In the beginning was the wood..and I began to carve

   
Hi all, this is a running catalog of my artistic pursuits. Depending on my mood I sculpt (wood, or concrete, or porcelain, or plaster), I make furniture, I write, I write music, I help people. I ramble on about my techniques and will probably post some photos ….so if you want to learn how I do some of what I do, hang around. Be blessed and enjoy..and feel free to write me.

Andy Warhol said’ just make art! Don’t worry about whether it’s good or bad, leave that to the so-called critics, and while they are thinking about it, make even more art!!!

Or something like that. I could google the quote and have it correct in about 2.3 seconds but I’ll leave it as attributed.

I’ve been in the process of making a pear-pod docking table, complete with a non-functional dock, that has a plug in jack, to which I wired several LED sockets. These LEDs are strategically placed within the table to give a quaint mood backlight to some glass that I fashioned to fit a void that I cut into the table in the shape of a pear with a bite taken out. This table is sort of a takeoff from Isamu Noguchi, he made a few tables including a very elegantly carved one that he stack-laminated a shocking amount of wood, carved it and sanded and polished to a high degree of finish. There is quite a bit of wasted wood doing this type of a table simply because you take a good sized board, cut the successively smaller disks out of it, stack and laminate them together….but considering that this is recycled wood that I purchased from guy who had had it in his shop for about 30 years it was about time to take the wood and give it a life as a piece of furniture..

Carved wood has a very small corner of the art world, *think Henry Moore* but holds an even tinier segment of the furniture world. Wendell Castle was and is one of the few people who dared to try to bridge that chasm between art and art that actually has a functional purpose rather than to just sit in the corner and `collect dust. In the 70’s Castle made a few tables with carved acoutrements on top, for example he made one table with a carved book and a pair of ‘reading glasses’ also carved out of the same wood as the table.. He made another table that had a set of keys and a key ring carved and laminated onto the top of the table, and yet another table with a pair of carved gloves adorning the table, again, carved from the same type of wood as the table.

I am a huge fan of Mr. Castle and my thoughts were leaning toward the idea of doing a few pieces along the lines of what he did, just updated for the 21st century. Seeing as how I was once an electronics technician by trade, wiring up LEDs or even other types of electronic silliness is easy for me, and I imagine that I’ll be exploring more of that later…maybe a table with one large button that, when pushed, gives a prerecorded cryptic message…or maybe a recording that shouts STOP!  when the button is pushed...or maybe gives an electric shock to see how Pavlovian people can be...

My table is carved from alder. I got a massive pile of hardwood lumber (for a price so cheap I should have been charged with robbery) from a guy who was basically shutting down his wood shop, including some mahogany, alder, a couple massive boards of poplar  and some amazing ribbon shimmery black cherry that is so beautiful I want to cry when I look at it.