David Trotter: The Story of My Life In Leather
I have spent over 55 years designing and experimenting with leather and hand fabricating leather goods of various types.
The only ‘real job’ I ever had was designing and supervising production of leather tool pouches. A real job, meaning full time employment with a real paycheck. I did that for 27 of those years. The rest of my career has been experimenting with leather and hand making and selling my own work.
I grew up on a pioneer farm in the Caledon Hills north-west of Toronto. My parents had moved from Toronto, just after the Second World War. My siblings and I attended the one room schoolhouse, on the far corner of our farm.
I spent my summers on an island on Georgian Bay at Pointe au Baril, sleeping in a tent and living in a log cabin which had been built by my father, when he was a teen.
I always loved making things with my hands, bush craft and tree forts at the farm and toy sailboats, rafts, forts and fishing gear when I was on the rocky island on Georgian Bay.
In the summer of 1969, when I was 17 and the first summer I didn’t spend at the cottage, I began working at a leathercraft studio owned by a friend of my mother, named Daphne Lingwood, where I learned to work with my hands making leather items to sell at her shop and for my friends and family and the occasional paying customer I managed to find.
That summer was also the year I ventured out into the world by driving to the Woodstock Music and Art fair in White Plains New York with three friends. There I learned that people in my own age group (and older) were very interested in my leatherwork. I gave a young lady from Syracuse NY, whom I met there, a leather mask pendant that I had been wearing around my neck. I never saw her or the pendant again.
I subsequently attended Sheridan College in Oakville to study art and art history and ended up being told by one of my instructors that I might as well go and do leatherwork because all the projects I had created for class projects were made of leather anyway. So I did.
I continued to make leather creations for Daphne’s leather craft shop and eventually I began attending craft shows all around southern Ontario and larger shows like the One of a Kind 10 day Christmas shows in Toronto and The Ottawa Christmas craft show. I gained a following for my leather belts and jewellery, as well as a few of my more sculptural three dimensional boxes, vases and wall sculptures.
I began selling custom leather fashion accessories at two or three stores in the Queen St. West area of Toronto as it had become the new trendy fashion, music and art hot spot in Toronto during the 1980s.
Still it was difficult to make a living by selling my leather creations.
I now had a wife and two small children. I knew I had to do something to change things. We decided to make a move to the US, and into the larger and more mature American craft market. My wife, Nancy, being American, was all in for a move to the States.
With the financial help of Corning Enterprises, we moved to Corning NY in the late 1980’s, where I opened a leather craft shop on Market St.
The shop was open seven days a week and we attended big wholesale/retail craft markets on the East coast of the US. We had to hire people to look after the kids and mind the shop while we were away. It was a lot to maintain. I was quickly burning out. It was not working. I couldn’t do it. We would have to change something, again.
Nancy was making bi-monthly trips to Toronto, to deliver my work to a couple of remaining customers on Queen St. As luck would have it, on one of her trips she happened upon a Toronto newspaper and was perusing the classified ads, where she saw an ad from a tool manufacturer in Ajax Ontario, starting up a leather tool pouch manufacturing department.
They were looking for an experienced leather designer-craftsman to supervise and manage their new leather tool pouch manufacturing operation, starting immediately. Must have experience and credentials.
Hallelujah, I applied for the job and got it.
It wasn’t a job made in heaven but it gave me a regular paycheck. and the opportunity to start over and to learn a lot about the technical aspects of leather making and leatherworking that would be very helpful.
We moved back to Ontario and I started my new job. I was still able to attend small shows and enter local exhibitions and work on my own leather art on weekends and evenings. I also had a ready supply of leather scraps and trimmings as well as leather contacts with the tanneries and distributors of leather from around the world. It was not the job I had dreamed of but it worked.
While I continued my full time job, I purchased my current home and work space, in the countryside, near Orono Ontario.
I quit my job in 2015 and I began rebuilding my own leatherworking business by making leather art pieces and a few fashion and functional works and attending art and craft shows around the Toronto area. I open my doors to have my own exhibitions a couple times a year and
I sell my works through Meta4, a craft gallery in Port Perry Ontario.
My workshop and gallery and home are in the Cow Palace, my converted 1950’s livestock auction barn.
I still love working with my hands and I still experiment with new methods of working with leather and making one of a kind leather art and functional works.
I have recently been asked to teach what I have learned about leather and have held a couple classes in my studio. I invite interested groups to come and see demonstrations, where I talk about leatherwork and talk about my life and my love of leather.
NOTE: I am open to commissions of interest to me, particularly works of wall hangings and free-standing leather sculptures.