Learn | Issue No.08

more than a year during which time I learned a ton and had a great time in the beautiful Austrian countryside. I paid for my living expenses by doing stone setting jobs for a company in Vienna during the weekends and did multiple seminars at the goldsmith school where Martin taught, for all the different classes there.

me a couple years later teaching on Tahiti, crazy when I connect the dots in hindsight). After going through this process, I was officially a GRS instructor and taught my first GRS course with the Aktiv Guld company in Copenhagen, Denmark at the end of 2018. I learned a ton from this experience, and if I did my job well, the students as well. Since then I’ve taught a couple classes a year at Aktiv Guld, which are always great fun to do. Over the years I’ve received inquiries from time to time about private courses with me. I always thanked the person for reaching out and felt somewhat honored they sought me out for private training, when there are so many places to learn. But, unfortunately, I wasn’t in the position of teaching private lessons. Mainly because my work setup was only arranged for myself and I was never long in my own private workplace to begin with. Then in March 2020 I was stuck in place, like the rest of the world. But the inquiries kept coming in. After a while I was done with my stone setting jobs, and because all the trade shows and my travel plans had been cancelled, all of a sudden I was in a position to say yes to this. First I started with people I knew personally. This went and felt very good, both for them and for me. Then I had private students I didn’t know very well, but through acquaintances of friends and colleagues. Then the ball started rolling and since then I’ve been pretty much fully booked back to back, as of this writing many month in advance. They come now not only from Holland but from all over Europe, and from time to time even from overseas, which is awesome! Sometimes I receive a nice and friendly e-mail, phone call or message with the question if I’m willing and able to teach in their personal workshop. My go to answer is no, but on some special occasions there is a possibility it can work for both of us. At the end of 2020, for example, I received an email from a bench jeweler who I had spoken to briefly at the JCK show in Las Vegas back in 2017. I must admit that I couldn’t remember that particular conversation (I talked to hundreds of visitors during those trade show days) but he mentioned how impressed he was with the 901 bird knob and how he had mentioned on the show that he would possibly get in touch with me at a later point. He happens to run a workshop and jewelry

How did you transition into being a teacher?

The first time I started to teach in a minor capacity was during my first trip to Singapore. The company there just received 3 Leica’s and GRS machines but had only ‘old timers’ working in the workshop. So my job was to explain the benefits of the tools and how to utilize the machines in a proper way, so it could help them in their work. I was 23 back then and had no idea how I could convince them of the benefits of these machines. Something about ‘you can’t teach old dogs new tricks’ came to mind and the start was a bit rough. But after doing my setting jobs, which I did there as well, and they 10x looped my work when it was finished like their life depended on it, they started to come around and slowly they asked if I could demonstrate again how the machines worked and what kind of gravers I used. Then, during my second Baselworld show with GRS Tools, the president of Glendo asked me if I would be interested in teaching official GRS courses in the future. I was all for it but had some slight doubts. I wondered if people would take a person like me serious. A young guy with not a 30+ year track record of working experience under his belt. She convinced me they would look at my work first and foremost and then at the results my potential future students would get from the courses I taught, if they were uncertain of my competence the first time around. I didn’t see any flaws in that explanation, so I was thrilled to get this plan started. Glendo flew me over to the US for 5 weeks to shadow 5 different classes that were taught at their GRS Training Center by 5 different instructors. This was to see and experience for myself how they run classes there. This was a great experience in and of itself and had the bonus for me of meeting many great artists from the US. (At the end of my stay in the US I flew to Las Vegas to demonstrate for GRS at the JCK show, which got

Learn ISSUE NO.08

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