We wrote a past Kitelife article about a wonderful addition to the Drachen Foundation kite collection: “DF Board president, Scott Skinner, describes how the fifteen kites, all more than a hundred years old, made their way to Drachen. Because of an unexpected and delightful gift in 2000, the Drachen Foundation may hold the oldest specimens of Korean kites extant. The kites were originally bought by or given to Georges Lefevre, French consul to the Orient in the 1890s.

29 years ago, seven enthusiasts met on the island of Fanoe, Denmark and established the most unique of world kite events. This annual meeting would not be a “festival” in the traditional sense: no sponsorships, no paid attendees, and, for the most part, no formal schedule. From those original kite crazies, the event grew to host well over 8,000 fliers in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The Kitefliers’ Meeting has held steady with over 5,000 attendees to the present and it maintains a special spirit. People come because they want to come.

My kite prints are as much about the craft of making as they are a gentle delight in challenging the notions of what constitutes a print and where the perceived borders between the fine and applied arts end and begin. In the U.K. there are still very distinct borders between that which is perceived as art and that which is then deemed craft. A denial of craft skills seems to me as an educator a sad consequence of current trends. Fortunately this view is changing and I find great enjoyment in making craft works that are shown in an art …

As we look at all the facets of kiting from single line to four line, from flying with your grandkids on the beach to 800-man mega team flying, from fighter kites with glass-studded string to the art of aerial photography, nothing brings more excitement and adventure than power kiting. In over 20 years of kiting, I have tried out virtually all forms of power kiting, including kite flying from the back of a paraglider.

In the past few years, there have been some fine books that you should consider adding to your kite library. Two are from the world of fine art: one features the life and work of Tyrus Wong; the other, the contemporary work of Jacob Hashimoto. If you are at all interested in paper and bamboo kites, On Paper will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about paper.

There has always been a Hashimoto in my life. My first pull of air was in the arms of a Hashimoto, the famed Dr. Edward Hashimoto of University of Utah, who brought me and my entire Utah family into the world. Since then, I can track Hashimotos (artists, kitemakers, writers, scientists) popping up through my long list of life experiences – this list ends with the most recent, Jacob Hashimoto.

In a country where millions of kites are churned out every year to live out their brief, ephemeral lives doing battle in the skies before being reduced to a scrap of tissue paper and two thin strips of bamboo, the kitemakers themselves are almost always totally anonymous. Babu Khan was the exception. A kite made by Babu was a treasure, for Babu Khan was a kitemaster – one of the finest kitemakers in India.

For two years in the 1960s I was the assistant to Benjamin Thompson, the Chairman of the Department of Architecture at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard. Each spring the students held a Beaux Arts weekend which included a Kite Flight on the banks of the Charles River. There were elaborate and beautiful kites and silly prizes. It occurred to me at the time that the Kite Flight could be expanded to both sides of the river and hundreds of people could participate.

I don’t often write about kitemaking per se for Discourse, but I’m going to take the opportunity in order to talk about inspiration, mentors, and kite heritage.

Art has been in my life for as long as I can remember. It existed in basic forms of imagery and objects viewed by people, admired in museums, and bought and sold in galleries. As a child, I was always drawing but would never have called myself an artist. Artists were almost mythical creatures in my eyes: men and women of museum and gallery legend. I, on the other hand, was always exploring nature and science. For me, representing the physical world through art was a way of better understanding its functions and processes.