Matthew Martin: Il Macchinista Picasso
A young machinist etching in his legacy.
According to Pablo Picasso’s mother, the young artist’s first word was “paz” which is short for the Spanish word for pencil, “lapiz”. Similarly, “pen” is short for pencil. Yet, there is nothing short about the success my friend Matthew Martin has manufactured for himself except for the amount of time it’s taken him. Of Matt’s creations, foremost are his pens, an iconic human invention. It is quite timeless in fact, as are the materials in his employ that stretch through history. His ink was developed for use in zero gravity, and at times he has applied ancient mammoth’s tooth in the grip. With the following words inscribed here, a picture will be painted of a person and a craft.
T: Tell me, right now, what are you getting into? It’s Sunday, but what’s this work week looking like?
M: Honestly, I’ve been trying to stay balanced with making things. Realistically, something I identified back in Massachusetts, there was a pretty heavy imbalance of work I did in my dad’s place.
T: You were out there for 12 hours everyday I remember.
M: Especially when the shows were coming, that was the thing. Zoe [wife], not to her appreciation, I would say “hey, I have 45 minutes we can hangout.” There was always something to do, and there really is still, especially if you set the sights high. I’ve been trying to temper that with staying balanced on other stuff. That’s the thing I really knock myself down to acknowledge, too, because I could just make shit for 12 hours a day and only focus on that. That sounds fun, and it definitely would be, but you do that for a while and then a bunch of other stuff starts falling short. Then, you can’t go and immerse yourself in it, so you have to take care of what will help you long term. So, I’ve been doing yard work, cooking, cleaning. The thing that really gets me is that it’s just one door over, it’s just right into my garage. It’s always there, it’s not separated.
T: That’s the thing about being your own boss, having your own business.
M: Right, there’s always something you can go do. You can push it out of your mind while you have dinner or whatever, but when you open that door again, you’ll see something on that desk that needs attending to, and it’s very present, y’know, in your mind. Even if I just forget my glasses or my water in there right before I go to bed, I’ll just see the six things I need to do tomorrow and it’s just like “dammit! I didn’t need to think about that right now.”
T: No escape, huh?
M: Yeah, but, you say “no escape,” you just have to really plan and work towards not working, if that makes sense. You have to put a solid amount of effort into saying—to be honest, I haven’t even really cracked that code yet. We’ve tried a bunch of different scheduling stuff. Now that Zoe’s working with me in the office, that’s helped a lot, because she can kinda come in and say “this shit is more important than you dicking around on parts or whatever. So, come address this.” That helps give me a hierarchy of structure.
T: The way what you’re doing is a mix of domestic and business—the way Zoe’s involved—it reminds of an old styled homestead.
M: Exactly, right. You gotta chop firewood. You gotta tend to the animals. You gotta pick the apples. We’re shifting to that mentality even more because Zoe just worked her last shift last night at her other job. It’s a clean slate moving forward. Now, we are both responsible for all of the work and we’re both trying to tackle other things, like the house and stuff that isn’t directly related to making pens, too.
The “MCM” on the calipers is very Casey Neistat.
T: You have all your cards in this now, but let’s talk about how it started. You lived in Bridgewater, you went to BP [voc/tech school]. Your dad is a machinist and your grandfather was a designer. When I met you, you were enthusiastic about art. How did that impact your decisions moving in your early days?
M: It’s funny you frame it like that because initially, I applied to BP and wanted to get into commercial design where they were using Photoshop and drawing on computers. That’s really what I did; I would sketch, I did a little bit of spray painting. So that’s what I was thinking when I was in eighth grade, when we applied. Then we kinda got in, y’know, the real decision was more about job security. It [commercial design] was all up in the air. Machinists in the U.S.—it’s crazy. You could look up the exact numbers. There’s hundreds of thousands, if not more, CNC operator jobs.
T: At 15, you were thinking about job security. I found that in Erick’s interview, too, he was thinking about the money to be made to live.
M: It’s all about the prospect of, like, “what the hell are you gonna do with your life?” Obviously, money is pretty integral to that whole part. I figured, at home, however much I wanted to add to that would compound with my dad in some capacity. The first thought [when choosing CNC] was that I could help him run his machines. I did that when I was 14, 15. Certain setups take 20 minutes to do the thing. Then you have to screw one screw and then hit one button and nothing can really go bad. So I did that for a while. Obviously, with more exposure, you get more reps under your belt.
T: Your dad was also set up in the garage, which mirrors what you’ve got going on now where there was always work to be done. You spent four years at BP in the CNC shop and you interned for your dad. You end up going to a SkillsUSA competition your junior year. Did you win anything?
M: I took silver in the state of Massachusetts for CNC Turning. I would have taken first but I missed a burr, I didn’t file it on one of the edges. My geometry and critical dimensioning was better than the dude that took first place but I missed that burr. I was focused on the measurements. They were perfect, and I was so happy all the numbers were what I wanted that I didn’t even look. That’s kind of like an origin story that I always hold with me. When I came back, my dad said, “hey, let’s get you a little lathe and you can make knife parts and worst case scenario, you’ll go to college in two years and I’ll learn to use it.”
T: When he got you that lathe, was that, right then, when you said you’d start doing pens?
M: One of his customers actually threw it out there as an idea because at the time there were a few “tactical pens” on the market. He said off-handedly that it would be cool. I kinda think he was doing it for his own gain because he wanted a nice bronze pen but not a lot of people made those. That was the summer of 2012. In August, I made my first pen and that was before we even went to senior year. That was the weird thing, too, because I had no idea what I was doing. I had this lathe in my dad’s garage and I had successfully programmed only three parts and one of them was for the competition.
T: Just for reference, how many parts do you have programmed?
M: I have 500 programmed in my database right now. A lot of them are old and unused. You’ll take little chunks from some knowing that this part from this program is good. It’s funny to go look back at the old programs because they’re ugly. They’re like a recipe made in such convoluted terms, y’know? It’s like calling for a half cup of sugar, but instead it says 14 million granules of sugar. I only really started pen-making right before senior year and I was literally so happy to be making money.
The Machine
T: When did you start to see money?
M: In November, I went to my first knife show with 96 pens and I sold out and I was only 17. So, it kind of took over, and that’s what I was saying about the balance earlier, but at that time, the sun was shining. Honestly, my first couple of years, there was this weird disconnect of work I was doing and the product because I didn’t really have a lot of refined skills. Just making the parts, they were bad, man. My lathe, I was learning how to use it. I was cutting titanium. Everything is expensive so when you buy something and it sucks, it’s like “damn.” My dad was able to help me out a lot with that because he has experience with that and he has good connections to get good tooling and material, but realistically speaking, the process of me making my pens is pretty very different than him making a knife. It was trial-by-fire. Even the most basic stuff like “how do we drill a hole, how do we make this shiny, how do you bond these two things together?” I couldn’t set the bar too high because I was just so thankful to make a hole. Like, “who cares if it’s not in tolerance, who cares if it looks like crap? This is the best hole I’ve ever drilled because I’ve never drilled previously.” I didn’t recognize it at the time but that bottom-up style—I have all my old work in the archive, the first pen I ever made. It’s bad, dude. There’s no two ways about it, but I was happy with it because relative to the nothing I’d done before, it was a monumental achievement.
T: That’s really the story of an artist. What comes first is bad and then you learn the tricks. What are we working with nowadays? How many shows have you done so far?
M: Total knife shows? Somewhere 36-40. I haven’t kept count of it exactly.
T: Do you think that is a part of the measure of success?
M: Absolutely. Here’s the other thing. This is the big thing that I grappled with over the summer. It’s very easy to define your success on the sale of your product and that’s a poor metric in my mind because I sold 96 pens at my first show back in 2012 and my work was not that good. Over the summer, I made some awesome pens, some of the best pens I made in my life but no one wanted them because we’re in the middle of a pandemic. I had to tell myself that “still, this was really great work and you have to separate it from the fact that no one’s purchased it yet.” So, you ask about the knife shows, and it was kind of both because I would make sales there, obviously, but people would be able to pick up my work and I’d be able to hear, y’know, “I love this part of it. I love how you incorporated this. I think this finish is really good and it’ll look really good with my knife” or whatever. I didn’t recognize that but it was really like two sides of the same coin because it’s one thing to make the sale and it’s another for someone to appreciate the work and just say “this is a pretty thing.” And, in the knife show context, it would happen a lot more because I would use all these materials from the knife world: the titanium, the zirconium, the carbon fiber. People were familiar with the presentation and they’re seeing it in a new form so there was a lot of appreciation there. I did three or four knife shows a year and then a bunch of pen shows. One year, I did six shows, I think. Pen shows, recently, have tapped out. There might be the blade show this June in Atlanta.
The artist’s steel “paintbrush.”
T: Can you tell me, roughly, maybe how many pens you’ve made?
M: I’ve made—I haven’t kept an exact count. I did for a while at the low numbers but I let it get loose. I’m somewhere between 8,000 and 8,300.
T: Do you have many of those on you or are there out there in the world?
M: I have plenty in the archive. I make some for Zoe. I got a lot of the rejects. I have an archive of my oldest pens and that was something my dad, after I made my first one, really was like “put that shit away” and he took it and put it in his safe. That was something my grandfather stressed for him. A lot of my big ones like my first click pen and then the first with any certain material or my new clip style. A lot of my prototypes wind up in the archive like a proof of geometry. The reality is I’m still trying to make a living so if I have a perfectly saleable pen, it’s probably not getting kept. So, I keep the ones that have little defects that aren’t going to cut it.
Don’t forget that burr.
T: We’ll circle back because I’m interested in the curation of your pens. I’d like to know more about your machine.
M: So that plays into a little bit of what we were just talking about because I’ve had two machines. The first machine I bought was a very lower-level, hobbyist machine. It was $15,000 and it was more just like “let’s see what it can do.” Pretty low-tech, low capability. It was actually a machine from the 50’s that they, like, rebuilt. So I did that whole feedback cycle I was telling you about where I would try to do even the most basic stuff. On that machine, I was able to get the reps in and start doing more complex stuff. It always boils down to isolating variables. You have to be pretty scientific about it because if you say “I’m trying to perform this cut,” there’s probably only five or six things that you need perfect to have that be successful. In that way, I took a lot of value in that system.
T: This lathe is your paintbrush in a way. The materials are like the canvas.
M: And the paint in a way depending on how you’re trying to do that metaphor. And it’s not an exact analogy because when you want to put paint on canvas, you put paint on the brush and you apply it to the canvas; it’s a very instantaneous process. The feedback is very immediate. If you put your paints out, you can do what you want and be very spur of the moment. You can change your mind. You can go whatever way your heart takes you, but with how my stuff is processed, or structured I should say, you have to commit to a design then write a program according to that geometry. Then, you have to make that geometry successfully.
T: There’s finesse. There’s a lot of intent.
M: Yeah. I was going to use the word “convoluted” compared to painting because, if I want to change something at the very end, it basically means I have to start the whole thing over. It’s not like I can just put a little extra blue with the light blue and there’s the shade I want now. The spontaneous creation, there’s still a moment for it, because I can start riffing on stuff. I would make all the same pen in a bunch of different materials. That was an easy way to have variety without having to do all the programming again. If my machine is making the same part, I could put copper in or bronze or titanium or zirconium. That was one of the initial ways I was trying to identify how to have that creativity without being burdened by all the restrictions of this very complex system.
T: You’ve explored other forms of art that’s been related or unrelated to pens.
M: Yeah, I read a whole, giant book, The History of Art, last summer which helped me out a bunch. I was trying to figure out where to take this and what’s my total intent, y’know?
T: Right now, you’re trying to explore your potential.
M: There’s potential everywhere and that was the weird thing to kind of recognize is that through such a bottom-up learning process like what I was saying about the most basic stuff, now I’m trying to go more top-down and say “how can this be done in a more refined, curated manner?”
T: That’s the real true measure of success. You’ve gone all the way to the top of your process and now you can look down and say “Where am I going next in the future and the long-term?” Has COVID made it tough?
M: Yeah, well, there’s no shows which is huge because at the shows, there’s obviously sales but more importantly the networking and exposure. People can get their hands on stuff, they can look at stuff, they can ask me. I mean, on average, and I’ve actually tracked this before COVID hit, someone would come to my table and we would talk for 20-30 minutes about even the most specific part of something.
T: Yeah, I know I would. Even the ink you inquire about at length. Right now, I’m using a G-2. These are my second favorite pens.
M: G-2! That’s the go-to, man! That’s the one I use, too. No fault on you. My pens will actually take that ink cartridge. Anyways, about the shows. In March of 2018, I debuted my first fountain pen and I started to go to pen shows on top of knife shows. I did the Atlanta pen show and then I went to a bunch of different pen shows. The crowd is very different. The funny thing was all of my work until now needed this whole different context. At a knife show, I can show someone titanium. I don’t even need to tell them it’s titanium. They can pick it up and they can tell. But the majority of fountain pen users are using acrylic, ebonite, different forms of plastic, y’know? Non-metal. The nibs are metal so there’s a little bit of understanding there but in terms of, like, the explanation, there was a much higher barrier of knowledge disparity. I would have a titanium pen on the table and it would be $350 and someone would straight up ask “why is this $350?” At a knife show, no one would ever do that. Someone would go “this is a great price” because they know that titanium is hard to machine, “look at the finishing, it’s all blah, blah, blah”; it’s all inherent. That, to me, was the biggest eye-opener between the objective difference and the subjective difference, because in the knife world, it was all about the objective analysis. “This knife has a high polish. This blade steel is harder than that blade steel. This piece of wood is better executed than that piece of wood.” There’s so much to reference. So if you want to do a specific style like a hunter-skinner, you have this objective blade shape that will be good to skin a deer; it’s proven. If you go to the pen world, all of a sudden, it’s just “I like the way this pen looks.” As long as it gets ink on paper, you’re getting the job done. So there were a lot of these people who were not used to the form that I was presenting. It sucks there are no shows right now. Fingers crossed, I hope we can go to a couple this year, but basically, I went to the LA and Philadeplia pen shows in January and February of last year, right before everything hit the fan, and those shows were awesome. The people were so cool and it’s so genuine because everyone can bring their own thing to the table. It’s cool to have such a variety. There’s a vintage pen market. There’s people that use fountain pens that are 100 years old. It’s been a whole different game than what I was playing.
One of the ancient mammoth’s tooth pens.
T: What you’ve transmitted so far are core components to most artists’ story: expertise and audience. With what you’ve just said, it’s like you started holding up a painting in a photo gallery exhibition. Let me ask you, what is the long-term aspiration?
M: The long-term aspiration is, I think, to have more diverse offerings of items that I make. I’m pretty general about it, right now, because I’m trying to stay true to that bottom-up approach with stuff I like making. I do what could be categorized as functional art. Work that has an application, that has a secondary function to actually be used, which I really jive with. Everything in our life gets used so why don’t we have more stuff be pretty.
T: Excellent philosophy. I think everything that serves a function has some inherent potential for art.
M: When I read that art history book, there was this whole idea where if you have a nice dagger, make it real pretty so you don’t even have to prove it’s a nice dagger so that when you pull it out, someone can see it from 30 feet away and they’ll know, before objective analysis, this is a high-function that has subjective value. To me, even a purely high art piece, like a sculpture, that still has a function of looking pretty and making you feel something. My thing that I’m kind of committed to now is taking these materials and using them in new ways, specifically, like, the titanium and zirconium. We [people] just recently started using titanium in the 50’s. Historically speaking, there is no titanium sculpture, and there’s still not a lot nowadays because it’s used for, like, spaceships. That’s the kind of thing I really like is the contradiction with the science because there’s so much science that goes into making these alloys like with specific grain structures and the additives and all that stuff. Taking that and just making it look nice, I feel there’s a lot of potential there that is unexplored and I don’t really know how that will manifest itself. I still gotta pay the bills, right? Then pens are still getting priority.
T: Do you see yourself working differently in the future?
M: Yeah, for sure. Let’s be real, I’m not gonna make $200,000 a year selling pens. There’s just too much competition. I could commit to a timeline where that’s the thing but there’s guys that are spitting out 10,000 pens a month; they’ll make hundreds of pens a day or whatever. That’s just in the U.S. You start talking overseas, the whole thing has ballooned quite large since I joined. For example, the first blade show I ever went to in 2012, I was one of three penmakers out of, like, 1,200 tables. In 2019, there were over 40 penmakers. I don’t know how my work will progress in the future.
T: Would you like to see yourself work less and still make the same money?
M: Well, yes. That’d be like getting into fine art or sculpture. That’ll be in the timeline eventually. I could go get a CNC operator job and make way more money than I am now pretty certainly, especially where I live. But that’s not what I’m in it for and that’s what I keep at the forefront. It’s just a matter of going through, again, the feedback of the materials and pushing the limits a bit and my own limits with the equipment I have and my own ideas. It isn’t worth much if it can’t be applied and executed in reality. That’s something I have to grapple with. I like to do sculpture. I’ve done a couple of wall sculptures. I did one for Anthony [mutual friend]. That was my first commissioned one. I’ve done some other small ones. I really enjoy the work but if it can’t get sold then there’s a part of me that says “this isn’t worth doing” and it’s wrong but I can’t help feeling it still.
T: Is there something like a bigger project on your horizons that would contribute to not only machining but to art as well?
M: I hope. That’s the whole thing and I kinda wanna take it like I look at two past historical art movements. Way back when the Greeks first figured out to cast bronze in a way better capacity and there was this great flourishing for 1,000 years on cast bronze because they pushed the limits there. The other one I really like is much more recently in the Art Deco movement about a hundred years ago in the 1920’s. The whole world was connected so you could get wood from Brazil or minerals from wherever. You could get materials from all over the world. So, I want to use my titanium like those bronze crafters a millennium ago because if you were to identify a sculpture as titanium, if someone looks 1,000 years from now, they know for a fact there is a definitive lower window of when this would have been made without even knowing who made it or anything about the sculpture. No one was making titanium sculptures in the 1900s, it just didn’t exist. Personally, I have a few techniques that I’ve come up with that I haven’t really tested them yet because it’s a lot of R & D. But, I have a few ways that I’m trying to work up that combine the machining in fine art capacity to use the material in a way that no one has used it before. What impact that will have, I don’t know. Properly executed, I think there could be a significant appreciation from many people, I guess. I have tempered my expectations in the case of any physical pushback that life has.
An example of Matt’s sculpture.
T: Tomorrow is Monday morning. I mean, tomorrow’s Monday all day, not just the morning. What’s the first you’re going to do for work tomorrow?
M: A little cup of coffee and then I’ll probably package up orders that came in from the weekend. I gotta send two pens out. Those gotta get boxed up.
T: Like a cardboard box?
M: Yup, a little USPS, priority-mail type box.
T: That’s very much away from the art aspect of the business.
M: Yeah, shipping, getting it wrapped and getting it out but hey, that’s the whole point of it. I make the whole friggin’ thing and then it’s gotta get shipped out. But, yeah, I’m probably going to finish up some more pens. I just got this new batch so there’s some sanding and polishing there. And, I’m going to have to buy new stuff, some new tooling, get ready for my next batch, whatever that is.
T: You got any songs that you’re gonna listen to?
M: I’ve been feeling a lot of Jacob Collier recently. He gets me hyped in the shop. If I’m feeling more in the dancey mood, I like Stan Getz. He has an album on Spotify that’s like two hours long. I just hit shuffle on that and they’re pretty much all bangers. That’s nice when I’m finishing, though. Staying the vibe, keeping flowing on that, but, yeah, that’s pretty much it. Snarky Puppy. I’ve been going through Snarky Puppy stuff.
An engaging flourish of engraving for us.
Ah, a song in the studio of an artist to accompany the labor. It is only natural. Many wish to leave their mark in this life. One day, you might find the fortunate conditions where you sign your name in history’s vellum vestiture with a Martin pen. That is the legacy Matt is weaving in South Carolina: a sartorialist of steel, a man and machine; a being that is entwined with an abstraction. Besides these final words appended to the top and bottom, the exchange above was raw, unpolished discourse. However, when this reading dresses the walls of your mind, I believe it is you that will be the furnisher of a sparkling mirror sheen. In this portrait, you will gaze upon the etchings of the image of a craft as well as the adroit artisan restlessly incorporated by his vocation.
