When I was 7, while friends were playing ball, I was making small sculptures like Alexander Calder’s. By age 12 I could listen to experts explaining modern art and remain polite even when thinking they were saying bullshit. Forty years later I discovered peace poles, which are monuments to peace. No one was making large ones for institutions. So, I did with stainless, copper, limestone, etc. But after hundreds placed in parks, on campuses and in church yards, my hands wore out. I now make lighter weight and less physically demanding work like paintless paintings made out of metal with designs and colors created with fire, acid, plating, and shaping (okay, more demanding than paint, but less demanding than making monuments) as well as stainless disks that look three dimensional, various kinds of sculptures, the rare figurative silhouette on aluminum, etc.
As meaning-laden as peace poles are, I want art to have intrinsic value in and of itself without representing something else or being about else. If words adequately could convey it, I would write that instead. So, I create visual experiences that I hope are enough just for what they are without words attached.
”An artist cannot talk about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.” – Jean Cocteau
But people ask about my process, so I will try to write about that. It is not always the same.
My Process?
There always is a vision or a feeling in my mind that can come out only when I’m present with the means to let it. Copying a period piece can kill it. Creating something because people will buy it hurts. However, mere exploration of materials can get me rolling. Like this example from cooking.
I was telling my brother that I had discovered that if you slice an off-season, but fresh, tomato into 1/3 inch thick slices and sear one side of them briefly, perhaps with a pinch of salt and sugar on that side, being careful not to warm it all the way through, it will have a more full and robust flavor.
It still isn’t like a vine ripe tomato from a field in August, but it’s an improvement.
He asked how I thought of that.
I told him that I had been listening to the food show “Splendid Table” on Public Radio. They said people are too afraid of cooking cucumbers. They said to sear one side briefly. The next time I was in my kitchen with time to be creative, I tried it and didn’t like it.
But there I was with a little butter and Canola oil in a hot skillet, and an off-season tomato sitting on the cutting board. Off season tomatoes always are a little disappointing. I wondered if heat would help. It did. Searing one side slightly and leaving the other cool gave them a more robust flavor, and was a thought worth working with on other things in the kitchen. That’s one of my processes. Mere exploration of the materials.
Same in my studio/shop
Midst metal-working tools while working on a piece, or looking at one just finished, I’m never satisfied. I always want it to say more, have more depth, and feel more like what I was feeling when I first felt or envisioned something. I look at the surrounding tools and materials wondering where to start.
In the same way that I put the cucumber aside, I move the current work out of the way, taking what I learned from it to try something new.
At least that is one moment in a process with many phases, like when I am at my desk trying to sketch realizable versions of impossible imaginings.
Part of why it is difficult to talk about process is that I don’t think about it. I just do it. People ask what was in my mind when I made a certain mark, how the artist got from waking up one morning with a blank canvass (I wake up with a crowded one) and ended up a couple of months later with, say, metal wrought into something that spoke to them. I felt something, or saw something, and went to my studio if I wasn’t already in it. There is always a thought or feeling lurking in my mind somewhere. I don’t understand people who wait for inspiration. I just go to my studio.
My favorite line about this is this from Chuck Close.
“Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work,”
– Chuck Close
It’s not working on just anything. Someone bought a period piece recently that they liked a lot and wondered if I could make something like it. I might have during that period forty years ago, but something inside me rebelled at the thought of doing it now.
My process might be “go to my studio and work,” but not on just anything. I often don’t know what I’m making until its finished. I might have a suspicion. I might try something again and again. The stainless disks I create now had a couple of hundred rough drafts. I knew there was something there. It took years of making one after the other before I thought, “There it is.” But even though people were buying it, I didn’t want to make copies of it. It might have looked like I was making copies of it for a while, while really I was trying to take it further, which I did. And so I continue.