Tom Googerty usually wrote simple, how-to-do-it instructional prose. Occasionally, however, he tried to express the aesthetic that guided his artistic vision and artisan's hand. Googerty believed that a blacksmith earned the right to be called an artist if he acted on the "universal, divine impulse within us...to make things beautiful." The artist-blacksmith was one who "understands and follows God's law, Truth, the laws of Nature, the laws of Art, and abides by the possibilities and limitations of this sturdy, honest material." Googerty's aesthetic principles stressed honesty and integrity; graceful line, form, and due proportion; and creativity grounded in Nature and History.
Honesty and integrity governed the relationship between the worker and the work. Googerty drew particular inspiration from German and Belgian ironwork of the 12th to 17th centuries, in part because he believed that in medieval times the craftsmen had also been the designers. Art and technique had fused naturally at the Gothic forge.
The modern factory, however, had alienated the "studio trained artist" from the "shop trained man." The former could dream but not do, the latter do but not dream. Unlike some handcraft purists, Googerty did not object in principle to laborsaving machinery. He did insist, however, that hand work had "a beauty which the machine cannot produce."
Honesty and integrity also demanded a natural fit between material and object, form and function. Because iron was a crude, sturdy metal most often used for everyday things, ironwork should be "fashioned into shapes that are suitable and practical for the material." Ornamentation should relate to use, as in the case of visible rivets and decorative bolt heads that served both as fasteners and design statements.
Googerty particularly disliked efforts to mimic Nature. He insisted that delicately wrought iron rose petals and realistic leaves might show off technical virtuosity, but failed as art. "Nature does not furnish us with readymade designs.... It is impossible to utilize things in nature...without the play of human invention and imagination." The true artist-blacksmith "conventionalized" organic forms. "We simply use things in Nature as a motif to get our ideas," he explained, "and arrange them according to fixed rules and principles." The rules and principles were the traditional (Googerty would have said universal) notions of ordered line, mass, form, and due proportion that had characterized Western art since the time of the Greeks. Within these bounds the artist-blacksmith should let invention play.
