In this episode, we speak with artist and musician Marc Armitano Domingo about finding personal resonance in past traditions, turning one’s artistic practice into a thriving business, and bridging the gap between historical techniques and contemporary tastes.

Podcast produced by Ryan Leahey
Original theme music by Kasper Bjørke
Musical performance by Marc Armitano Domingo
Photographs by Kava Gorna 

Landon Metz:
Where are you right now?

March Armitano Domingo:
I'm in my apartment in the East Village.

LM:
Oh, cool. Where in the East Village are you?

MAD:
I'm on 10th between C and D.

LM:
Okay, cool. How long have you been there?

MAD:
I think like four years now? I was in Chinatown before that, so I literally would have been right next door to you.

LM:
So what's going on?

MAD:
I just had my breakfast and I’m getting ready for the show tonight.

Christopher Schreck:
Where are you showing?

MAD:
It's a gallery called Eerdman's. She shows mostly decorative artists. She has painters that are showing in the same show, but a lot of the art is decorative. There's a wallpaper artist, a marbled paper artist, and I’m kind of representing the ceramic side, I guess. [laughs]

CS:
She lives in the building where she shows, right?

MAD:
Yeah, it's really cool. It's actually on my street, on 10th Street, I think between 4th and 5th.

CS:
So what are you showing?

MAD:
A bunch of work – mainly my dishes, my plates, and then a bunch of my new lockboxes. It’s also the first time I'm showing my vases, which are kind of a new thing for me. So we kind of just stuck with the more functional side of my work.

CS:
How did the vases come about?

MAD:
It's kind of a funny way that I got to it. So, I’m currently painting my second salterio. I have an instrument builder in Japan who allows me to do my own decoration. I’ve asked other builders, and they're not so interested in collaborating in that way, but I basically asked this guy in Japan if he could just send me the salterio unpainted, unfinished, so I could just do all the decoration. I’d been doing research on Spanish salterio decoration, and I kind of wanted to do a Mexican design, so I looked at Mexican cathedral fresco paintings, Latin American and Spanish cathedrals with these painted vases. It just seems like something that they would put on that looks nice. There's no symbolism behind the vase, it’s just something that looks good - and then the Spanish salterios also have these vases painted on them. But I couldn't decide what kind of vase I wanted, so I was kind of like, “Okay, let's just execute them through porcelain. Basically, I can just make these tests that are a product that I could also sell, and they're just kind of a fun exercise in decoration, because it's a new form that I have to decorate and there are a lot of things that I need to figure out with this new form.”

LM:
Did you end up representing one of your vases on the decoration on your salterio?

MAD:
I haven't painted it yet, because I haven't decided. I’ve made about a dozen vases already; I still haven't decided on the one that I'm going to put on the salterio, but I think it's going to be this one that’s in the Mexican Cathedral in Oaxaca. In the cathedrals in Oaxaca, there are all these organs, so I'm basing it on the organ decoration in this cathedral.

CS:
It'd be funny to have your own vase on the instrument. It’d be very Matisse.

MAD:
Yeah! [laughs]

CS:
Just for people's reference, could you talk about the salterio a little bit? From my understanding, it’s comparable to a zither but without the frets, correct?

MAD:
Yeah. So basically, the salterio that I play is a special type of a psaltery. The psaltery is basically an instrument that originates in the medieval era, and it's usually shaped in a trapezoid or a hog nose shape. You'll see angels playing them on their chest in medieval paintings. It’s kind of the precursor to the harpsichord and piano. The style that I play is an 18th-century salterio, and it's a really special type of instrument because it has all these possibilities that you could do with it: it's used for accompaniment, it’s used for solo music, it’s used for sacred music, theater music. There are two playing styles. There's pizzicato. There are these little mallets that you can use to play it.

LM:
Do you have one there with you right now? Can we see it?

MAD:
Yeah, of course. So this is the one I started learning with. It’s also one that I decorated. The rosettes are made of layered paper, and then they're gilded.

LM:
Beautiful.

MAD:
I didn't go crazy with any of the soundboard decoration; I just kind of wanted to be very plain but still have the rosettes and all the tchotchkes that you need for an 18th-century instrument to be of the period. This color was actually one of the most popular colors to paint them, this beautiful cobalt/turquoise color. A nice soothing color.

CS:
I remember you posting the process for the inlaid rosettes on Instagram. It seemed really meticulous - a lot of compass and exacto knife work.

MAD:
Yeah. The rosettes for my first salterio were actually a copy of the rosettes from an instrument from 1725 that was built in Rome. I have a bunch of pictures as reference for those rosettes, but I couldn't trace them because the paper was too thick, so I really just had to recreate them using a compass. I should have had these punches to make the more circular shapes, but that’s a whole other thing that I'd have to learn, so I just used an exacto blade for all the carving, and it turned out great. Something I've always wanted to do is instrument decoration and instrument building, so this was a perfect little entryway into that.

CS:
How long have you been playing the salterio?

MAD:
I started in 2020, I think.

CS:
Oh, wow. Very recently.

MAD:
Yeah. I kind of got consumed by it. For the first year I had my salterio, I think I practiced my other instrument once. [laughs] I was very naughty and kind of lost all my chops on the other instrument, but it was all worth it. Honestly, the sound of the salterio is so beautiful.

LM:
Did you grow up playing music?

MAD:
Yeah. I started, like most American children, with a recorder in the fourth grade, playing “Hot Cross Buns.” But what's funny is that the book we had for the recorder was called “How to Play the Baroque Recorder.” The recorder is a Baroque instrument, but I feel like that part is forgotten when we're taught that. It's kind of a shame – like, everyone learns this instrument, but throughout the education system, there's no recorder playing that you can continue. It's like, you learn the instrument and then just forget it. It doesn't make any sense, because there's a lot of virtuosic music for the recorder that anyone could play - I mean, not anyone – but you could eventually learn after years of practice, but America's just like, “No, you don’t get to continue.” [laughs]

LM:
And from the recorder, where did you go?

MAD:
I was going to play the viola, but then I broke my wrist the year before we were supposed to start and I couldn't hold it up, because you had to twist your wrist in a certain way. So I ended up playing cello, and my first cello teacher’s teacher, who I ended up taking lessons with, she had a collection of instruments. She lived in her mom's backyard in, like, a medieval tent and then the granny shack was where she kept all her instruments. She had Celtic instruments, Middle Eastern instruments, Indian instruments, and she had a viola da gamba. That’s the instrument that really interested me, because it's six strings, tuned like a guitar, has frets, is bowed. It’s also a whole family of instruments, so there's every size from a double bass size up to a violin size. It’s been popular in different places in different times, and if you follow the history of the viola da gamba, you kind of get all the best music from the period. So it started in Renaissance Italy, and it was also really popular in England, where they had three different ways of playing it - they had like division music, where you improvise and play upon ground basses, which are like repeating bass patterns; there's liraviral music, which is really chordal; and then there's concert music, where you play all the different sizes. You play polyphonic music, where each person reads one line of music, and it's a really great communal music-making activity. The music is just really, really beautiful.

CS:
So when you're playing viola da gamba, are you especially drawn to music from a particular place or time?

MAD:
Totally. The viola da gamba that I have is a copy of a seven-string bass viol from France, so most of the music I play is French music. I do play some Dutch and German music, because they also had seven-string instruments there, but it's not really well-suited for, like, English 16th-century music. It's really suited for late-17th-century French music. I have the biggest possible size of a seven-string bass viol, so it's very boomy and has a really rich undertone sound to it. That's basically what I played from freshman of year of high school up until I got my salterio, so I feel very well-versed in the French style - not so much with English, but I'm hoping to get back on that and start playing more English and other types of music on the viol.

LM:
Are you composing as well?

MAD:
I don't really compose music. I do make arrangements of other pieces, which was really common back in the 18th and 17th centuries. So, if I like a piece that was written for violin, I might adapt it for the viola da gamba, or do the same thing with the salterio. I just made an arrangement of a choral piece, which was almost an exercise for me. I wanted to see how thick of a chordal texture I could make with the salterio, so that was really fun, and I'm excited to do more of it.

CS:
To your knowledge, are there instances in which these instruments are being used to produce contemporary works, or is it more geared towards the faithful recreation of historical compositions?

MAD:
Definitely. I have a lot of colleagues that play the viola da gamba in modern settings. There are makers of electric viola da gambas. The salterio has been revived much more recently. Let's just say the first person to look at the salterio as a serious instrument and try to revive the techniques, there's like one person in the ‘90s that tried to do it, and since then, there's really just been a few people here and there, but now there's a bunch of people that are starting to play it - not a lot, but compared to the viol, definitely. Since it's kind of similar to a cello, I feel like a lot of cellists try out the viol, so it's more common for the viol to be played in a contemporary fashion. But the thing is, there's hammered dulcimers, which are the modern descendant of the salterio, and those are definitely being played in modern ways. Like, you'll see online videos of people doing video game covers and all sorts of different things with the hammer dulcimer.

LM:
How does your relationship to playing these compositions translate to your visual work? Because I feel like there’s a bit more of a creative leap in what you're doing with the ceramics.

MAD:
I mean, like I said for the salterio decoration, I literally was trying to make a decision by making these like mock-ups of these weird, flat vases out of porcelain. But a lot of times, I'll be inspired to make something that's based off of maybe a sacred piece – like, I love the story of Judith beheading Holofernes, and there's an amazing Vivaldi oratorio where he describes the beheading of Judith all through choir and a really, really diverse orchestra for the time. He used mandolins, clarinets, viola da gambas, which is really uncommon at the time. Even for Vivaldi, using viola da gambas was not common. I’ve made a lot of pieces that are inspired by biblical stories, too. A lot of the time, it's more the instrument decoration that inspires my work, and not so much the content of the music.

CS:
Where does the interest in the Catholic motifs come from for you? Is it simply a nod to classical themes that you've encountered by virtue of your studies and your practices, or is there a more personal connection there?

MAD:
I guess, just as someone that appreciates art and music, there's so much sacred music and art that exists that is of really good quality, so that’s where I get the whole Catholic and sacred side of my aesthetic, I guess. There's just something really visceral about a lot of these stories of saints and biblical Old Testament stories. They're just really dramatic, full of drama, and they’re really perfect subjects to make art from. There are just so many possibilities of you can do with even just one story of a saint – like, you could do the martyrdom, or you could do paintings of their lives, and there’s a lot of things that you could do even do on an individual level with each of these stories. There's a lot of possibilities, and the stories are so well known and so ingrained in our culture that it just kind of calls me.

LM:
Did you grow up Catholic?

MAD:
No. Funnily enough, even my great-grandfather was agnostic, or didn't like believe in religion, so it's kind of surprising how far back the atheist side of my family goes back. But I’ve just always loved getting dressed up, and one of the occasions that we would get dressed up was to go to church. We'd go twice a year: one for Easter, one for Christmas. I guess it has to do with jealousy a little bit, too – like, when my older brothers did first communion, I was kind of jealous. I wasn't included because I was too young to do first communion, and I was like, “Mom, when am I going to get to do that? It sounds so cool. They get to go to like class after school and hang out.” [laughs]

LM:
So I guess aesthetics aside, do you have a relationship to mythology or religion or spirituality?

MAD:
Spirituality to me comes when I'm with nature. I definitely do have a spiritual side, but it's not in any sort of organized religion.

LM:
So your interest in these aesthetic languages is more about the humanity that drives those forces.

MAD:
Definitely. The art of the Counter-Reformation is my favorite, and the whole point of the Counter-Reformation was to try to make the viewer feel the passion of the art. My favorite art period is Mexican Vice-Regal art from the 18th century, and they just really got the sweetness and the passion down to a T.

LM:
What do you think about American architecture in relationship to a place like Mexico or Europe, where there's so much literal embodiment in the streetscapes of these periods? You're constantly engaging with it and having to deal with it and metabolize it in your day-to-day, just going to get lunch or whatever, whereas in the States, you have more agency the decision. You have to seek out.

MAD:
Yeah. I mean, I guess in New York it’s kind of hard to experience what the foundation of this city was – like, the whole Dutch foundation of the city is kind of invisible to most people. There's the Battery, and a few buildings here and there, but I actually don't even know if there are any original Dutch buildings in New York. That’s why I love going to California, because you get every single period of history when you go there. You get all the adobe houses from the Spanish Colonial period, and then you have a bunch of architecture from the Mexican period, you have these saloons from the American period and up until contemporary day. But on the East Coast, obviously there are colonial buildings and stuff over here, but the line is much more unbroken. It’s a very straight path over here on the East Coast, whereas on the West Coast, it feels really crazy, with a lot of twists and turns.

CS:
Earlier, we were talking about the works that you're going to be showing tonight: the vases, the lockboxes, the plates. You exhibit these items in gallery settings, but you also sell them through your online store. I'm wondering if we could talk about how your interest in these various handmade crafts evolved into a full-time business, and whether your practice has changed as it’s become a profession.

MAD:
I had done ceramics a few times growing up; I think I took like three classes total in my childhood, and then I was also really interested in making stuff with Sculpey. I was obsessed with Tim Burton growing up, and I really wanted to pursue stop motion animation as a possibility as a career. You know, just one of those fantasies you have a kid. Then I was in conservatory - I went to Peabody, which is part of Johns Hopkins in Baltimore - and I was in New York for a summer, and I took this ceramics class. I just really fell in love with porcelain as a material. It’s a perfect painting and decoration medium: since it has a white base to it, you can get color on it really easily - almost too easily; like, you can stain the porcelain and it becomes a really hot mess if you're not careful. But the more I looked into the history of porcelain, the more I was interested in the medium because of its relationship to the history of globalization, all the drama regarding its secrets. It took 1,000 years for Europeans to figure it out. A lot of people take it for granted, because they think it's just like clay that you get from the ground, but it's a synthetic material that was invented in China…but we did not go over what you asked! [laughs] So I started with this class, and I was having a really weird start - not in a bad way, but I just didn't know I was doing. I was like, “Okay, I want to make little pots for my plants. Let’s just start with that.” Then I started making these plates that had engraved images on them. I started making plates with love emblems from the early 17th century, and the reason why I wanted to do the love emblems was they were featured on this instrument maker’s instruments. His name was Joachim Tielke, and he’d engraved love emblems and gods and goddesses onto his instruments. To this day, I haven't seen any instruments that are more richly decorated than his. So I kind of started with that, and then I wanted to make some that were inspired by harpsichord soundboards. Harpsichord soundboards, like salterio soundboards, are usually decorated with gouache or tempera paintings, usually of botanical images that are copied from lithographs and copper plate engravings that they would copy from these books. A lot of times, they're not really preciously painted. Like, the most famous harpsichord maker during the 17th century, Rutgers, apparently one of his staff members could paint a harpsichord soundboard in a day. So it wasn’t mass-produced, but it wasn't so precious. It was just like, “Get the decoration on and move on.” That's actually how I started the bugs: on these soundboards, there will be little insects going along into the plants, sometimes with birds, and even shrimps sometimes, although I don’t know why they’re there. It’s this whole trompe l’oeil scene, but the shrimp is the weirdest one. [laughs] I'm just like, “Okay, what’s that all about? Is it food?”

CS:
Yeah, that is really odd. Speaking of those plates, was it a question then of you just sharing what you were making online and getting a strong response? Is that what led to you start selling them?

MAD:
Yeah. I started posting it on my normal Instagram account, and I got a lot of people asking, “Oh, can I get one? Can I get one?” So I ended up making a whole Instagram page for them, and then made like a little Squarespace shop and start selling them on there. It's been my full-time job pretty much since. Like, I basically dropped out of conservatory to pursue this full-time as a job.

LM:
Are you also selling antique jewelry?

MAD:
Yeah. I grew up in Palo Alto, but I went to school in San Francisco for high school, so I spent a lot of time on my lunch breaks going to Haight-Ashbury and seeing what they have in those shops there. I was always really interested in Victorian jewelry, and that's like kind of unusual for me. I usually like things that are from before the Industrial Revolution, but there's something about Victorian jewelry that is just so well-suited to people today, I think. There a lot of different sub-genres of Victorian jewelry - it's a period that lasted almost a hundred years, so there's like a lot to choose from - but my favorite period of the Victorian period is the Aesthetic Period. Like, Oscar Wilde was an aesthete. But Aesthetic Period jewelry is also really interesting because it has a lot of cultural and globalized ideas in it, too. There's a lot of Japonisme in Aesthetic Period jewelry; there were even silversmith shops that were started in India and made lockets and silver with Indian deities on them. It’s really interesting, all the different periods in Victorian jewelry. I also love all the revival periods that happened during the Victorian era – like, Etruscan revival jewelry is probably my top favorite after Renaissance revival jewelry.

LM:
My friend has a buckle ring that he bought from you - a little gold ring with a belt buckle on it. It's very cool.

MAD:
The buckle jewelry is, I think, the most wearable. I personally wear a buckle bangle pretty much every day.

CS:
Kind of a broader question for you, Marc: We’ve been talking about your interest in these classical practices and themes in various disciplines, and I'm wondering what interests you more: Are you interested in a revival of the past, or are you interested more in responding to the present? In other words, in presenting your work publicly, is it a question of preservation, of keeping these ancient traditions accessible? Or do you feel like they’re somehow in line (or maybe even at odds) with contemporary tastes and practices, and that's what makes them resonant? 

MAD:
I would say it's a little bit of both. At the end of the day, I think what interests me the most is the research that is involved with creating and playing this type of music and making the plates and working with porcelain. For me, the research is the most enjoyable part of it all. Like, instead of doom scrolling on my phone, I doom research [laughs] - you know, going on Pinterest and seeing all this different Chinese porcelain, going on JSTOR and reading about the nuns that played the salterio. The research is the most fun part. When it comes to music, it's not about preservation - it's more about trying to understand and present to the world a different type of taste and trying to see if people still like it or not. 

LM:
I don't want to put you on the spot, but to that end, could you play a little bit now so we can get a sense of what that means?

MAD:
Of course! So, I tried to grow out my nails, but I'd keep getting scratches in my porcelain. So instead, I have to use these special 18th-century rings.

LM:
Wow, those are cool! So your fingernails are at odds with your different mediums?

MAD:
Yeah, but these were like what were used in the 18th century to play the salterio a lot of the time. They're called Ditali, and they're just like these brass rings that you put bird quills in.

CS:
Wow.

LM:
Oh, so they're not someone's long-ass fingernails. [laughs]

MAD:
I'm really interested in trying different materials for the nail part, because apparently they use everything from ivory to tortoise shell to horns for these, and I've only used turkey and goose. [Proceeds to play a line on the salterio]

LM:
Wow, beautiful.

MAD:
I'll play this piece. It's from manuscripts from Santiago, Chile. That's an another thing that is really exciting about the salterio: I get to play music from not only Spain and Italy, but also Latin America, and I get to see how music was transferred between Europe and Latin America. But this piece was found in an enslaved woman's personal music book. Her name was Maria Antonia Palacios, and she was apparently an organist, harpsichordist, and saltario player. Salteristas, we call them. But in this music book, I think she had six minuets and a few marches by this Austrian composer named Ignaz Pleyel, who was apparently more popular than Mozart in his own time. [Proceeds to play piece on the salterio]

CS:
Nice!

LM:
It’s cool, it seems like your relationship to these instruments and this language kind of comes by way of Spanish-Mexican culture from having grown up in California. I think it was maybe a pervasive thing in the area, but also something that had a dream-like quality that you were drawn to.

MAD:
Yeah. I mean that was definitely part of it, and I was doing a lot of research over the pandemic on California history, mainly because I was doing a commission for one of my clients. She wanted a whole California-themed dinner service, and I was just like, “Okay, what kind of music was played in early California?” But also, my parents are both from Venezuela, so I grew up on like Venezuelan Christmas music, and that has a lot of Baroque influence, because the harps that they play in Venezuela are basically Baroque harps and the style in which they play them is Baroque. I mean, they go off and are virtuosos in their own right, but a lot of the playing techniques come from Baroque technique.

LM:
Did you grow up visiting Venezuela?

MAD:
Yeah. My family would alternate between going to Venezuela or visiting my family in Spain.

LM:
Cool. You have a real familial, personal connection to these places.

MAD:
Yeah.

LM:
The last thing we haven't really touched on is the lockboxes. Tell us about those.

MAD:
Well, I always felt like I was a Francophile with music and with the French porcelain. I always saw that as my favorite, and then something switched in me, where I was just like, “Okay, France is cool, they make great art, but there's a lot more out there than just French Baroque music and French porcelain.” My favorite porcelain manufacturer is Viennese. It's no longer around; it was one of the big porcelain manufacturers from the 18th century that only lasted a few decades. But the DuPaquier manufacturer from Vienna was known for the craziest use of color, the craziest use of figures in their work, and my favorite piece that they made is this tobacco box that has a locking mechanism on the top that you put a little padlock on. They had two different styles: the one that I make, and then they had one that had two locks, where one was a real lock and the other was a porcelain lock that was made to look real. That’s kind of where it started. I wanted to make my own decorations on them and just have fun making those, but it's really a complicated thing to make, because porcelain is really known for warping and cracking, especially during the drying process, so if anything goes wrong during the process, I have to scrap the whole thing and start over. There's a lot of pressure involved making these. [laughs] Also, the paint that I use is underglaze, so it might look great before I fire it, but you never know how much you’ve actually applied. I usually have issues with darker colors, because it might look black, but after you fire it, you’ll be like, “Oh, that was one layer, and it’s green now, so you're screwed.” That’s why I avoid going to darken my color palette, especially for the lockboxes. All of my pieces require three firings, and there's a risk of something breaking in each firing. 

LM:
Where are you doing these ceramics? Do you have a studio space? Do you have a kiln? It's a bit of an ideal to work on them, no?

MAD:
For the work that I make, I feel like it requires a gas firing, which is the more traditional way of firing porcelain. It involves flames going into a chamber where all your pieces are, and there's a different atmospheric makeup to it, so there's no oxygen. It's called a reduction firing, because you're reducing the oxygen that goes into the kiln by putting flames in there. New York is really strict on gas laws; you can't even have a gas stove anymore - that's how strict they are - so there are only like three studios in New York that have gas firings. The one that I work out of has one, but it's part of Columbia University, and the whole basement area was donated by Macy in their early 1900s. Because of the Arts and Crafts Movement, he wanted to put a bunch of money into arts and crafts education. The kiln that they have there now, I don't think it's the original kiln - it could be one that was remade maybe in the ‘60s or ‘70s or something - but it's grandfathered in. It’s one of the only options I have to make my work, because it would look completely different if it was fired in a normal electric kiln.

LM:
Do you know what those differences would be?

MAD:
Yeah. I've done a bunch of work with electric kilns, too. It's not that I like it less, it’s just that I’m most familiar with using color with reduction. It’s a higher temperature, so it changes the colors completely. That's the main reason why I think I need to stick with the gas kiln. I mean, I could relearn a completely new color palette, but it'd be a huge learning curve. Another thing is that the actual body of the clay feels completely different when it's fired in a gas kiln, because it's more vitrified. It's more glass-like; there's no air in it at all, and it has a really beautiful translucent quality.

LM:
It’s really shiny.

MAD:
Nice and shiny. It's also a cool white tone as opposed to a warm, creamier color. 

LM:
It's like a pure, pure porcelain.

MAD:
Yeah. There's some bone ash in the studio that I'm excited to try mixing into the porcelain. Bone ash is used to make the porcelain even more translucent, so I'm going to do some little experiments with that.

LM:
Oh wow, cool.

MAD:
I never, like, talk about my work, really, so it's kind of a complicated thing for me to try to synthesize everything into words. [laughs]

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