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For Jason Newblanc – also known as Gadget, the nickname he’s had since college – being creative is a way of life. Growing up in Sunnyvale, he tried out all kinds of arts and found a natural affinity for ceramics and sculpture. In college, “I studied computer science because I was scared of being a starving artist,” he laughed, “but I minored in art, so I kind of lived in the art department and I snuck into the computer science department to do my coursework…I really liked the art people much better.”
He continued on as a maker, including many years spent building for Burning Man, but never tried to market his creative wares until a recent twist of fate: After a long career in tech, the Redwood City resident was laid off last January and decided to dedicate himself to his art full time.
As luck would have it, the Redwood City Library’s new public makerspace had recently acquired a laser cutter and was offering a workshop. Newblanc learned how to use the tools and software, went home and studied up for a month, then returned with a design.
At the library, “I quickly became an expert laser cutter because I was doing things nobody had tried,” he recalled. After a few months, he had made the first example of what has become his signature style – intricate wood cuttings in multiple layers.
“I kind of fell in love with it and decided that’s the direction I wanted to go,” he said.
He ran a GoFundMe campaign to help purchase a professional laser cutter of his own, similar to the library’s but a bit bigger and stronger, and now works out of his home, where he has a backyard woodshop/studio area.
“The laser cutter is in the garage, the computer’s in my office, so I’m constantly running between all these different places to get things done,” he said. “Most of the time when I have my woodshop open I’ll pull things out in my backyard and it kind of sprawls all over. I try to keep my art sprawl away from my family as much as possible.”
He described the laser cutter as akin to a large printer, only instead of paper, it transfers designs to other material – in his case, basswood. He designs in layers and cuts one layer at a time after staining the wood, then puts them all together.
Some of his designs feature architectural motifs familiar to locals, such as downtown Redwood City’s Fox Theatre. He’s also inspired by the natural world and environmental issues, with flora and fauna frequently turning up in his work.
The inspiration for Rise, for example, which depicts an octopus with its tentacles around the dome of Redwood City’s old courthouse (now the home of the San Mateo County History Museum), came from a trip to Japan, where he learned that the neighborhoods of the Tokyo area each have their own iconic manhole design.
He started pondering what such a design for Redwood City’s streets might look like.
“I was trying to link the city to the sea and talk a little about climate change,” he said. “I haven’t quite got it into a manhole form yet.”
Another design, The Dream, was inspired by a friend’s property in the Sierra foothills called Hummingbird Ranch and depicts a wistful alpaca dreaming of being a hummingbird. Inside the wooden layers is a small space in which Newblanc hides a dream of his own.
“Each one of these that I make, I write down a dream and I embed it inside the piece so it kind of has a secret core on the inside,” he said.
In addition to his larger pieces, he also makes and sells laser-cut magnets, made from leftover wood pieces, in an effort to create less waste as well as experiment with smaller designs.
Laser woodworking gives him “a good balance of working digitally and working physically. I get to sit and do the design process digitally in front of my computer and then I get to go out and sand and paint and stain and assemble and glue, and get it all together,” he said. “I’m not a linear thinker. I think in many directions at once.”
Community has always been a big part of Newblanc’s creative life. He’s a longtime member of the Redwood City Arts Commission, championing the creation of and support for public art in the city, and has been a part of the recent blossoming of public art projects around town, including the Commercial Way Mural Corridor and the Racial Equity Mural.
He also has another ongoing body of work, one that involves a lot of found materials. Constantly collecting scraps, bits and pieces on his walks around town, he assembles them into miniature futuristic cityscapes and gives them new life.
“What I love about it is, each of the parts came from the city and has had, like, a life of its own…somehow it ended up on the street and I found it,” he said. “Taking all those parts that have all that different history from the city and kind of recreating cities out of it.”
His “Questioning Cities” series considers how cities relate to the oceans (with a bar graph representing sea plastic, made of plastic he collected and arranged by color), as well as how they relate to other cities and to the Earth. One of those pieces, “Questioning Cities: Urban Sprawl,” was recently in an exhibition at Pacifica’s Sanchez Art Center.
This project has also helped connect him to other artists using found objects.
“We all need different parts so I’m picking up all sorts of things that I don’t need now because I know I can trade with them; they save all the little things that they don’t need for me,” he said.
He’s been making the rounds on the art fair circuit and took part in this year’s recent Silicon Valley Open Studios event. You can also find some of his pieces at Redwood City’s Little Green.
“I’m a little bit of an introvert, so having people come to me is an easier way to engage,” he said of his experience at art fairs. “I’m expanding in all directions at once, trying a bit of online sales, trying to get into galleries and shows.”
Now that he’s had a taste of life as a full-time artist, would he ever return to the corporate tech world?
“Not if I can help it,” he said. Though he’s working harder, and with longer hours, “I’m loving every minute of it. I feel like I have a ton of ideas and a lot of stories to tell so I’m just excited. I can’t work fast enough.”
Made By Gadget, Instagram: @madebygadget.