Sculpture and a Chinese carving

I bought this carved panel in Hong Kong because it delighted me. The vitality of the birds and peonies, the humor of the carved insects, moths, cicadas, and the gay colors still are a joy to see.
The intricacy of the pierced carving and the efficiency of the design finally inspired me to try to copy a section in sugar pine. Here goes!

 The panel and the design inked onto the new block of sugar pine.

Sculpture and the Trolley Trail

Toby J makes it look so easy.... So does the fast editing.



Artist Toby J works with chainsaws to create his public art sculpture for the new light rail line.
Toby carves a tree removed during light rail project construction to create one of the sculptures that will be located along the Trolley Trail in north Clackamas County.

Six artists, including yours truely,  are creating public art from removed trees. All of the pieces will be located on the multi-use trail, adjacent to the light rail line.

Sculpture and Time

There's an arts organization in Portland that has a festival called TBA or Time Based Art.
There's lots of dance and theater, but no sculpture.

Sculpture is the ultimate Time Based Art. What other art form lasts thousands of years?
.....or seems to take a thousand years to master and complete a single work?

Portrait of the artist as a young tree.

Counting the rings, this tree was only 77 years old.

Wood carving is such an intimate art. It is working with a (once) living subject that changes over time. Getting to know and understand this being in my driveway is important because I'm going to be living with this project for the next two years.

Sculpture and the Farwest Show

This flame design is of a Buddhist, 7th Century bronze finial, selected from a book about the famous Japanese temple Horyuji, the temple of the Exhaulted Law.

I modified the artwork for the two 4 foot x 6 foot panels I created for the Farwest Show. Here's how I did it.

 

I had the frames designed and fabricated by Al Jolley at Designform Inc. I was initially going to carve AAC blocks and fit them into the frame. A BAD idea as it would be this scultor's nightmare of heavy AND fragile AND dangerous! That and moving the artwork to and from a three day show, with no budget, quickly brought me back to reality. Plywood was the only way to proceed.

 First I glued down a full scale pattern onto luan plywood, above. Easiest glue in my shop is a 10 year old bucket of wall paper paste. It lasts forever and never goes bad or dries up.

Then using my old trusty scroll saw, I cut out the stencil.

I used the stencil and spray paint to transfer the pattern onto the full scale plywood. The notch at the bottom and top is to insure correct registration. I align it onto the center line.

Here's the full scale design on 3/8th plywood ready for cutting. More in the next post.

Sculpture and Crocodiles

http://godutchbaby.blogspot.com/2010/07/macro-monday-crocodile-recollections.html

Crocodiles from designer Vincente Wolf's home.

`How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!

`How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spread his claws,
And welcome little fishes in
With gently smiling jaws!' .....Lewis Caroll

I bought this crocodile because it was the most powerful, viseral sculpture I saw that year. It got even more powerful after I leaned more about the culture and tradition it comes from.

Crocodiles kill more humans than great white sharks. That's what makes the canoes of the Sepik river so powerful. Carved from a single log, with the prow being a crocodile head.

Think about it, you're in a small boat, riding AT  WATER LEVEL, among giant reptiles who would like nothing better than to have you for lunch. Best to blend in. When the boats were no longer serviceable, they were left. Others came and cut the carved heads off and sold them.

A friend who visited the region brought me back this crocodile. It's an amazing carving, but I wonder if it embodies the shift from art being part of life- as a boat, to art for businesss, souveniers for tourists. Have you seen any good crocodiles?

(Update: Dutchbaby was inspired by this post to write about her experiences and memories with crocodiles on her blog. Click here.

Sculpture and drawings for The Cathedral of Childhood

So how do you get anyone to notice a sculpture that is only 16 inches tall?

You find more of the story to tell....

This sculpture started just the small sculpture with the title of "the little queen." I then had the idea of the queen surveying her realm, which also happens to be built of  children's wooden blocks. Combine that with my ongoing investigation of Romanesque art and the pedestal somehow has become a Romanesque cathedral. Click on the images to see an enlarged view.

So here are three thumbnail sketches showing how the building has evolved. More next post.

Sculpture and The Cathedral of Childhood

She's come a long way from the cherry log she used to be.

Carving wood is an act of faith for me. I have to blindly trust in my original idea, holding fast to its essence, while doubts in my abilities and my other commitments grow.

I know the sculpture will turn out fine once it finally starts to look back at me. She has a presence now.

"Sculpture-Contrast and Context"

Contrast and Context are key to how we perceive sculpture.

That's especially true for sculpture fragments.

By itself, the little Christo is too small to hold your attention. After years of being lonely up on the wall or being hidden in drawers, this carved Jesus figure finally has a home.

The antique trunk I broke down became the perfect background for him. The trunk's method of slotted construction was used to create the panel and frame. The rough finish doesn't compete with the polychromed figure. The scribed circles allude to haloes and cycles. They also reinforce the patterning in the repousse metal INRI. (Another homeless fragment)

Siting sculpture is often about creating a composite sculpture, binding different things together. In this example, the narrative comes from the religious nature of the art and the simple materials. Each component adds contrast and context to reinforces the whole new work of art.

Happy Easter.

Sculpture and 4 x 4 inch squares

Nothing clever to say today.

Just wanted to show the progress for the castle of the little queen. Carvings are on end-grain old growth cedar. That means instead of knife and chisel, I'm using flex-shaft and grinding the patterns. It's efficient but unpleasant- noise, dust, and less control.

Sculpture and Sculptors Around the World II

Welcome two sculptors from opposite parts of the world to Shadows on Stone. Please visit their websites to see more of their sculpture.

Od Broza is a sculptor from Vojvodina, Serbia. He has many of the same interests of architecture, wood carving, restoration as Shadows On Stone, but you can read about them in Serbian. His blog is - ALT DEUTSCH SILBERHOLZ For those of us who can't read Serbian, he takes lots of interesting photographs.

Forgive me if I have his name wrong, I took what appears to be a name, it's capitalized, from an article about his work on his blog.

There's a photo of him in the nude, ( that will get you to look at his blog!,) but no recognizable first or last name. If anyone reads Serbian, please help me with this?????)

Strange the ways of the internet.....

Sculpture and a Morning in The Middle Ages

It's so delicious to slow down.

A gentle rain is falling, my office is warm, the door is locked, the phone on silent. I'm spending the morning steeping myself in the distant past, 1000 to 1350 AD, looking at my books on Romanesque and Gothic art.

Those art books take up almost an entire 4 foot wide shelf. It's heavenly not to feel rushed and savor each image.

My eyes drift from images of cathedrals to tiny enamels, woodcarvings and reliquaries. How quirky and alive everything is. I'm enjoying them both for their own beauty, but I'm also hunting for solutions, noting details and color palettes, making drawings for use on these next two carvings.

Hope you can steal some time to sit quietly and plan your new year.

Sculpture and James Staines

I pulled my big book of Romanesque Art off the shelf for inspiration on how to cave St. Francis. (I swear half the work of wood carving is thinking about it long before I ever pick up my chisels!)

Tucked inside was a tear sheet from Flexcut Carving tools 2005 catalog, featuring the work of James Staines on the cover, and three small images of different carvings inside. They're brilliant. David Benner of Flexcut loved the sculpture "Woman in Care" so much that he bought it and featured Staines work in the catalog.

All photos from the artist's website See better photos there.

WoodCarver Magazine reviewed the carving, the winner in the professional category, saying "My jaw dropped when I saw this carving. .. More thant anything I had a sense that every tiny part, from the way the fingers impress the cloth on the thighs to the beautiful curve of the back, from the subtle colors in the uniform to the tension in the lips and the character fully realised in the eyes _ everything has been rendered exactly, and simply so. There is nothing to be added or changed. Just loved it".

Woman in Care by James Staines 2005


"Return to Ithaca" by James Staines.

Each wood carving has a wonderful simplified but very quirky individuality.Artless simplicity is a hard thing to do, but Staines is a total pro. Very post-Romanesque. Clues and good inspiration to how I need to proceed with my own carving.

Sculpture and Bruce Johnson

photos from Johnson's website: FormandEnergy.com

My friend, Janet Yang, visited the Ren Brown Gallery in Bodega Bay, California and turned me on the powerful sculpture of Bruce Johnson.

His current body of work is called “UPROOTED". He uses redwood stumps and roots and fabricates copper "boulders" to play with the juxtaposition of lines of energy, mass, gravity and energy. His large scale work is just stunning. Check out his Poetry House on his website to see a wonderful marriage of art and architecture.

See more of Bruce Johnson's work here

Sculpture and "a musing on trees and carving"

photos from "From Flitch to Ash"

What do you do when your life goes up in smoke?.

Diane Derrick's book "from flitch to ash, a musing on trees and carving" takes you on her recovery after twenty years of wood carving is burned. All that is left is a pile of ash and a box of slides.

There's much in this short book for any wood carver to identify with: picking up that first mysterious stick that needs your help to tell its story, finding and storing and carving ever larger pieces-( a 300 pound oak stump), to meditations on what is the nature of wood and what is the nature of the woods?

She develops a scent for wood, finding it in dumpsters and acquiring wood from sculptor Barbara Hepworth's private stash. Diane says she was tempted to sacrifice it (after learning that Hepworth died from a studio fire) but "It is not easy to give up a piece of premium wood and instead, I hid it at the bottom of my stack."

The fire took her work, her history, but freed her from the physical work that carving demands. "Althought I felt empty, I felt liberated. No longer need I recoil from the thud of blows,the glint of sharp blades, the staccato of successive taps, or the ever mounting piles of chips,..No longer need I restrain the impulse to throw down my tools and run."

What wood carver hasn't felt that at least twice on every project? If you carve wood, there's much to enjoy in this book.

Sculpture and Creative Time.

People think that if you're an artist you do whatever you want, when ever you want. If only that were true.

Granted I haven't punched a time clock in years, but I have to buy my time to create just like everyone else. The rent and paying gigs take priority over what I'd like to do.

The trick is after the rent is paid, while actively searching for the next commercial sculpture job, is to remember not to panic if it's not immediate, and go to my workbench and get to work.

I began to carve again on the little queen. It's been 3 months or more. The little girl it's based is now 6 and is changing physically so quickly that it is now or never to finish it. Right after this next two paying jobs.....

A Visit to Master Cabinet Maker Michael McCallister at BoxHaven

I visited woodworker Michael McCallister, aka "Mel", of BoxHaven to see his marquetry studio and lazer cutting machine. It's in a well organized basement, desk, computers and lazer clustered in one area, the rest of the space has finished projects and walls hung with stacks of colored and natural veneers.

For demonstration Mel used a Japanese design that had been translated into vector patterns. He said that paper is actually harder to cut than the veneers because of the cross linked fibers. The lazer was quick and fairly quiet. (How noisy can light be?) It quickly cut the intricate pattern, and works to thousandths of an inch tolerance. It's a wonderful example of the machine freeing the artist from hours of painstaking cutting, allowing him to focus on the art.

I was so engaged watching that I forgot to ask about the machine itself and what the cost would be to hire it out for custom designs. It's worth a second visit. If you have any questions about your own projects, Mel can be reached here.

Sculpture and ANLD Garden Tour

Today is the media preview tour for the Association of NW Landscape Designers Behind the Scenes Garden Tour. My sculptures will be in a garden designed by Donna Giguerre

The"Behind the Scenes Tour" is open to the public and takes place on Saturday June 27. This years tour features gardens in the Eastmoreland and NE Portland areas. All of the gardens were designed by ANLD members. It's $20 per ticket with proceeds from the tour supporting scholarships for landscape design students at Portland Community Colleges & Clackamas Community Colleges.

Sculpture at Auction

There is good news and the bad news of the fate of the little green dance angel.

The figure cost me $10 to buy, several hours of my time, and $7 to ship it to Seattle. It sold for $12.00. As SFoDI fundraiser? A big loss.

Lila Hurowitz of Dance Art Group wrote to say,"Thanks mucho mucho for your sculpture, it turned out to be a highlight of the night! the MC (not really a dancer, more a burlesque-type announcer) did a very sweet and funny dance with it on stage. Unfortunately it did not sell in the silent auction... so the MC did a special live auction with and a few other items and it then sold for $12 a guest who donated it to DAG, and we displayed it at Sunday's workshop and jam."

After crawling out of my cave, I realized I was confusing cost and value, money and art - to the detriment of the art.
Sound familiar?

The sculpture was a flop, a negative number as a fundraiser. But as art, the little green angel was both inspiration and dance partner for an onstage performance. It literally embodied the evening for the audience of dancers and dance supporters. It was bought and given back to DAG to function as icon and mascot. This is success, not a problem. It did exactly what it was made for, to move (in every sense of the word) and delight people.

Part of creating for fundraisers is letting go of any expectations. Though next year I might just write them a $12.00 check....

Antique Wooden Artist's Manniquin

I bought this little figure years ago. It was missing it's left forearm and hand. Expensive at $250, considering it was broken. They wouldn't lower the price. I bought him anyway.

What I hadn't expected was how much I'd learn from it.

When I examined it closely, I realized that I could carve the replacement arm and socket myself. When you repair something you are the second person to actually see it. Everyone is content to scan the world around them. But to copy, you really have to see. Not just measurements but the style and the angle of cuts.

This little guy is a mastery of economy. Nothing is fussy or overworked. Whoever made it was in production mode. Efficiency rules, yet there are odd quirky aspects to it. The individual hairs of the eyebrows, and the feet with bunions.

I showed him to a collector of artist's manniquins. He said that from the style of it, it was probably American made and from the 1800's. Repairing him became a mini-master class, well worth the original price. I've referenced him many times when I have a carving question. My sculpture collection is not a luxury, it's a working reference library.....