“I thought it was going to be a one-and-done kind of thing,” Sinziana Iordache said of her first drawing of a mechanical watch. It has not worked out that way.
Ms. Iordache studied architecture in her native Romania before she moved to Canada in 2007 and later became a founder of an interior design business. “I’ve always loved art, but there is a certain taboo, especially in Eastern Europe, about art in general,” she said. “The feeling is that art is not a sustainable career. It’s more of a passion.
“My parents didn’t think that; they were always extremely supportive and pushing me towards it, but I tended to be more logical and practical, so I never thought of art as a career.”
Inspiration hit during a visit to the MB&F M.A.D. Gallery in Dubai Mall while she was on a vacation in 2019. The gallery displays not only the unconventional watches made by the MB&F brand but also kinetic objects that combine art and technology. She recalled being particularly inspired by the work of Gaby Wormann, who uses mechanical watch parts and other materials for her sculptures of insects.
“I thought, ‘This is so interesting because it is art yet it’s combined with something that’s technical,’” Ms. Iordache said. “When I came back from vacation, I started drawing watches right away, thinking, ‘Let’s see how this feels.’
“I absolutely loved it. I was hooked.”
A Way to See
Her first drawing, purely for personal pleasure, was the intricate skeletonized movement of the Vacheron Constantin Métiers d’Art Mécaniques Ajourées, which, in terms of complexity, is like starting at the top. It now hangs in her living room.
That was followed by the dial of the equally elaborate Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso Hybris Mechanica Calibre 185, also drawn for pleasure. (In the drawing, the date on the perpetual calendar display reads June 6, 2021, the day she started work on it.)
“Money was never something I had in mind when I first started,” she said. “It began purely out of passion, a way to unwind and switch off at the end of the day.” Yet after she posted some of her work on social media, commissions started rolling in.
One of her earliest sales was a portrait of what she now considers her grail watch, a Breguet Tradition Quantième Rétrograde 7597BB.
Another favorite, she said, was a drawing of the A. Lange & Söhne L001.1 caliber in its Double Split watch. She reproduced every detail, including the intricately filigreed hand engraving, a Lange signature, on the balance cock, the bridge that holds the balance wheel in place.
It caught the eye of another client, Manor Haas, an avid watch collector who asked her to draw his favorite watch, a Lange Datograph. “It’s the chronograph of all chronographs,” he said.
“I love what Sinziana does,” he added. “The details are insane. She even drew the micro-hairs coming out of the stitching on the strap.”
The price for the 18-inch-by-24-inch drawing was 5,000 Canadian dollars ($3,560). “When I picked it up, I was doing the math, thinking, ‘OK, how much am I paying divided by how many hours?’” he said. “And, with all due respect, my plumber gets paid more.” He said he gave her some extra money, “to show my pure respect for this rare, beautiful, difficult, niche art form.”
Like Tiny Buildings
Ms. Iordache also has worked for a few brands: IWC Schaffhausen hired her to draw some of its special, high-end watches as gifts for buyers. “Portraits are another whole way to appreciate a watch,” she said. “They are very small, and not everyone’s going to come up to your wrist and take out a loupe to see the detail, or ask you to take it off and turn it around so they can appreciate the craftsmanship — but if you have this scaled portrait, and it’s framed on your wall, it’s another way to see it.”
Prices for her drawings, which are almost always black on white, vary from 400 to 10,000 Canadian dollars, depending on size and complexity. The large pieces — 22 inches by 30 inches is the biggest she does — take 150 hours to complete.
Ms. Iordache’s attention to detail seems like a natural extension of the world of watch collecting, where fans are known to deliberate endlessly about such minutiae as the shape of a tourbillon bridge or the curve of an inside bevel.
She said she is much like them, relishing the finer details of mechanical timepieces, which she said are like “tiny buildings” involving design and craft. “There’s a balance between the aesthetic part of it and the very technical aspect that I love,” she said. “It’s all about the detail, perspective, light and shadow.
“We didn’t use computers in the first year of my architectural studies, so everything was old school: We sat at drafting tables, with ink and pencils. It was good training. We had to write on the blueprints, so we had to take a lettering course. Like every student in university at one time or another, I thought, ‘When am I ever going to use this skill?’
“Well recently I was drawing a Patek Philippe 5130G World Time, penciling in the 24 city names, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is finally getting used.’”
Some Experimentation
Ms. Iordache described graphite, her medium of choice, as “quiet and understated.” She uses Staedtler 2-millimeter mechanical pencils with leads in five different levels of hardness, supplemented with graphite powder or Faber-Castell Pitt Graphite Matte Pencils for very dark accents. Everything is freehand, although she sometimes uses drafting tools such as rulers and circle templates.
She said her love of black and white derives from her architecture studies, and it spills over to her studio, where one wall is painted black, a strong contrast to the glossy white desktops and the white cabinet doors that cover custom shelves and supply drawers.
There are exceptions, such as the time a client asked for a reproduction of the luminescent hands and indexes on his particular Rolex GMT-Master II, known as the “Batman.” Ms. Iordache said it took some experimentation, “but I found an acrylic paint that glows in the dark the way the lume does, in exactly the same color.”
“It was an experiment,” she said, “but I spoke recently to the client, and he told me the color and the glow are holding up. He said, ‘Sometimes I’ll pass by in the evening and be like, ‘Oh, it still works.’”
When it comes to scale, Ms. Iordache said, “I won’t draw anything smaller than eight by eight. You would lose the detail.”
At the sizes she uses, she explained, drawings can include flaws and signs of wear: “You’ve had a history with the watch. Every scratch, every bang tells a story, brings back a memory. We carry them with us and they remind us of something apart from the fact that if you like technical aspect. They’re also very emotional and we kind of get attached to them.
“I’ve had commissions where the client has told me not to include the scratches, and I’m like, ‘Really?’ But this is your watch. Without the scratches, it could be anybody’s watch.”
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