“I like to try new things, and a few things stick,” she said.Īs she worked on several of the bowls, which she took out of the forge in turns, it looked to an untutored eye as if her fast-moving hammer was striking the steel square at random. Now, she makes 300 of them a year and said they have become her bread and butter. The bowls are a type of bell that originated long ago in Asia that can be used for meditation, music, relaxation or healing. After it was cooled and polished, she found that the metal rang when struck by a mallet, just the way that Tibetan singing bowls do. Max used her hammer to mark that square with divots and then gently bent it into a concave shape. “I was playing around, wondering what can I do with a square of metal,” she said. That may not be what people first think of when they imagine someone striking an anvil by a fiery forge. Now Max considers herself to be an artisan blacksmith who creates forms with texture and color out of basic metal shapes. When she spent a weekend at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle taking an introductory course on blacksmithing, she was hooked. Max said that great-grandfathers on her mom’s and her dad’s side of the family were blacksmiths, and a great-great uncle worked as a metalsmith. That creative drive and a family history of making stuff has helped her to fit in up here, where many people choose to live off the beaten track and support themselves and their art with a variety of day jobs. “And as a kid, I wasn’t allowed not to be creative.” “I’ve always been interested in nontraditional things,” Max said. But it did take her a little longer to figure out what hats she would wear in order to make a living in the Pine Tree state. It didn’t take her long to find her way back for good, and she stayed even after spending her first winter in the snowy city of Presque Isle. Max found employment at Maine High Adventure, the Boy Scout base located on Grand Lake Matagamon, where she had come as a camper in the 1980s and loved it.
I came to Maine to work as a whitewater guide, and it was a very good fit.”
She grew up in Dallas-Fort Worth, which has a population of more than 7 million people and is known more for its high concentration of corporate headquarters, big hats and oil-rich history than for its quiet country roads and simple blacksmith shops.
In short, it’s a very long way from metropolitan Texas, where she comes from, and that’s just the way Max - a blacksmith, artist, jewelry-maker, house painter and even sheetrocker by trade - likes it. Behind the forge, which can get as hot as 1,700 degrees, an open door gave a glimpse of thick snow falling on the trees that screen her property from the road nearby that runs past her rural Penobscot County homestead located about a dozen miles north of Orono. Her long, curly hair flowed out from under her face shield, her blue jeans and work shirt covered by a heavy-duty apron, to protect her from errant sparks. Then Max, 48, selected a hammer and began to strike the steel square, her blows ringing throughout her rustic blacksmith shop even louder than the whoosh of the hot wind that came from her forge. With the fluid ease that comes from years of practice, blacksmith Lara Max used metal tongs on a recent afternoon to pull a glowing hot square of steel out of her small forge and place it carefully on her anvil.
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