Metal Sculpture Blog

We were driving Sunday, running errands, finishing our holiday shopping, spending time together and there was a hush over the city. The sky was grey, striped here and there with thin blue veins and there were few people out. Even the parking lots at the mall were mostly empty and we didn’t have to wait in line anywhere. It was calming. For the first time in a long time, the world felt sane.

It surprised me. All of the worry about the economy, the stress of building sculpture for deadlines, the urgency of making sure all of our six children are adequately spoiled with tons of needless junk for Christmas went away and we were left with a focus on quality, on time, and on the space around us.

That mood has stayed with me and this morning, when I woke to an unexpected foot of snow on the ground, the world white and still, I felt especially blessed. Perhaps we are all taking a deep breath and the slowing down is good for us. Maybe we will spend more time with our family, friends and neighbors around meals we cook ourselves. Maybe we will move away from cheap disposable goods to a renewed focus on quality and durability. Maybe there is something really good in this period of our collective history. A new beginning. A quiet joy. A cause for celebration.

Sometimes I get so frustrated. Reading essays today on Damien Hirst, Cindy Sherman and others, I feel like screaming. What is it in our world that values derogatory social criticism and horror so highly? The “real” it seems, to me, is too obvious. Certainly death is real, and commentary on it has been a staple of western tradition. Still, morbidity, exploitation, dissection and dissemination are so easy that I am repulsed by the contemporary art establishment’s thrall.

Lying awake tonight, trying to understand the energy given to sadistic and horrific ejaculations, I ended up envisioning my own “outrageous” exhibit. Admittedly, it was fun. I imagined the exhibit space down to its last detail–a beautiful room, replete with aesthetic art, furniture, rugs, but scattered throughout with my own particular social critique. There would be an enormous mirror layered with shards of other mirrors, one on top of the other so that all one would see in the reflection would be fragments of self, repeated endlessly. No full, complete view would be forthcoming. Interspersed in the mirror shards would be fragments of text from letters, newspaper clippings, old photographs, sundry household effects. I would call the piece, “Introspection divided by obsession = Narcissism.” Then there would be a mannequin, or maybe two, completely wrapped in computer and electronic wires holding blackberries or the equivalent. One would see their eyes, which are down cast and focused, but nothing else human. This piece I would entitle, “Email me.” There would be a pair of lovers, so completely involved in a kiss that they are oblivious to their surroundings. Encircling them would be several nay-sayers, holding up screens and smirking. This piece would be called, “Get a room,” and would be a commentary on the hypocrisy of our society that makes the porn industry more successful than the mainstream film industry while it shuns natural and beautiful affection. Finally, in the corner, would be an expensive toilet. When the viewer flushes it, it would peal with laughter–a commentary on the value of “potty humor”in today’s society which, when all is said and done, contributes exactly as much as a laughing toilet to human endeavor.

Finally, I got out of bed, poured a very stiff drink, and started to write this because if I succumb to what is easy (and contemporary art as it is revered is as easy as a simple landscape delivered with a little aplomb) then I forsake everything I value in art. For art, metal art or stone, oil or pastel, music or literature, must give you more than what you can read in the newspaper (or on the Internet) on any given day. We are so good at recognizing, and accepting, what is wrong with our world. We so seldom focus on what is right. How does one know love? Certainly not through sentimental film or literature. How does one know beauty? If we are looking to art to help us understand that which makes us recoil, then how is it that the mainstream news media is not being auctioned at Christies? Today’s news headline “Aunt arrested in chained teen case,” and its accompanying photograph, is certainly as shocking and socially revealing as a cow sawed into sections and preserved in formaldehyde. For me, art has to be about the things we know but can not articulate. Death is easy. It happens to us all. We know what death is. But can we define love? Or faith? Fear or joy? Art, I think, must attempt to describe and deepen our understanding of the things we know but can not define.

It would be fun to let go, to absolve the frailty and banality of what is human in techni-color, to finally free myself of rage and horror as I make metaphors for the most low in human experience and celebrate myself as one who has the “balls” to be honest about it. Ultimately, that endeavor would prove as mundane and worthless to me as it seems to have done to those who came before me and are finally settling down to raise their kids, sobering, finally, after too long an adolescence. Instead, I try to articulate that which is as real as death, but more rewarding — I try to articulate the components of life that defy definition and are as individual as they are inspiring.

Like the sky today, I am leaden with promise. There are new images in my mind, new materials. I want to try different things, to work in wax and wood, combining textures and forms with the metal for depth, variation, subtlety and shock. There is a storm brewing in me. But I am also leaden with the storm brewing in the world, trying hard not to let my fear of it be the impetus for my creative release.

I have been thinking a great deal about fear lately, how insidious it is, and relentless. All of us seem to be waiting for a storm of unreal proportion and for me, the waiting is the worst. Not knowing wreaks havoc with any sense of power or control so I find myself planning — worst case, best case, everything in between — and imagining all the various scenarios.

I used to play a lot of chess. Focusing not on the board in front of me, but on all the moves that might be made, I plotted action and reaction to any number of potential strategies. I live my life that way too because, in spite of all my best attempts to fully embrace the alternative, it is more natural for me to live in my memories and imaginings than it is to live in the present.

Strangely, it is the present that I sculpt. Through my art, I am fully present in my life and when I am working, I am content. I am thinking that I should take a lesson from this, focus on my every day life and leave the storm to do what it will. Still, this storm is so big, and the anticipation so intense that I feel lost. How do I work toward my ideal when the world feels so dark? How to I not let current events pull me into their winds? How do I turn fear into beauty this time?

The brilliance of fall, of cottonwoods and aspens alight against a deep blue sky, the warm flow of blood through my legs in direct contrast to the sharp bite of wind on my face, the smoke from my burning weeds graying the clouds, their flames dancing in the bin, the deep exhalation of everything that has grown, fulfilled itself and is finally spent consumes me. I am drawn to the ordered chaos of the world around me. Broken sticks on the ground in the forest, the perfect graduated color palate of the Bosque, the sandstone textured clouds of the sunset last night inspire me and I have been thinking that I should sculpt those downed branches or mimic the texture of that sky. But these thoughts beg a question. How, if I am mimicking in my art a world that already exists, am I truly creative?

To create is to bring into being, or cause to exist. I do not cause the sky. I do not bring those downed branches into being. If I were to recreate the beauty of the natural world, I would be able to freeze it, know it again and again from different times and parts of myself. But in doing so, I run the risk of rendering me merely a spectator by objectifying and reducing that which is so fully alive, so huge, to something manageable and separate from myself.

Art, for me, must be something that is itself huge and fully alive, something that I not only witness but also interact with, something that, like nature, has the power to transform me. In spite of all my yearning toward beauty, the sculpture must also have meaning, its own ordered construct where the random textures and smooth colored swirls speak to a whole that is at once recognizable and new. That, for me, is the creative process. Out of the vortex of myriad sensations and drifting thoughts as I revel in a sandstone sky comes the mysterious allure of texture and color, light and shadow, feeling and idea that are not themselves objects but instead are the gestating parts of a whole not yet formed, only promised.

In between shows, frantic, frazzled, trying to sustain a semblance of normalcy and just managing to keep fires to a simmer, I find myself checking out, searching for something that can calm me, reading trash novels, and indulging in memories of a well know trail through meadows and creek crossings, where wild strawberries are hidden in the shadows of the pines, tiny, brilliant and infinitely sweet.

Silver nitrate stains my hands black. My back is almost out again. There is a large gash from a piece of sharp metal on my shoulder. There is an ache in my heart. I have turned myself inside out so many times over the last several months that I feel there is nothing left. A writer friend of mine wrote me recently and talked of the muse who had abandoned him. In her absence, he felt a kind of peaceful serenity and in someways, was glad she is gone. “She was a bitch,” he said and I burst out laughing as I read the email. Aren’t they all?

So today, waiting for my love to finish errands so we might actually go for a hike on that remembered trail (the lastest works are drying, but there aren’t many so I ended early and have a little bit of time) I finally finished reading Dave Hickey’s, “The Invisible Dragon.” He implied that real art has to exist in a real world (institutions being emphatically not real) and that its power to communicate must, inherently, come from beauty for beauty is the language that transcends the middle men of politics, religions or institutions. In someways, he sounded like Martin Luther demanding a one on one relationship with God. He ended the last essay with, “As (George Bernard) Shaw pointed out, institutions collapse from lack of funding, they do not die from lack of meaning. We die from lack of meaning.”

I found myself thinking about the irony of searching myself and my life for the things which challenge me to produce works that have meaning, works that stimulate and provoke me visually, emotionally and mentally while holding to an ideal of allusive — a viewer recently described my sculpture this way — beauty and what I want and need more than anything else right now is a walk in a beautiful wood. I would gladly, at this moment, trade meaning for beauty.

My father used to tell me that the beauty I recognized in the world was the beauty I knew inside myself. A beautiful sunset is only beautiful when it triggers an unspoken knowledge of myself. I think art does the same thing. Like Hickey said, “The rhetoric of beauty tells the story of the beholder who… contracts his own submission — having established, by free consent, a reciprocal, contractual alliance with the image.” Meaning delivered outside the “rhetoric of beauty” is dry, dead, cold. Beauty puts life, and the meanings we subsequently derive from it, in context. Today, I want to be the viewer. Take it in. Submit. Let go. I simply want to eat the strawberry in the cool of the woods and hold my lover’s hand.