ALEJANDRO PUIG, VIOLIN MAKER

I have been making things out of wood, and earning a living doing it, since the late 1970’s, but my attraction to the material in its tremendous variety, visual beauty and sensuous plasticity goes back to my childhood. I still have a distinct memory of hanging out in the wood inventory room of my 7th grade shop class and rapidly learning to identify everything in it. The feel, the look, the smell, the weight, the way that it responds to cutting tools, the different applications that a given species is well suited to. All of these things have attracted me, animated my imagination, and kept me happily engaged all of my working life.

Along the way I have made furniture, cabinetry, built houses , workshops, chicken coops, even household utensils. In the early 1990’s I started working as an apprentice to a violin restorer named Daniel Hendricks and we later became partners, along with Lee Kupersmith, in a restoration business called Seraphin Strings. We worked on everything from good factory instruments to old Italian beauties. It turned out to be a world class introduction to violin making, both how to do it and how not to do it, because we had to fix everything. I learned enough in those years to start building new instruments and fell in love with the process and rhythm of it. I have received two awards from the Violin Society of America, one for cello tone (2006) and one for violin workmanship (2010). Currently I divide my time between making new instruments and restoring old ones for private customers and other shops. These two surprisingly different processes continue to inform one another.

So, what else about me? I was born in Havana Cuba a few years before the revolution of ’59 and my family emigrated to the states in the summer of 1960. Having grown up on the east coast I abandoned it a few weeks after graduating from high school, moving to New Mexico where I enrolled at UNM and spent a few years knocking around the art department. Eventually I met my wife there and our two daughters were born. We bought land in southwestern Wisconsin in ’91 and proceeded, with that magical elixir of youthful vigor, idealism and blissful ignorance, to build a shop, house, immense garden, large shed and a large greenhouse.

In 2015 I returned my mothers ashes to the Island of Cuba. In 2020, after 39 years of marriage we buried my wife here on this farm. It was a beautiful journey. And life continues to unfold.