Another perspective.
For a slightly different perspective on the sculpting process: Visualize that I have this one-ton piece of cedar stump with a few hundred pounds of stone embedded in the root system. I see it on the beach and I say to myself, “Of all the pieces of wood I’ve seen on my two-plus kilometers of beach walking, this piece stands out as the appropriate piece.” What was to be carved, I did not yet know. From a practical perspective this piece would be challenging to move out of the pile of wood debris, into the water and then tow a few kilometers back to a location where I could remove it from the water and truck it to my studio. On the other hand, it did appear to be a solid, sound piece of wood. Prior to this encounter I had considered the twenty-kilo “Transformation” driftwood to be a heavy piece. Having found this large, inconvenient yet resonant-feeling piece, I returned without it to my home studio and got on with my life.
It was a number of months before I finally made up my mind to make a commitment and bring back the piece. When I got it home, I had to do something with it. What was it going to be? I did have a feeling that I wanted to get inside of it, to be inside this piece yet I didn’t know how I was going to go about doing that. My approach was not to concern myself with figuring out what it was going to be, although I was certainly curious. The approach was to ask myself, not, “What can’t I do?” but rather, “What am I able to do? How can I move ahead on this piece?” How shall I start?” Clean up the outside of the piece, the bleached roughened chipped weathered areas of the piece. Expose fresh skin, smooth out the sharp angles.
The cleanup kept me busy over a number of months. I slowly became familiar with the piece. I got comfortable with it. I sanded and smoothed. I sanded more, I smoothed more.
