Material-Media

Wood Sculpture Techniques at the Portland Japanese Garden

My art tells stories, my collaborator is wood. In my current series, I recycle construction debris, coaxing these manufactured shapes into revealing their natural irregularities. I work with cross-sections of wood and pay special attention to the grain and texture. With certain wood sculpture techniques, the history of the tree becomes an integral part of the finished sculpture. While looking at the art you can see the passage of time because each line is one year of growth.

Japanese Technique in Wood Sculpture

Major influences on my wood sculpture are the Japanese monk, Enku, and the Taiwanese artist Ju Ming. Both influenced my work with their direct approach to carving.

Enkū (円空) (1632–1695) was a Japanese Buddhist monk, poet, and sculptor during the early Edo period. He was born in Mino Province (present-day Gifu Prefecture) and is famous for carving some 120,000 wooden statues of the Buddha and other Buddhist icons. He used his art as devotional objects, giving them away, and to pay for lodging on his pilgrimages to temples throughout Japan.

I will be carving small figures in the style of Enkū and showing recent sculptures.

To learn more about Patrick Gracewood’s sculptures, Pacific Northwest Sculptors, or contact us today!

Dance with Me: Sculpture, Dance and Creative Collaboration

My comment, “Sculpture and dance are closely related, much like a creative collaboration” had left some people puzzled at a recent Pacific Northwest Sculptors member meeting. I see dance and sculpture as a continuum of movement and stillness, the ephemeral to the eternal. Almost everything we know of early civilizations comes from sculpture. Indeed, if some form of physical artistic expression can last thousands of years, it’s likely sculpture. Additionally, an installation can encompass the ephemeral, everything from gallery installation to Andy Goldworthy’s nature work.

I’ve been a sculptor for forty-three years, and celebrate thirty years of dancing contact improvisation in 2019. Often what I learn from one discipline transfers to the other. Dance requires that I show up several times a week, fully present, emotionally, and physically. I have discovered this has been a good method for making art. Moving mindfully became my physical therapy, an antidote to the exertion and repetitive motion of carving. That kind of awareness gradually shifted my focus from the object to the space surrounding it.

The Creative Collaboration of Sculpture and Space

That awareness has helped me site my sculpture in clients’ gardens. Conversely, many sculptors believe their collaboration is completed when the art is finished and sold. If you have sited your work outside, you know what happens. It shrinks radically as it contends with the chaos of the rest of the world. Siting sculpture requires shifting focus from the art object to creating an environment that includes art. Blocking some views, framing other sightlines, defining a clear approach, you choreograph how people move through space to better appreciate the art and the entire space it occupies.

My concept of what sculpture is got much larger.

My early artworks often appeared overly polished and careful. There’s a valuable skill in banging out “working-class sculpture” aka stage sets and props for performances. Cardboard is free and quickly fabricated. In fact, I have never made cardboard models for my own sculpture before I started dancing. Now I make them all the time. These models I create act as a physical embodiment of an idea. Indeed, the model serves as a visual placeholder that haunts me until I have time to make it in a permanent medium. Working in a throw-away material encouraged me to work fast, go for big shapes, deep shadows, and lots of bright colors. The results are often very engaging on their own. I now make damn sure that same fun and energy make it into all my sculpture. The question I pose to other PNWS members is, “What enriches your creative practice?”

Creative collaborations with famous sculptor and dancer pairings: Isamu Noguchi and Martha Graham; Robert Rauschenberg and dancers Paul Taylor; Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown; Robert Morris and Simone Forti.

To learn more about Patrick’s work, Pacific Northwest Sculptors, and contact us today!

Art Inspiration – My Oracle…The Ocean

A lot of my work draws heavily on ocean waveforms for art inspiration. I’ve spent many happy hours sitting on beaches all along the west coast from San Diego, California to Long Beach, Washington just watching and letting the power soak into my bones.

I call this visiting my Oracle….I ask questions and (usually) I get a few answers.

There is nothing better for resetting your sense of self than watching several tons of water crash against the rocks …again and again…relentlessly. The rocks hardly notice, but over the years, the water will win. In search of art inspiration, I discovered when I went back to visit a favorite beach I found the sea had rearranged objects in my absence.

Where Medium Meets Art Inspiration

My sculpture medium is paper clay. It has high water content and I can slam a slab of it against a “rock” that I set up in my studio. The effect is very much like what I observe at the beach. I manipulate these slabs to support human figures. I follow this sculpting method for a while like a person in a fever. But, after several new pieces, the fever will leave me and I step away from the ocean waves for a time. I now know that at some point I will have to return to the sea for information about my life and my art. (Aren’t they one and the same?). My Oracle will always be there.

To learn more about Michele’s work or Pacific Northwest Sculptors, contact us today!

Riipppp – How to Create Spontaneous Visual Art

Joe Cartino

Visual art displayed behind velvet ropes seems wrong to me. In homage to Duchamp’s idea that paintings die after 50 years, my B.F.A. exhibit featured a pair of birds named Da and Da pooping on reproductions of famous paintings which I displayed behind red barbed wire.

The joy of creation is why I do art. Over the past few decades, I have explored the “anything can be art” philosophy found in Dada and Pop art in traditional sculpture, collage, and in a series of satirical toy and game assemblages. I’m always looking for inspiration, so when a fellow sculptor from the Pacific Northwest Sculptors named Chas Martin offered a creativity workshop, I was ready.

A Lesson in Spontaneous Visual Art

RIIPPPP…. It was the sound of a watercolor painting ripping and a world of possibilities opening up. In his workshops, Chas provides a day full of inspiration and encourages his participants to be open to new ideas. When he accidentally tore his painting trying to free it from his sketchbook my years of improvisational acting training kicked in. We sieze opportunities and treat everything as a wonderful gift. I took that torn painting back to my studio and continued to tear and twist to create something new. The curious creatures that emerged were the genesis of my new series of sculptures I call Dada Dodads.

A Dada Dodad is not a product, but a visual art process. A humble scrap of paper becomes a medium for imagination and exploration. Junk mail, doodles, in-flight magazines, virtually anything can become one of these playful creations once they are liberated from their 2-D rectangles. The photos of the evolution of a Dada Dodad document its life cycle. In the Fluxus tradition, I encourage people to shape and display Dada Dodads however they see fit. The velvet ropes are removed and the boundary between artist and viewer is now transformed into a partnership of co-creation.

To learn more about Joe’s work or Pacific Northwest Sculptors, contact us today!

Elements of art: Thoughts about Lines

Just there on the office floor are 3 good sized boxes of comics. They are there because a friend of my nephew’s passed away and willed him his collection. They are Golden Age comics. That is from the 40’s, 50’s and early 60’s. There are several holy grails of comic art in there. In particular, for me at least, a 1952 issue of Walt Disney’s Comic and Stories. This issue came in the mail when I was 5. I could not read. Ran all over the house pleading for someone to read it to me. All my normal readers were busy except grandma who was visiting from Salt Lake. Could she read? She’s so old. Boy could she. She had a remarkable voice. Had a hint of frog in it. She read me the thing, us sitting on the edge of my bed. I never forgot. I am writing this as a direct result of that little episode.

Seventeen years later a friend and I are taking a drive north from Vallejo, Ca. We stop at a little store for snacks. I see a comic book rack. I buy a Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories for 12 cents. It is the same story, reprinted. I bought it and read it for myself this time. I began buying them monthly and eventually acquired great piles of the things. I became a cartoonist sculptor. That particular artist was Carl Barks who passed away 17 years ago at the age of 99. Carl was from Merrill, Oregon and worked as a writer for the early Donald Duck cartoons. After a strike at Disney in 1941, he began working as the Duck cartoonist for Dell Publishing. He was very good and very prolific.

Why does this matter? What does it have to do with sculpture? Beyond Barks’ storytelling was the drawing, the lines, expressions and gestures. They were all dead on. Alive. In most studios where cartoons are pumped out by the bucket load are model sheets pasted to the wall.

If you want to draw something lifeless use one of those. The thing that made Bark’s drawing so good is that every expression or gesture is unique to the situation. If the expression is just right then you not only get it but you feel it. You know exactly what that particular curve in that line means deep down. To get this right is a bit like method acting. You have to feel it, you have to be that as you draw it. This applies to sculpting as well. It’s like being one with what you are doing.

Humans are adapted to finely interpret facial and body expressions. There are shades of meaning in a facial expression that can change with just the teensiest nudge of a lip line. It’s a complex language all its own which we understand right from birth. The lines themselves can have meaning, such that the shape of a line on a face when applied to the curve of an abstract sculpture conveys some of the original meaning. Car makers know this and if you’ve ever been tailgated by a ‘53 Buick you know what I’m saying.

Like words, line curves can carry connotations. In this way a simple line can speak directly to one’s emotions whether that line is part of a face or the silhouette of a sculpture.

Pacific Northwest Sculptors member George Heath's classic comic collection

Giacometti – Charioteers Rolling in the Money

A hundred and one million dollars is a lot of money but that’s what hedge fund manager Steven A. Cohen paid in 2015 for Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture, The Chariot. Giacometti was a multifaceted artist who achieved his greatest recognition for his freakishly elongated spider-like human figures. A prominent existentialist philosopher explained Giacometti’s figures as depicting the estrangement of modern (post WWII) individuals living in an empty cosmos devoid of meaning.

Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture, The Chariot, 1950

To me, one thousand and ten dollars is a lot of money and I was thus inspired to carve and assemble my own Spoon Charioteer. The one hundred and one million dollar version of Giacometti’s bronze masterpiece is number two of an edition of six, cast in 1951-52, and is only three inches less than six feet tall. In comparison, my humble version stands only three inches more than two feet high (25Hx8x12 inches) and is made of scraps of wood and metal. The most cunning features of my chariot are the wheels made from Progresso soup can lids, drawer pull escutcheons, and a rusted electrical cord spool. Everyone should have a shop with such serendipitous junk. My Spoon Charioteer is really one half unpainted black walnut spoon and one half painted and low relief carved charioteer.

Robert McWilliams sculpture, Spoon Charioteer — Robert McWilliams’ sculpture, Spoon Charioteer

A spoon may seem to be a perplexingly mundane motif for serious sculpture but I have been first, whittling, and now carving spoons since 1972, so even if you send the sheriff to try to make me stop, I won’t. Although otherwise not remotely comparable, my spoons are to me what Michelangelo’s ignudi (naked men-women) were to the greatest sculptor who ever lived. Spoons combine the male handle with the female cup, the sinuous, unpredictable curves of the voluptuous mature woman with the predictable stiffness of the militaristic male and the convex with the concave; and spoons are neither left or right, or up or down, and they spoon (nest) in perfect unity.

The charioteer side of my sculpture is an androgynous, golden haired adolescent who looks to me like one of the Archaic kourus that preceded the golden age of Classical Greek sculpture. He is gloriously beautiful, naïve, and lusty. He is representative the new generation, both female and male, the one that always, and without fail that rolls in to replace the cynical, the plumb tuckered out, and the put into barn wet and tired.

Spoon Charioteer is not a mere copy like Steve Cohen’s, mine is original, unique, and still for sale.

Common Sculpture Tools – Orange Plastic Bowl

Andy Kennedy

A couple months ago I described some of my clay sculpting tools, a fork, a baseball bat, a stone with a sharp edge. Tools can also be a word or an idea, or a whole system of ideas, anything that can be used to affect change. The tools of this essay are vague abstractions grounded by physical elements of process. And presently featuring an orange plastic bowl, about 17” diameter and one inch thick all around.

It’s very rounded because this bowl was part of a sphere that was once a float for a fisherman’s net. I found this orange plastic bowl buried in sand on the beach of Ft. Stevens park by Astoria and hauled it home. It’s surprisingly heavy at over ten pounds. I’m going to pause, because there was a time when I did not know what this thing really could do. That was a time of unknowing, but keen recognition that this orange bowl seemed to have Potential written all over it. Like being handing a big puzzle piece that is connected to a huge new view of the world. Finding this orange hunk of plastic was like a wardrobe that leads to Narnia or hearing at a planning meeting for International Sculpture day that an empty storefront adjacent to the CAVE might be available for art installation.

There were a few moments in the middle of International Sculpture day within the bustle of other artists setting up demonstrations and Vancouver residents walking into the PNWS event. I was there, in the middle of an installation that I co-created with Amber Metz (AKA Aim Axon) called Meditation and Manipulation playing with one of the 200+ bamboo sticks that I brought into the CAVE Adjacent space over the month leading up to the event. I stood there observing yet another wondrous property of an orange plastic bowl, a piece of found object art that I now call the haFast forms a cone with my hand at the apex and I’m in that state of discovery and surrender to wonder spontaneously conjured, hyper-present, ready and willing, at the axis of crafting reality and it occurs to me, “The quality of this moment is the thing I want to share”.