Why do I make sculpture, or any art? Why does a 7-year-old? When I was 7, while friends were playing ball, I was making small sculptures like Alexander Calder’s. Why does a 7-year-old do that?
My parents noted my interest in Modern Art and began taking me to gallery openings. Much of it was fascinating, but by age 12, I could listen to experts explaining a piece and remain polite even when thinking that what they were saying was bullshit. Decades 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 placing hundreds 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 monuments) as well as stainless disks that look three dimensional, various kinds of sculptures, the rare figurative silhouette (sometimes 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. I create visual experiences that I hope are enough for what they are without being the visual representation of something verbal. If words adequately could convey it, I would post those words instead.
”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, even though it changes to suit the project.
My Process?
I always have in my mind visions and feelings that can come out only in the presence of the means to let them. Copying can kill me. Creating what sells hurts. However, 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 applying elsewhere in the kitchen. That’s one of my processes – exploration of 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 are always thoughts and feelings lurking in my mind. 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 brought 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 get to 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 some hundreds of rough drafts. I knew there was something there. It took years of making one after the other before I thought, “There it is.” The problem is that after the “there it is” piece, something in me didn’t want to make a single additional one, even though more than one person wanted to buy it. Whatever it is that drives me, wanted to move on to new terrain. That’s when it takes discipline. I must find something in the “there it is” one that is new enough to me to get my mind to tune into it again, so that the other people who want it can get one, or at least one like it. So, show up and get to work while trying not to spend all the time on the things not yet figured out. Maybe most of the time, but not all of the time. Otherwise, starvation is the future.