One of the interesting things about making artwork for other people is that sometimes I’m deliberately creating something I will never experience the way they do.
I can understand the story.
I can know why a particular place matters.
I can know who someone was or why an object needed to be included.
But it isn’t my memory.
And that’s okay.
In fact, I think that’s part of what makes custom work different.
A stranger might look at the finished piece and see an interesting engraving.
The person it was made for sees something else.
That’s the reaction I care about.
Not because craftsmanship doesn’t matter. It does.
Not because I don’t want the artwork to look good to everyone else. I do.
But those things aren’t the entire point of a personal piece.
Sometimes a small element in the artwork carries more weight than the largest thing in the composition because of what it represents to one person.
Nobody else needs to know.
There’s something I like about that.
We live around an incredible number of images now. Most of them are designed to be understood immediately and then replaced by the next one.
A physical object can behave differently.
It can sit in someone’s home.
They can walk past it every day.
And whatever they see in it doesn’t have to be what everybody else sees.
That’s probably one of the clearest meanings I’ve found yet for the words printed beneath the Crafted Runes Studio name:
Where Stone Becomes Story.
The stone is the part everyone can see.
Sometimes the story belongs to only one person.
— Rune Master