A beautiful Christ, with powder blue boxers under the silk, from the Philippines, with surrounding Balinese shrine doors.
A Nepalese photo frame that I've turned into a tiny mirror and painted my "holy blue" ie tempera paint.(You can catch a glimpse of me in the mirror.) There's a very tired madonna on top. next is the Christos. At lower right is a Japanese Daruma. It's very direct carving. It deserves a better photo. not now...
Carved Balinese shrine doors that were made into a frame for Persian miniature painting. The frame is old fence material and needed a bit more ornament. I used wooden Checkers and sunk them into the frame. Works, no?
7. My art collection I bought my first two works of art the day after I was layed off from my first professional art job. It was a crazy extravagance of $200 that I've never regretted. Most of the art is sculpture, specifically wood carvings, some folk, some religious.Each work speaks to me in three ways:
a) It tells it's story (or the story I've given it.)
b) It functions as dimensional library I can consult at any time:"How did they make that cut? Organize the patterns? Paint the surface? Simplify the forms? Why is this piece so moving to me?
c) They're my cheering squad.Few things feel more discouraging than trying to make a living hand carving wood in the 21 Century. These wood carvings remind me that there are other things that are important: Devotion. Appreciation of the natural world. Taking all the time necessary to make something beautiful. That there is a long line of craftsmen and women who came before me, I'm just claiming my place in line.
In her wonderful book, Art Objects, Jeanette Winterson writes:
"If truth is that which lasts, then art has proved truer than any other human endeavour. What is certain is that pictures and poetry and music arre not only marks in time but marks through time, of their own time and ours, not antique or historical, but living as they ever did, exuberantly, untired."
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