Non-Toxic Smoking

An interview with Creative Director and cigarette whittler Lisa Naftolin.

“It ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out.”

―Heraclitus, Fragments

I used to smoke the occasional cigarette. Particularly I’m thinking of the Export “A”s in singles, loose in a paper bag they sold at grey-market prices behind the counter at the depanneur on Mount Royal in Montreal that summer when I was X-raying raisin bran, hydroelectric dams, and airplane parts at a lab out by the Olympic stadium. I was living in a dirt cheap apartment with philosophy undergrads on the Plateau and everyone I knew was wearing plaid shirts with the arms cut off, and and their apartment keys on a bathtub plug chain necklace, and everyone was listening to Nirvana and playing pool. I kind of fit in, except that I’d dropped out of school and was saving up to go live in Greece, working 60-hour weeks with this working-class industrial lab job. We’d take the truck out to the Mirabel airport, slap a big piece of medical film on the inside of the nosecone of a 747, and shoot X-rays through the metal with a radioactive barium source to look for cracks in the plane. We wore technician’s jumpsuits over our clothes, and in my pocket I had my certification from Atomic Energy Canada for working with unstable particles, and a few loose cigarettes. All the guys I worked with had a pack of Players’ regular in the front pocket of their jumpsuit, and I liked feeling like one of these guys. I was an on-and off smoker until I had a kid.

These days I don’t think about smoking much, but a few years back I met Lisa Naftolin, a New York creative director that I highly admire who has been working with my chalk-based white ink and carbon-shellack black inks on wood. She is maybe better known for her work at the Guggenheim and New York Times so I will quote her biography from her website:

Lisa Naftolin (b. 1964, Toronto) is a New York-based Creative Director who has worked on cultural and commercial projects for museums, magazines, brands, and artists for the past 35 years. She has been Creative Director, Publishing and Digital Media at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, and Creative Director of Art + Commerce. Naftolin has been an Art Director at publications including The New York Times Magazine and Architecture. The recipient of numerous professional awards, Naftolin has sat on the board of the AIGA NY and on juries for The American Institute of Graphic Arts, the Hyères Festival, and the I.D Awards among others. She has been a visiting critic in Design at Yale, a mentor in the Photography program at the School of Visual Arts, and a visiting artist at Cooper Union.

Lisa Naftolin’s career as a creative director is enviable, but more importantly, for this newsletter, she’s been been making un-smokable cigarettes, un-lightable matches and un-typable typography using my inks. Her years of experience wrangling space, type, environment, and meaning for big institutions might begin to explain the sort of easy, refined sensibility that she brings to whittling sticks and inking and collage on translucent paper. But her biography doesn’t explain everything. Naftolin’s sculptural work is both obvious and indecipherable, immediate and remote, sleek and humble and because of this, and because somehow smoking is on my mind, I had to ask her a few questions. What follows is our mostly unedited email interview.

Your cigarettes have a prized place in my studio I think because I like your work so much and felt flattered that you used my inks and I just love the feeling I get from them, their elegance.  

Thank you, that is just so nice to hear! I love your inks, so the feeling is mutual.

Can you describe your mood or place in the world prior to making the matches and the cigarettes?

In 2018, I suffered a concussion. The succeeding period of recovery necessitated a reevaluation of my working process, refocusing my individual practice upon repetitive, handmade methods. We have a little house in upstate New York and I moved up there to recover. It is small and rustic and I used materials I had at hand to make work, most of it integrating decades-long investigations of language and letters. The cigarettes, while not typographic, feel related to typography, to 1s or Ls. I had the sense of marking time as I made them: one, one, one, one…

What time of year was it? How did it feel in your body? How many did you make?

I started whittling in July of 2018, using sticks from my property, which has lots of trees. I made pencils first, sharpened and unsharpened, using chocolate bar foil wrappers for some with metal collars. I made hundreds, a few of them red editors’ pencils. The repetitive process was therapeutic and I found that I could carry on focused conversations while whittling that were difficult otherwise. When I went to the city I would scavenge sticks in Washington Square Park. I was whittling all the time and keeping my tools with me: a metal tray for shavings, a utility knife, sticks, tape, and ink.

How important was the repetition and feeling of doing it vs its possible meaning(s) as an object?

Both were important. The making was critical at a time when I felt slightly disconnected from my previous circumstances, and the resulting objects were evidence of my continued productivity. My short term memory was not working; having physical evidence of my days—a growing body of work—was comforting.

Did you choose a particular wood? What did you think of the inks I provided? How important were the materials? 

There are a lot of oaks and maples on our property so that’s probably what I was using. I didn’t know specifically what the wood was, but I have become very attuned to the properties of each stick, evidence of insects that have made their way under the bark, hardness, dryness, color. Originally I used some birdhouse paint that I had on hand, but I prefer using your inks. Their characteristics are so particular. The black draws me in deeply and the white has a beautiful, slightly chalky quality. I get very attached to my materials and I enjoy the bottles of ink. 

When did you last have a cigarette?