Creative Corner

In the continued quest to perfect his offerings to guests, Mr. Gutman presents the following this month:

As he says, “You have to make a horse every now and then, you know! I’ll try to cast this one. The last 2 horses I tried to cast didn’t work out that well, so crossing fingers.”

A few days later, he sent photographs of the cast—a success!

This is a butler with zero background in sculpting who, if you compare his works when he first started innocently with carved fruit for guests at turndown a couple of years ago, has proven that research, attention to detail, persistence, and practice backed by a good dose of intention to wow, do pay dividends. In other words, he started where many of us are now, so you, too, can succeed, whether in sculpting or some other skillset that can be learned and then used to wow guests.

In his own words: “I recently stumbled upon a YouTube video of an artist who showed a whole process of molding and casting a sculpture. In that particular video he showed an interesting technique I was not familiar with and which I applied on the horse bust.

“Now this is something that I do a lot of and recommend anyone to do as well: I keep looking for materials on the subjects of sculpting, molding and casting. Search enough, and you’ll always find something useful you can utilize.

“I even go over the same materials again and again. You’d be surprised how much
you get out of that. Specially when you practice a lot and then go back again
to review the materials, you now have more experience and can understand something
better, where before you may have missed the importance of a datum or maybe it was
too much to digest the first time and so you only picked up just a part of the whole. A second, third and fourth review/restudy really goes a long way.

“And, of course, never give up… I failed only twice before in making a mold. Both of these
times were when I tried to mold a horse. So take the challenge, find or come up with the answer of how to do it. And then do it. Sooner or later you’ll get it right!”

Mr. Kobi Gutman is one of the most accomplished hotel butlers in the world, currently working as the head butler at a private hotel in Florida; he can be reached via the Institute.

The Institute is dedicated to raising service standards by broadly disseminating the mindset and superior service expertise of that time-honored, quintessential service provider, the British Butler, updated with modern people skills, and adapted to the needs of modern employers and guests in staffed homes, luxury hotels, resorts, spas, retirement communities, jets, yachts & cruise ships around the world.