Our internet connection was down here for most of the day yesterday which was not really a surprise given the -19° on the thermometer. Cold enough to make today’s puny 1° reading look appealing. But because I didn’t have to focus on writing the blog I took the time to rearrange a couple of things in the studio, things that I often look at from my seat at the computer. On the large stone wall that holds the fireplace in my studio there are three half-round stone shelves that hold several wood carvings.
One is an inexpensive carving of Don Quixote that my sister gave me for Christmas when I was a kid and another is a beautiful carving of a crow from artist Don Sottile, a talented sculptor from my home Finger Lakes region. Then there are a few of my own carvings from the early 90’s, predating my first attempts at painting by a couple of years. They are not nearly as well executed as Mr. Sottile’s work but they mean a lot to me, if only as a reminder that they were keys to a door in my mind that I was desperately trying to open at that time, one that would eventually lead me here.
I thought I would take this opportunity to rerun a blog entry about these pieces from back in early 2009:
Immediately before I started painting in the mid-90’s, my form of expression was wood carving. It was unpolished and rough but it provided the vehicle that I needed to spark further creativity. Most were created with an inexpensive set of small chisels and scrap lumber, usually just pine boards leftover from projects.
Actually, the technique that is used in these carvings is linked very much to my earliest efforts at painting which consisted of a heavy layer of paint then removing the parts that didn’t belong leaving the desired image. This is a technique that I use to this very day.
The thing that I learned most from doing these pieces is that I wanted to emphasize expression over technique. By that I mean I did not want to focus so much on refining technique to obtain a very polished final product that the piece became more about craft and less about expression of emotion. By doing so I realized the pieces would retain my own identity and idiosyncrasies. It was my first real stab at creating a visual look and vocabulary of my own.
I also took the idea of the work having a tactile feel to it. The attraction of these for me was in holding them and feeling the wood and the weight of it in my hands. When I first started painting I worked primarily on paper and I got this same feeling from the cotton of the watercolor papers. It’s something that I also try to insert into my work today as well, through the use of texture and in the way I present the paintings.
When I look at these I’m not particularly impressed by them as art but I do appreciate them for the lessons they provided at a time when I needed guidance, lessons which I took to heart. To me they are touchstones to a certain part of my life and as such are important to my development as an artist.
Redtree Times 