Work

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2011 - 2016 

For the first few years, I had my own business making guitars doing restorations, and I was an active (and the youngest member) of the New England Luthiers Association.  I never stopped working other jobs on the side; I worked in restaurants, construction, sales, retail, shipping, packing, warehouse floor work, warehouse management, and other odd jobs too. Each of these part-time (and sometimes full-time) jobs that I worked on the side, each taught me and invaluable amount about their prospective industries, efficiencies, systems, drives, and most importantly, I learned what I like, don't like, I learned about good business practices and bad ones, but most importantly, I learned a lot about people. (I am still in touch with most of the people I worked with and for, they've become good friends. I should mention I have never been fired, I myself chose to move on.) 

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2016-2017

I had some sort of early mid-life crisis and decided to close my Lutherie business. I realized I was young, and I was working around the clock, 60 - 80 hours a week, and studying and continuing education in whatever spare time I had. So, one day, I got fed up and dropped it all. I found this full-time job that took me away from home, I worked for 6 months with this guy Ryan Pierce, the owner of 'New England Track and Field', painting college and high school running tracks, we literally worked from sunrise to an hour or so after sundown, 24 days a month, with one long weekend a month as a break. Every day and a half, off to a new track. We basically spend every hour of every day together for 6 months, hotel and motel hopping every night. He taught me more about how to live than anyone I've ever met. He looked at me one day and said "John, you're always drawing (which I did when we were on the road or in the hotel room, or on lunch break) and talking about art, and Italian sculpture, why don't you go to Europe, take a one-way ticket, and just go. When the season ends, you'll have more than enough money to take a few months off from working. just do it." .... So, I did, I bought the ticket right then and there. In January of 2018 I took his advice I flew to Italy.

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2018 - 2020

For the first 3 months, I traveled around Italy soaking up the culture, the art, the history, and the language. I had an Airbnb experience rappelling from a 40-meter-tall medieval tower, and I became friends with the guide, Roberto, who happened to be the owner of several Italian companies, called People Group SRL and Recover Energy SRL. After my Visa expired, I called him, asked if I could have a job, he said yes, and offered me a job as a canyoning, hiking, and corporate team building experience guide, and translator and English teacher for the rest of their team. So, I came back to the USA, packed by bags, enrolled in a school in Italy (to study the Italian language) and I sold everything that I wasn't bringing with me, and I moved to Italy.  In the mornings I went to school, and afternoons and weekends I worked with Roberto, and his wife, who, believe it or not... is named Roberta. 

When I had free time, I took on commissions to work on cellos, violins and upright basses, and practiced sculpting.

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The Pandemic: 2020 - present day

January 2020, I met the love of my life, and only 3 months into dating, boom! The pandemic hit, we moved in together, and my work with Roberto and Roberta came to a halt. Italy as a nation came to a halt. Martial law forbade us from straying more than 200 meters from our homes without a permission slip from the government, and a national curfew at 9 pm. Military and carabinieri patrolled the streets, and I was out of a job. So, returned to sculpting.

Now I am spending most of my time developing a product line for my new business (this one here, Randazzo World). This product line is a mix of various things, because when I become fascinated enough by something, I usually try my hand at it, especially if its new to me, and I usually immediately get to work on trying to improve it if possible, or if I think it's perfect the way it is, try to see how I can understand why it seems perfect and learn how to apply that to other things I am working on. Randazzo World's first collection is expected for release winter of 2024.

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Management

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     In all my business' I have always had to collaborate with subcontracted artisans. Whenever something that could be done better, more efficiently, and create an overall higher quality product, I delegated that job to a specialist. I worked side by side with many artisans and engineers on projects to meet the client's needs, and requests. I've conducted market surveys for my work. I've prototyped and tested highly experimental projects, worked through iterations, recorded and demonstrated progress until final a solution came to fruition. Written and managed invoicing, done my own bookkeeping, cost breakdown, product analysis, presentations to patrons. When you work on your own, no matter how specialized you are in your particular trade, craft or field, to a certain extent you have to be a generalist to survive, so I became just that, I learned (and am still learning) everything there is to know about building and managing my work. I am open-minded, accept my failures, and do everything in my power to learn from them and not to make the same mistakes twice. 

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Philosophy

     First and foremost, I am an artist, and people come to me because they see something in my work, or my philosophy or my being that inspires them, connects with them, or intrigues them personally. That being said, my work is almost always very heavily influenced and inspired by my patrons. Simply put, what I do, wouldn't be worth it or satisfying I wasn't connecting with my patrons and helping to extend their personality out into their world. In this collaboration between artist and patron the final product is always beautiful because it is an amalgamation of the two entities.

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Research 

     Being able to anticipate a patron's needs and tastes is so important to me, and I've always taken that very seriously. To create unique styles, design new forms, (and in my Luthier work) engineer acoustics to the client's pallet, it requires and enormous amount of research beforehand, and that research doesn't really stop until the instrument is finished and in the client's hands and they are happy with it.

     In my Luthiery work I spend hours researching their playing style, their musical tastes, the history behind the instruments and styles of the people who inspired them, all in an attempt to be able to capture a part of them, in the instrument. I want the musician to pick up that instrument and feel like it exists just for them, and that's because it does. I always try to raise the bar, strive to push the limits, and innovate, in acoustics, in construction, aesthetics, and emotional significance and connection to the viewer, and or user.  

     In my furniture work, I always take the time to see the space where it will be inhabiting, and study the tastes, style and of my patrons. This can run as deep as reading and studying the literature they keep, understanding their literary roots, begin to reach into their interests and prospective. Listening and studying their music collection, understanding it's texture. Anything I can use to get a better idea of who that person is, what their style is, and what would suit them best, and make a lasting connection with them personally. Then I try to feel what that looks like, feels like, and how it needs to function and to what degree it needs to function to create lasting impact, describe its owner, and last the test of time. The technical research comes later, because the first and most important thing to me is that my furniture helps a house become a home.  

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Fields of Study (Privately)

     Some of my favorite subjects are ancient history, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, classical literature, practical engineering, and not last (but for now I'll end the list here) and also certainly not least... Linguistics.  

     Expansion of knowledge in these fields has taught me that everything is so tightly connected, and we spend most of our lives not evening noticing or thinking about how they influence each other and influence us. You cannot understand one field without understanding the fields that overlap with it, that influence it, or are influenced by it. The search for knowledge is so fulfilling because of its inability to be exhausted. We just have to ask the right questions. 

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Competencies

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Digital Design

• Uccnc G-code

• Fusion 360

• Gimp 2.10

• Blender 3D

• Photogrammetry with Meshroom

• Font Forge

• Inkscape

• Microsoft Excell / PowerPoint / Word

• I've dabbled in HTML

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Manual Design​

• Hand Drawn Animation

• Classical Drafting

• Calligraphy

• Font Design

• Stringed Instrument Design (Luthiery Design)

• Silversmithing Design (Jewelry/ Sculpture

• Architectural Design (wood, stone, concrete structures)

• Architectual Interior Design (Moldings, Built-ins, Fixtures, Furniture, Kitchens, -etc.)

• Mechanical Design (Manual Mechanisms, Tooling Solutions, Kinetic Design, -etc.)

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Manual Trades/ Skillsets

• Wood Carving / Wood Sculpture

• Traditional Felling/ Hewing / Dimensioning 

• Classical Joinery

• Luthiery

• Classical Marquetry

• Silversmithing

• Welding (Mig and Acetylene) 

• Stone Carving (Marble, Limestone, -etc.)

• Clay Sculpture (Water based and Oil based)

• Electronics Soldering

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Languages

• English (Mother Tongue) 

• Italian (C1-C2, I've been mainly living in Italy since 2018)

• German (Almost A1.  Mainly studying this now)

• Portuguese (Sub-A1, can understand around 25 percent)

• Spanish (A1, can read and understand most spoken Spanish)

• French (Tourist Level/ sub-A1, I am slowly losing whatever French I had, simply due to not having someone to practice with.) 

• Russian (I was born in Russia, so I try to maintain at least a tourist level Russian for speaking, reading and comprehension)

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Language is one of my greatest passions and has always been. I travel and study them constantly. I aspire to have my language chops only improving overtime, not degrading. When I was little, I studied ancient and dead languages, obsessed with their alphabets, lexicons and grammar. My mother tongue is American English, but I am also fluent in Italian, and can read and write (and albeit, not without difficulty, communicate) in Portuguese and Spanish, and have been taking the time to learn German, Russian, and French and Latin (for which I am mediocre to say the least but improving!). I practice 6 languages every single day. 10 minutes a day for each one, I do half hour in the morning at breakfast, and half hour in the evening before bed. I am lucky to have friends and family that speak these languages, so I also have the opportunity to practice them live frequently, sometimes even daily.