I engrave coins. And I sign them with a name that isn't mine.
My name is Ignacio Farré. I was born in Barcelona in 1981 and grew up in Seville, where at the age of thirteen I left school and started working in the family jewelry-engraving workshop. Juan was waiting for me there — my stepfather, though calling him that falls short: Juan was my father, and the man who taught me everything. He sat me down beside him, put a graver in my hand and passed on to me a craft that has almost vanished today: hand engraving on metal. Wedding rings, dedications, heraldic crests. A craft of precision with no going back, because you can't erase metal: what the graver opens stays open. In that workshop I also learned his most important lesson, and it wasn't about metal: life isn't thought out, it's built.
Years later, the internet opened a door that almost no one in Spain knew about: the hobo nickel. It's an American tradition with nearly a century of history. During the Great Depression, the hobos — the drifters who crossed the United States hopping from train to train — would take five-cent coins, the ones with the Indian head, and with nothing but a pocketknife they'd re-carve that profile into something else: a character, a skull, a face. Then they'd trade the coin for a plate of food or a night under a roof. What began as the art of hunger became a collector's discipline, and today there are engravers capable of carving true masterpieces on a coin the size of a fingernail.
When I discovered it, I became obsessed — that's how I learn: for years I thought about nothing else. I bought a microscope, learned to sharpen my gravers with a watchmaker's precision, and ended up making my own microscopic tools for each exact cut I needed. And I found something I didn't expect: on the other side of the ocean there was a culture that valued this work the way it deserves. My coins started selling among collectors, first in the United States and then across half the world.
And there's a detail that matters to collectors, and that defines me: I don't use pneumatic tools. Today almost all art engraving is done with air-powered systems that strike the graver for you; I engrave the way it was done in the old days, by hand power alone: the graver moves through the metal with nothing but the strength and control of the hand, cut by cut, with no motor involved. It's the slowest and most demanding way to do it. It's also the way Juan taught me — and the only one I'm interested in.
The way I work is unusual. I don't start from a sketch or a finished design: I begin with an idea in words — "a woman with braids rippling in the wind" — and let the piece emerge under my hands as I carve it. I put a feather here, see that it's asking for another there, and give it one. Hours under the microscope, the world switched off around me, in a slow dialogue with the metal. I don't know how a piece will turn out until it's done — and that uncertainty is, for me, the best part of the craft. Every coin that leaves my workshop is truly unique: not even I could repeat it.
And why Fayol? Fayol was Juan's surname. He died suddenly, and I couldn't say goodbye to him the way he deserved. But every coin I engrave carries his surname, and every piece that travels into a collector's hands — in America, in Europe, anywhere — carries it with it. It's my way of keeping Juan, somehow, sitting beside me in the workshop. Forever.
There's one more thing that makes what I do strange, and it took me a lifetime to discover it: I have aphantasia. My mind can't form images — when I close my eyes, I see only black. I've never been able to "see" a piece before carving it. And even so — or precisely because of that — I reached the very top of an art that, in theory, demands a prodigious visual imagination. I tell that whole story in my book, "Visualize an Apple."
