Ken presents an interesting story of an unexpected entry into the world of art and sculpture. He’s paid close attention to his teachers and has sought out special instructional opportunities to become a productive artist. Along the way, he has volunteered his time on the board of NWSSA and currently serves as our president.
LE: To begin, Ken, briefly introduce your self.
KB: I live in Seattle with my wife Adele (a painter) and four cats. I started experimenting in stone about 8 years ago, and was introduced to NWSSA about 7 years ago. I first called myself an artist about 5 years ago.
LE: What is your life history as it relates to being an artist?
KB: I never thought I was artistic. I was not the kid in school who drew well or made neat clay critters. I was creative and could tell a good story or figure out a problem, but steered clear of the art room. Perhaps part of it was my partial color blindness, which has always made dealing with colors problematic. I was fascinated with bugs and snakes, and later the micro layers of science. I started down the path of a science career until I discovered economics and finance while in biochemistry grad school and real estate in particular drew my attention. After my heart had been broken by divorce, it was mended and opened by an art fanatic. Discovering art was a new intellectual challenge. I could not understand it, but it was endlessly interesting and exciting. I started collecting two-dimensional art, and one day decided I needed a dark stone sculpture that was about 3 feet tall for my living room. After searching for quite a while in vain, I concluded I would have to make it myself. I also thought making my own art would exercise the right side of my brain in a way that it had not previously been challenged, and that it would impress my art fanatic ex-girlfriend.
LE: How did you get started sculpting?
KB: I started with some basic steel chisels and a round green cobble from my back yard. After turning the points into rounds, I gave up. Later another girlfriend dragged me to a mushroom expo at the UW Center for Urban Horticulture, where I was exposed to several great sculptures, one by Kazutaka Uchida. It was unsigned and there were no plaques to indicate the artist, but I spent much more time caressing and circling the Uchida piece than I did scrutinizing the mushrooms. I was fascinated by the piece.
When we left the mushroom expo I immediately bought a copy of Sculpture magazine to look through the stone supplier advertisements in the back. I got a dozen catalogues, called most of the suppliers, and then ordered some tools that would be suited to harder stone. I rewired the basement to accommodate a compressor and started my second experiments in stone. I subsequently had Suz Gentiluomo as an instructor at a class at Pratt, and she turned me onto Camp Brotherhood and the NWSSA. At my first Camp Brotherhood I met Mr. Uchida, learned that it was his sculpture that inspired me to get serious about sculpting, and started a friendship that has lasted to this day.
I played around the edges of carving until a job change allowed me a two-month visit to Pietrasanta, Italy. Surrounded by virtually free stone and the constant dust of fellow carvers, I lost my fear of ruining a stone and soaked up technique.
LE: Who or what are your artistic influences?
KB: In addition to my personal relationship with Mr. Uchida, I have been tremendously influenced by his art. Along with Mr. Uchida I like Nagare, Noguchi, Henry Moore, Manuel Neri and much “primitive” art. I try to focus my art on simple natural forms. I cannot readily express what I try to achieve in a piece. I have heard discussions between artists who claim that they want to avoid making “pretty” things. I spend all of my artistic time striving to create pleasant forms. I do not have a particular message in mind and no underlying story. If I think about a work long enough after its completion, I can interpret the piece to include some autobiographical or historical dimension. But give me enough time and I can make up a story about anything, so I sometimes think that is rather artificial attribution of meaning to what I had intended to be just a pleasing form.
I will draw 10 or 20 versions of a form, pick the best of the pack, and then redraw using that line or movement that I found pleasing for the top of the piece with new choices for the middle or bottom. Inevitably, the final piece is different, but hopefully better than the drawing. I have gotten most satisfaction from figuring my way around a mistake or break, and feel like mistakes add a great deal of humanity to my work.
LE: How does your art reflect your philosophy?
KB:: This is the most difficult question yet; perhaps because I feel like my “philosophy” is actually a collection of thoughts on different topics, without some grand plan to tie them all together. I do think that if a grand plan develops, it may do so because of my art. There is something very gratifying and relaxing to me about carving, although finishing the piece is the final rush. I often use this to convince myself that the journey is more important than the destination. I have always been patient, but I think that goes without saying for anyone who chooses hard stone as a medium.
LE: Why is art important to you?
KB: My day job is entirely intellectual, and I come home 100 percent focused on my head. I struggle every day to bring my heart into the action, with mixed success. When I get involved with art the balance tips toward my heart. I also enjoy the creative process, and get a big rush when I complete a piece or satisfactorily figure out a design issue.
LE: How has the NWSSA influenced your art?
KB: The NWSSA has introduced me to many encouraging and talented individuals. I have taken inspiration and stolen design ideas from people like Verena Schwippert, Kirk McLean and Rich Hestekind, to list only three. To paraphrase Bryan Ohno, artists need a community to discuss ideas and push concepts to their limit and share/exchange resources. The NWSSA has provided this community to me, and makes me feel like an artist in the midst of a developing movement, rather than a loony on some distant fringe.
LE: What is your favorite tool or technique?
KB: My favorite tool is the core drill. I love putting holes in everything. In addition to creating the perfect form of the circle, there is something fascinating to me about seeing into the middle of a stone. Looking through the hole in the stone also gives a different view of the world.
LE: What is your favorite stone?
KB: Basalt is my hands-down favorite. However, I have created more pieces in other stone types. I drool over all basalt, but I find other individual stones fascinating for their form or coloration. Recently completed pieces have been in basalt, schist, henna limestone, Belgian black limestone, olivine and marble. I have so far worked mostly in the 100 to 200 pound size range, although I finished a 650-pound piece earlier this year. I have a 1,500 pound piece in the works, as well as two pieces in the 400 to 600 pound range. My long-term desire is to work in the life size range or in the desktop size range. I find that mid-sized pieces are difficult to place. As you can tell, I like to work on several pieces at a time, giving one a rest if I run into a design issue or want a break. In a typical year I will complete five pieces. A good year will find seven completed pieces in my portfolio.
LE: Please talk about a few of your favorite pieces.
KB: My first created favorite I call ‘Dark’, which is the three-foot tall black marble from my dreams that originally drew me to carving. I started this piece in Italy and had mostly roughed it out by the time I shipped it home. I had originally conceived it as a totally symmetrical totem with a football-shaped cross section, but a friend in Italy questioned my symmetry plan before I had roughed it out. I realized she was right so left in the bow on one side. I had also thought the piece should be highly polished on both sides, but as I was polishing I realized the tooth chisel marks were much more interesting than the black glassy surface. The contrast between the two was even better. That stone was a very good lesson in learning when to stop.
A second favorite is ‘oYo’. I was visiting Mr. Uchida in Japan and he said I could carve any one of a couple different stones, the most attractive of which was a squat white marble. I did some drawings that night after dinner to figure out what I might make of the piece. The next morning Mr. Uchida broadened the potential selection to include a small, roundish basalt. I was thrilled to be able to use the Japanese basalt, and the marble drawing looked even better when applied to the basalt. I had only one and a half days to work on the piece, so when I was completed I was very tired of it and disappointed. Adele told me to give it a rest, and when we got home to Seattle and I pulled it out of my luggage I knew I had an instant favorite. In addition to coming from my friend’s studio and rock pile, it had a certain quiet sensitivity that I loved. I have since made several other favorite ‘oYo’s’ because I enjoy the form.
LE: What are your biggest challenges?
KB: My workspace is a blessing, but is also my biggest challenge. Perhaps I was an engineer in a former life, but I like machines and can spend hours thinking of a better way to do something. That energy has created a nice studio that I share with Karl Hufbauer, but it can also be terribly distracting when I purchase some old piece of equipment to reconfigure. I can spend hundreds of hours distracted by facility issues that in retrospect I would have preferred to spend on carving. The space is perfect for stone sculpting (we rent an old welding shop on a city lot near our houses) and we have lots of room for stone piles and work in progress, but I spend far too much time worrying about studio issues, which takes away from my art.
LE: What are you looking forward to?
KB: I am looking forward to taking more time from my day job so I can spend more time in my studio. I have many ideas that are stuck in my sketchbooks until I have the time to test them on stone. I would also like to spend more time in pure artistic exploration. I was lucky enough to spend a month-long residency at the Vermont Studio Center in January this year. I picked January because I knew it would be outrageously cold, and I was not disappointed. I wanted to experience creativity from a totally different standpoint, so I worked outdoors, creating forms in ice. I mostly worked with a spray bottle, applying mist to wires, snowballs and twigs to experiment with shapes. I ultimately ended up making my most satisfying forms by applying mist to various shaped snowballs. Perhaps I’ll write an article about ice forms another time…
