea of sort of tapping my unconscious became important the process of how I drew changed.
I started out drawing on good paper and got rid of the newsprint. I decided that since the warm up drawings were more relaxed and had better flow I would get used to using better paper in case I came up with something I liked.
I started to consciously let go of control and draw without any preconceived image or direction. In doing so I came up with some interesting designs and abstractions. But it was only when I started to look into these designs that looked like a bunch of random lines, shapes or scribbles that things took a different turn.
I began to see images in the designs.. It might be a womans torso or a koi fish or a piano. Sometimes the images were thematic and other times unrelated. I started to cull out the images and turn the abstract into something a little more concrete. I focused on drawing whaterver I saw without editing it and let go of trying to focus on any theme. So whether the images were scary, sexual, funny, brutal, beautiful, spiritual I just drew what I saw.
The process has proved to be transformative for me and has opened up a new dimension of creativity and self-awareness. I know it sounds a little "new agey" but it's true.
I will have a page of these drawings up soon and hopefully a sequence of showing the progression of Intuitive Drawing.
Other Experiences:
Some of my past experiences have included working as a stage hand, buying and selling antiques, website promotion and design, running an audio production studio, playing both bass and guitar professionally, community building, supporting a year in Paris when I was 17 playing street music, video editing, producing promotional films and television commercials, music composition, photography, working with developmentally disabled adults, house painting and landscaping.
Just For Fun:
I spend much of my free time gardening, running, writing, woodworking, reading, making devious plans to overthrow the world and spending time with friends.
Charitable Contributions:
My favorite charitable contribution is to our local food bank. The Thurston County Food Bank does a great job with keeping expenses low and serving our community.
They feed the elderly, children, destitute families and anyone who does not have the income to feed themselves. They were a Godsend for the many people who lost everything in the terrible floods in this area Winter of 2007.
I do matching employee contributions with my World Knives, Ltd. business. I call the foodbank to see what they need and make a trip to Costco.
Also, please check out The Olympia Seed Exchange. The idea is based on encouraging extra vegetable growth to donate to the needy and build community.
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[As an aside:If you define a knife as a "weapon" consider replacing that word with "tool".
I have spent years researching the history of our oldest tool and have found that the use of knives as weapons is infinitesimal compared to their utilitarian uses.
Think about how many times per day a knife is used for food preparation, box cutting, wood carving, eating, medical and horticultural uses (and on and on) compared to any nefarious use.]
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