DRIFTWOOD SERIES - BOATS

Inevitably, as I get older, I start to think about the how life is a series of stages and in particular the journey from stage to stage. It reminds me of an ocean voyage in a way. The trip can be calm and serene or just as easily a stormy and terrifying affair. I wanted to do a piece to represent movement through those stages of life. I decided to represent this idea using a voyage analogy. I did two pieces with this in mind.

Into the Breakers

Some of life’s journeys are stormy to say the least. When I install this sculpture, I like to hang it at about a 45 degree angle, right side higher. I was thinking about the emotional battering you face when confronting life issues. The image I got was of one of the beach rescue boats on the Australian beaches as they launch the boats into the heavy surf. The boats are almost standing on end as they crash into the waves.

Voyage on the River Styx

Our lives certainly aren’t all turmoil … at least mine isn’t. Most of the time, life seems to gently roll along toward our inevitable conclusion. I thought about pictures I had seen before of an old barge drifting slowly along with Charon poling souls across the River Styx to the gates of the underworld. I fashioned a piece with that in mind. For me, the center bottom driftwood plank feels like a like a dangling oar from the vessel.

DRIFTWOOD SERIES

My driftwood series is primarily about shapes and contrasts. One of my favorite things to do is to scrounge for just the right pieces of driftwood. When I go to get driftwood, I am actually very selective and quite often have a particular shape in mind. I find as many approximations of that shape as I can find. I look for what I consider to be unique shapes … odd bends … swirls … geometric patterns … textures … colorations. This combined with the endless array of metal objects in varied stages of deterioration provide me with a multitude of directions available to me for sculpture pieces. Most of the work on a piece is “seeing” how those materials look and feel together. Just adjusting the angle of a piece a few degrees can make all the difference.

Often, I name my driftwood pieces. The name is usually associated with the found objects incorporated into the piece and the image that I get when I view the piece. Other times, it may be focal points in the piece to which I am drawn. Below are a few examples.


Infinity

I liked the curved sliver of stainless steel that I found. It felt like energy was flowing along its path. I positioned it to parallel the line of one of the driftwood segments. It felt like it would go on forever. I donated this piece for a silect auction to bennefit a local pre-school in Williamsville. I was very excited to hear that I friend had purchased the piece.

Sturgeon

Anne and I were driving through New York and saw a sign about the watershed with the sturgeon symbol on it. When I was looking through my driftwood pile, I saw a fragment that looked like a mouth to me. I made the rest of the piece to fit that mouth! This piece went to my friends James and Lynn for their beach cottage on Folly Beach.


Portal

I love holes … and looking into them. Look where it got Alice! This sculpture revolves around two important pieces. I couldn’t take my eyes off the stick with the orange top and the matrix on holes on it. The other important piece is the knothole. When I view the piece, I want to simultaneously look through the knothole to get an image of the orange pattern and at the same time view the pattern over the top of the knothole in an unrestricted view. I want to play with an idea. Is it the same pattern or does the different perspective make it entirely something else? It reminds me of a book I read called Einstein’s Dreams that talked about multiple realities. Maybe I am just falling down the rabbit hole and don’t realize it.


After the Fall

This sculpture is not as depressing as you might first think. Yes, I was thinking about what it might be like after nuclear confrontations … after the fallout. But, the piece is really about hope and resilience. I wanted to show the starkness associated with such an event. In the middle of all of this, is the face of a child, peeking out from behind the debris. The face is symbolic of our ability to survive.

I have talked with several people that view the piece differently … from demonic faces peering out to fallen angels. Interesting.

DISSOCIATIVE EPISODE

My friend, Nancy, brought me a present one day and said, “Here. I thought you could do something with this.” In the bag, was a large dilapidated doll body and the head that had been torn off of it. The wheels started to turn. By the time I got home, I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to play with the idea of detachment of the head and the body. Through the physical separation of the two pieces, I should be able to speak to the psychological separation of our intellect from our actions. He was out of his head. She’s out of her mind. He has a good head on his shoulders. What were you thinking? You’d lose your head if it wasn’t attached. Don’t we all have experiences where we make a decision and forge ahead with a plan, regardless of the facts we know to be true. The facts don’t apply … because we don’t want them to apply.

First, I needed to physically isolate the head-intellect from the body-heart. Boxes, boxes, boxes. I built tightly fitting boxes to hold the head and the body. I did not lose the implication of these boxes being coffins, but I am not going there right now. I lined the body box with surreal images. This background represented the external stimuli that constantly bombards our heart, our emotional selves. I did not use the same approach on the head box. My rationale was that such ideas would be dismissed due to our intellect. I wanted to connect the body with nature and natural symbols … a feather, a rock at its feet, an umbilical cord. I addressed the issue of the headless corpse with a bird’s nest and rocks. Bird-brained. Rocks for brains. The outside of the box was covered with dated license plates. This was to strengthen the idea of age and tradition and hanging on to what has been rather than the current factual interpretation. I covered the head box with copper sheets that had been scored with geometric patterns. I wanted the bright, clean colors and the patterns to further represent the intellect.

The two boxes were not attached. The smaller head box was positioned in any direction atop the body box. For me, this represented the disassociation of intellect from reality – the head from the body.

BARBIE BOUQUET

I have had a fascination with Barbie dolls for a very long time. It is not what you may think. I was always a solid GI Joe guy in my youth with no regrets. It is more about what it represents. I will use the term “she” because we tend to think of Barbie as a real person. However, Barbie as an art medium has unlimited possibilities. I remember talking with an artist, Paul Hoedecker, many years ago about a Flying Barbie piece he had done with Barbies, circling on a motorized circle frame hanging from the ceiling. I was intrigued.

I set out to find my Barbies. The cheap ones! My search began in Harper’s Ferry West Virginia at a local flea market. I spotted a dealer with a box of Barbies and found about 17 to my liking. The duel commenced. We haggled, we fought, we accused each other of being crazy an unreasonable. The dealer wanted $10 each. I wanted them for $2 each. She countered that she couldn’t because the Barbies were her daughters and had sentimental value. I responded that it was irrelevant whether you sell your sentiment for $2 or $10 and if sentiment was the issue what was she doing selling them anyway? We parted company.

A couple of weeks later, I was at the Newfane flea market. Again, I spotted a dealer with a small box of Barbies. As Barbie aged, she must have enjoyed living in a box with other clones. Whatever! I was looking at about eleven and offered $25. The dealer countered with $45 and a lecture on the value of Barbies as collectables. I mentioned that collectables did not live in a box and walked away. I overhead the dealer tell his friend that I knew nothing about the values or antiques and that I was a jerk.

Five minutes later, I came by a lady doing her yard sale at the flea market. You guessed it. She had a tubberware container full of Barbies. As I looked through it, the lady said, “You can have the whole thing for $5.” The price was right. Done deal! I didn’t count them until I got home. It was over 30.

Now, what to do? I have a small box coffin about her size. I’ll fill it partially with earth painted pink. In goes the Barbie with small fangs that I will fashion for her. I will call it Dracula Barbie. It is on my list of To Do’s.[It is not on the TO Do anymore. Got it done over July 4th weekend.] I have other ideas … for just the heads maybe. I have used a couple of the Barbie arms and legs for miscellaneous work.







[Had another idea just before the 4th. Houdini Barbie. Used a pink box, painted a blue, oxygen-deprived face, tied hands, and wired and locked box. I think it may have been Houdini Barbie's last Beijing performance.]

But for now, Barbie Bouquet. A nice vase … some greenery … a jaunty selection of Barbies … and there you have it … Barbie Bouquet. [Lastly, I have done some canning jars with Barbie heads ... and hot peppers cause sheis so hot ... and some canned arms and legs. Also set up Meatgrinder Barbie. When you grind the heads, golden thread is produced. ]

CHINA PROJECT: BASKET MAN

As we journeyed further south in China, we traveled through more agricultural areas. In these areas, we began to see more and more of the basket men of China. We were taken by the tremendous loads some of these men and women hauled using simple basket carriers over their shoulders. I wanted to initiate discussions about the physical nature of the work that these poorer workers were doing and the fact that both men and women shared this task equally.

I fashioned a stick figure from driftwood and a shoulder basket from sticks and wire I had around the house. It mirrored the primitive baskets I saw some of the workers using. I also fashioned a cone-shaped hat form sheet metal similar to the ones I observed.

The loads that I created for my sculpture were made from driftwood sticks and had English-Chinese words, phrases and numbers. I had the students use these in vocabulary exercises. As simple as this piece was, it still generated numerous questions from the students.

It seemed only fitting that the basket man reside in my gardens.

CHINA PROJECT: DRAGON MEMORY LOG

My favorite piece in the China Project Series is the Dragon Memory Stick. I had about a 4-foot length of driftwood that had a snake-like shape with its head slightly raised. I added tuffs of red wire bundles and ruted bells to add a bit of color and burned in two eyes. I made a list of about 100 things that I did while on the China trip in the format of “I action verb object”. ”I walked on the Great Wall of China” and “I ate the duck’s head at the Peking Duck dinner” are two examples. These statements were written on the log and then burned into the wood. The entire circumference of the log was covered. A stand was made to hold the memory log by reversing two similar driftwood V-branches and securing them to a base. When used with groups of students, the statements on the log served as both catalysts for discussions and to encourage the viewer to add their own experiences in their own travels.

This piece has found a home in my living room and it brings back fond memories of the trip each time I look at it.

CHINA PROJECT: DRAGON STONE

A significant part of what I try to do with a piece in a project like this is to somehow link a visual representation symbolically with some aspect of the Chinese history or lore. In this case, I wanted to link to the use of dragons in the Chinese legends and lore. I chose to do this with one of my hanging stones. I chose a stone with a rectangular shape that would represent the elongated face of a dragon. To this, I added a pairs of ram-like horns to the sides. These I fashioned by coiling copper tubing and then pounding it flat. I used several sections of wire bent to resemble lightning or fast-moving air and place them atop the head to give a sense of hot air rushing backward from the dragon’s breath. The final adaptations were the Chinese symbol hanging beneath the head and red flowing hair from the top. My usual hanging stone beads and feathers finalized the piece.

CHINA PROJECT: The GREAT WALL

During the summer of 2008, I took a three week trip with a group of teachers sponsored by SIT. Each participant had to complete a project upon his/her return to promote better understanding of the Asian culture. When I applied for the trip, I indicated that I would do an educational PowerPoint presentation and present it to students and/or outside groups. It was not until our flight home that I approached our leader, Bruce, and told him that there was no way I could do the presentation … both the students and I would be bored to death. Instead, I would do a series of sculptures reflecting the things I had seen and experienced. My project included five pieces, photos of the trip, a bulletin board, and souvenirs. I was allowed to exhibit the project in the foyer of the school for a couple of weeks and to meet with several classes to discuss the project. Later, I installed the work at the Vermont Asian Center in West Brattleboro for a show and discussion during Gallery Walk.

The China Project: The Great Wall

My goal for each of the pieces for the project was to introduce aspects of the Chinese experience in a way that would stimulate thought and questions by the students. With The Great Wall, I wanted to play with the idea of walls in general and whether they exist to keep something or someone in or keep them out.

I used some old barnboard for the base of the sculpture and smashed some smaller pieces for extending the sides. Using the irregular background pattern and by stacking pieces to vary the planes I hoped to give the effect of mountainous terrain. I further elevated the plane using smaller pieces of driftwood and flat, rounded stones for further layering. I broke the stone that I had brought back from China into smaller pieces and used it to fashion a serpentine wall across the piece. On the lower side of the wall, I used driftwood sticks placed vertically to represent the peoples of China amassed behind the wall. The question is again to protect them from invaders or to keep them in and ignorant of the outside world. Above the wall, I lined the smaller pieces with a glue that dries in yellowish bubbled fashion and gives the appearance of clouds and mist across the mountainous terrain.

I was lucky to be in China just before the Olympics. In the upper left hand portion of the wall sculpture, I place five rings (representing the Olympic rings) made from sliced beef bones. I included this to stimulate discussion of the impact of the Olympics on the country and the preparations that were being made to host the event.

Finally, I tucked a small imprint of a dog’s paw on the lower right hand side. From this, we initiated discussion about, what you eat in foreign environments that seems strange to us and what we eat that would seem strange there.