In this photograph, you can see the small amount of chiseling that I did at the base of the piece on the right. I like the way that the knots in the two pieces relate to each other – the knot at the bottom of the piece on the right is a little bit further from the end than the knot at the top of the other piece.

I used a Sureform rasp tool last year to dress the edges of the piece and I like the way that those surfaces relate to the chiseled surfaces adjacent to them. Thad Mosley, whose work is an inspiration for me, does the majority of his work with a chisel. A few of his pieces, notably Countee’s Leaf – for Countee Cullen and Three Arcs, play with contrasting textures, but most of his pieces are about weight in space and not about contrasting textures. I’m very much influenced by Mosely, as well as Brancusi, Hepworth, and Moore, but I do like contrasting textures. Mosley also uses stone in some of his sculptures, something that I’ve not been able to explore yet. I like the idea of not only the weight, but also the colors available in stone to contrast with the warmth of wood. Ideas to explore in the future!

This shot was taken on my property in Floyd – the base is a little bit too big, but it was all that was readily at hand. I’ll have to come up with a base for this piece in the future. Stone, anyone? I have lots of good-sized pieces of quartz on the property. Now, that might be an interesting contrast!

As is the case with all sculpture, you really can’t appreciate it without seeing it “in the round” – photographs of sculpture just don’t work very well. You have to be there to walk around the piece and be able to touch the surfaces. Sculpture, in my mind, is a very tactile and visual art.

The following series of pictures are of the finished piece. The first was taken at Touchstone and the last 5 were taken on my property in Floyd County.

If you look closely, you will see a “break” in the left piece, just below where it joins the piece with bark on it. Originally, the chestnut piece extended further to the left, but I wanted the negative space to start closing, so I cut the piece off about 12″ from the end and turned it 180 degrees. Then, I went searching for a piece to close the space in and found the ideal candidate in the creekbed. I don’t know what kind of wood it is, but it is hard and dense.

This is the “back” of the piece, if there is such a thing in sculpture! You can better see the individual pieces that are pinned together to create the sculpture.

My property is heavily wooded and this shot was taken early in the morning, before the sun got up very high.

I very much enjoyed the play of light on the surfaces of the sculpture as the day progressed. I was fascinated with the shapes that the sun created on the surfaces of the sculpture!

The possibilities of creating patterns with the chisel marks opens up new and complex ideas for the future. I let the cherry dictate how it wanted to be chiseled in this situation, but what would happen if I didn’t “listen”?

This last shot looks a little foreboding – the mass of green surrounding the sculpture seems to overwhelm it, but photographs are deceptive. Sculpture needs to be appreciated in person – photographs really don’t do it justice. I’d love to leave the sculpture outside, but the contrast of the finished surfaces with the raw power of the natural setting is one of the appealing features of the “installation”. If I left it outside, the surfaces would weather and start to blend with the natural environment, lessening the contrast that I so enjoy.

I brought some unfinished elements with me to Floyd and hope to do some work on them there before taking them with me for another session at Touchstone next year!

I never did much with my artistic inclinations, perhaps because I had seen, first-hand, how economically perilous the life of an artist was – both of my parents were artists. But I did, in my late twenties, create this small piece, which I still have. It was the first and, until my trip to Touchstone in 2007, my only sculpture.

It is sculpted from Jamaica Dogwood, a tropical hardwood, and has a river rock inside it. The base is mahogany. Both pieces of wood were collected in South Florida.

The piece is 9 1/2″ tall (including the base), 9″ long, and 5 1/2″ in diameter.

I’m using the slab of black walnut shown in the previous post as a “bench” to work on the bird. I had borrowed John’s Japanese saw and cut the branch at an angle and in this photo, I have worked the lower neck area with a small gouge to act as a transition to the smooth upper portion.

After smoothing the upper portion with a Surform rasp and sandpaper, I removed some wood from the base with a small gouge to set off the “feathers” of the bird – the burl on the cherry. I then oiled the worked surfaces with a mixture of 50% linseed oil and 50% turpentine and I was finished. I set it aside and started thinking about how much I should ask for it as a minimum bid. I started at $45, then went up to $65, and then decided that it was worth $125. Then, because I had obviously fallen in love with it (and because Chris said that I didn’t have to have an auction piece), I decided to keep it and take it home with me!

So I went to the auction without a piece and felt guilty the whole time. Friday morning, I assuaged my guilt by making this little gem:

This creation was a small piece (it is about 14″ tall) of well-seasoned cherry that had been a part of the log that Chris Shackelford had been working on. I took it and cleaned up the edges, sanded the exposed surfaces and oiled it with the linseed oil/turpentine mixture that all of us use to finish our pieces. I love the contrast between the finished and weathered surfaces. Chris gave me a small piece of soapstone to use as a base and I learned a tiny bit about soapstone sculpting in the process. Chris sculpts soapstone as well as wood and I’d like to try my hand at soapstone sculpting, but I never seem to have the time to do so! I heated the base with a torch and applied beeswax to bring out the beauty of the stone and then used an epoxy glue to secure the short rod that elevates the wood above the base. Later that day, I took it to the office and gave it to Touchstone, explaining how I had not had a piece ready for the auction. I hope it found a good home in the auction the following week!

In the background, you see three of the elements for the sculpture I am going to create next year standing close together. I’m really looking forward to my next visit to Touchstone! In the meantime, I’m going to build a cradle, buy some more chisels, and see what I can create here at home.

In this photo, you see the unfinished piece (featured in an earlier post) in the left background and two elements in the center background, one short and one tall. In the cradle are two more pieces – a curved plank and the partially cleaned log that is lying on top of it.

In this shot, there is yet another element, the large piece of black walnut leaning against the railing. It is about 4″ thick and I hope to find someone to cut it in half, longitudinally, so that I have two pieces, each about 2″ thick.

Pete, ever helpful, is holding a piece of black walnut in place atop a short section of either beech or maple so that I can see how the pieces might relate to each other. The unfinished piece is lying against the wall in the background. I’m thinking that I might lay the pieces on the ground next year to see how they relate to each other and to make a decision about how to proceed. As you can see, I don’t have a pre-determined sculpture in mind – the pieces and I are involved in a dialogue. There are many possibilities and each one opens up yet other possibilities. I find this process of discovery to be very rewarding.

Brad, the campus manager of Touchstone, graciously allowed me to store the elements of my future sculpture in a building that isn’t often used so that they will be safe until I return next year. I didn’t bring home a finished sculpture this year, at least not a big one. But I did bring home a “quick study”, which is the subject of the next post.

This picture, of Thad’s show at the Mattress Factory, was taken by Pete Sternisha, one of the students at the Touchstone class that I recently attended:

Thad mostly carves wood that he gets from city forestry crews or finds on the side of streets from trees cut down by property owners, though he sometimes buys wood from people who have logs that particularly intrigue him. All of Thad’s works are composed of pieces that are fitted together with either metal pins or rough joinery. His work is about volume in space, not joinery. They are direct, powerful, emotional statements that are refreshingly honest. Unfortunately for those who would like to see his creations, much of his work is privately owned and many more pieces are in Thad’s possession – he is not driven by the need for recognition, though he certainly does not shy away from it. His work is in several major museums and he has several pieces in public locations around Pittsburgh. So, if a show of Thad’s work opens, by all means do whatever you need to do to attend!

Here are some photographs of pieces in the Mattress Factory show that I took:

This photo is of two separate pieces. In the one on the left, I find the contrast between the chiseled walnut and the smooth light-colored wood to be very appealing. The juxtaposition of the roughly finished piece at the top left, which doesn’t “fit” with the other two pieces, adds a lot of visual interest. The smaller piece on the right, composed of four separate sections of wood, gives you an idea of how Thad works. In this piece, he has taken a cross-section of walnut (lower left), fastened it to the semi-worked log on the right and then perched a piece of cherry above those two joined pieces that is connected to the rest of the piece by a roughly worked limb.

This piece is all black walnut, one of Thad’s favorite woods to carve. The picture does it no justice – you need to be able to walk around it and see the changing negative spaces that the piece provides. The contrasting textures of the piece, created by the use of different gouges, adds a great deal of visual interest.

I like just about every piece that Thad has created, but this one is really special. I love the way the curved I-beam, finished with a wire wheel and coated with a clear sealer, contrasts with the walnut on the bottom and the cherry piece that is attached to the walnut.

Unfortunately, this shot isn’t the best – my flash created a shadow that results in rather blurry edges. But this photo does show how Thad combines smaller, manageable pieces of wood into a large sculpture.

Composed of two sections of black walnut, this piece intrigued me, not only because of the way the top is joined to the bottom, but because of the way the eye is led down from the top, following the horizontal cuts in the log. I returned to this piece many times before having to leave the show.

If you get a chance to see any of Thad’s work, don’t let the opportunity go to waste!

Sometimes, I get interested in movement and I thought that this piece might develop into an interesting piece. The method of sculpture that we have been taught by Chris Shackelford (in the background) is to use a chainsaw to make a series of cuts across the log after first marking the limits of the cuts with chalk. Then, the wood is removed with a large gouge and a mallet. What you see here is the log after quite a large amount of wood has been removed. Notice that there is a 90 degree turn from one end of the piece to the other.

Below, the piece is leaning against the railing. Terry Seya, another student, is studying one of her pieces in the background. I didn’t take that many pictures of my piece (my bad!) but I had started to carve one side convexly and was carving the other side concavely with a smaller gouge. I had also roughly finished the edges with a Surform tool to give a sharp edge to the piece. But I wasn’t enthused with my work and by Wednesday morning, after I had spent most of Tuesday working on a base for it, I disliked it enough that I was entertaining thoughts of cutting it in half and using the pieces in a different way.

Wednesday morning, after breakfast, we went on a field trip to the Mattress Factory, an installation art museum in Pittsburgh. We were exceedingly fortunate to be sculpting at Touchstone at the same time that the long-time teacher of the class, Thaddeus Mosley (he no longer teaches the class), was having an exhibition at the Mattress Factory. We were also fortunate to have Terry and John Singleton, another student, as chauffeurs to take us to the show. I could never have found the museum by myself!

I was profoundly affected by the show. I had been very fortunate to be able to visit Thad in his studio in 2008, but I wasn’t able to spend much time with him then, so the visit to the Mattress Factory this year resulted in an epiphany, of which I will go into more detail soon. The next post, tomorrow, will be a slight detour to provide you with a little bit of information about Thaddeus Mosley.

The piece is about 4 feet tall and is made of black cherry with a white oak base. It is currently in the house of a friend of mine in Floyd County, as I obviously couldn’t take it on the plane with me!

This year, I returned, not as “on fire” as I was last year, but with more ideas. My fellow sculptors from last year were there again and we had a fine time, though the setting was a tad more rustic than the previous year. I made 3 sculptures this year – I was in the groove, so to speak! Great fun!!

This piece started out as a rotten log that I thought was white pine. It turned out to be black cherry and it has a very interesting decayed spot in the middle, as you can see here:

I managed to take this home with me, despite the concerns of the Homeland Security guards at the Pittsburgh airport that it might be filled with plastic explosive. Ah, the times we live it, right??

The next piece was a “quickie” – it took only a bit over a day to complete. I’m fascinated with texture and contrast, so I selected a piece of red oak from the woodpile and removed some in the middle to reveal the beauty of the finished wood. I like the contrast of finish against raw, weathered wood. I gave this piece to a teenager who had a summer job in the kitchen of the Touchstone dining hall. He had taken a blacksmithing class and I had heard, through the grapevine, that he was very taken with this piece. I hope that he is inspired by it and goes on to create his own works of art.

The last piece that I made this past summer is the one that I am most pleased with. It didn’t start out that way, though. I found three crooked pieces of wood in the wood pile and figured out how two of them would go together. Those two are the long piece and the short angled piece. But when I put them together, I didn’t like the piece at all, so I put it aside and worked on the other pieces. On Thursday, I tackled the piece again and, at the brilliant suggestion of Chris, our instructor, found the way that the third “leg” fit the sculpture. I pegged it with a peg of white pine and was very pleased with how it turned out. It is currently residing at Chris Shackelford’s home in Floyd County.

I had a wonderful time and look forward to returning next year. Touchstone is really a special place – I highly recommend it!