I Wish I Had Done That
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- Last Updated: Tuesday, 14 December 2021 04:02
There have been many sculptures produced by my friends/colleagues in NWSSA whence I could happily apply the title line, but my current envy trip is this remarkable piece of Michael’s. He aptly has entitled it ‘Making Space’. I’ve visited it twice now in his studio and both times came away obsessed with its excellence. It truly captivates me. Here’s why:
- He did not choose a tried and true, tailored stone for the work i.e., like a piece of dimension marble. Encountering a broken black funerary monument, he exploited what otherwise would have been destined for the scrap heap; a textbook study around the word ‘inspiration’.
- The perfectly paired and polished surfaces, the absolute invisibility of the mounting, the general execution of the whole work, merit profound admiration to be sure. But what really grabs me here is the totality of sculptural experience required to get this work ‘right’. I’m thinking Michael probably started out just cleaning up the two broken halves with no greater purpose for them in mind. The first thing he did was achieve perfection in the polish (hey, it’s black granite! Try it!) which could only have been done by summoning up the skill of long experience.
Along the way, he had to be puzzling out some way to present the two halves being held apart; it would make a very weak story to simply clap them together again after polishing. Various methods come to mind - pinning in some way being foremost, or possibly using adhesives. The notion of presenting them as boulders with a human character holding them apart was a eureka moment in creativity. I don’t know that I’d have ever thought of it.
But how to make such a human character? It could perhaps be done in some kind of stone, maybe marble — but what Michael did do was illustrative of a restless creativity that had him eternally reaching out to expand his ability in sculptural arts. A curious mind had him playing with computer software that allowed him to execute 3-D imaging; in an apocalyptic moment he conceived of, and created, a human figure to do the pushing. It is metal sculpture, not stone sculpture, but it is no less of an adulteration than metal pins doing the job.
Michael finessed it all by correctly calculating the size the human must be relative to the stone ‘boulders’ so that certain feelings are evoked. To me, the boulders represent a looming, insistent power, trying ever to close — but here is a valiant savior struggling against overwhelming odds to fend off certain disaster. My mind runs to the little Dutch boy holding his finger in the dyke.
For me, the sculpture evokes TENSION. I feel it. All the time I’m looking at the sculpture I can’t stop feeling it.
Would I have done anything differently? Well, I write about this fine piece of Michael’s because I doubt I would ever have conceived of it at all. The important thing I have to say is ‘Good on you, Michael! Wish I had done it . . . !’
I chose to use a yellow canary wearing a facemask to warn that the virus is blooming, just as when caged canaries were used as alarms in the old mining days to indicate poisonous gases (the workers could try to escape if the canary dropped dead). My little birds are usually looking at something on another branch, such as a bug or flower. Since the Coronavirus looks like some kind of a seed pod in bright colors, I chose to use its shape as flowers in various stages of blooming. Scrounging around in my junk drawers (don’t all artists have them?) I tried to figure out what I could use to make this. Finding the right materials was not a simple feat. Then, I felt the blossoms alone were not interesting enough. The sculpture needed some leaf forms to make it a plant, but an imaginary sci-fi virus plant would not have green leaves. AH HA! Thinking about the South American poisonous dart frogs with their bright colored bodies to warn predators NOT TO EAT THEM, I painted these leaves in shades of blues along with the bright blossoms as a metaphor for the same. DO NOT SNIFF THESE!
By Benjamin Mefford
Maryhill Museum has been on my list of places to visit for a decade, and I finally made a point to spend a day exploring. The 5,300 acre property is located two hours drive east of Portland, Oregon on the Washington side of the river. This quiet landscape with sweeping views of the Columbia River Gorge is well worth a visit, particularly for sculptors. Founded by Sam Hill in the 1920’s, the museum has a fascinating history. The museum itself is a large building, with some modern updates and a diverse collection. Inside you can find a permanent collection of more than 50 works by Auguste Rodin, primarily plaster studies. While these are perhaps less impressive as art objects compared to his larger finished works, I found them both more accessible and more informative of his process. Also of particular interest is the collection of Native American artworks that includes stone sculpture. Altogether, the Indigenous Peoples of North America Collection has more than 3,500 objects. While there are just several moderate sized works that would clearly be considered “sculpture”, this is more than I have ever seen of such stone artifacts from our region. For me, seeing these hand pecked carvings in basalt alone was worth the trip.
Spread out around the exterior of the museum, one can discover the outdoor art collection. A large concrete sculpture installation is sited within an overlook garden, and was created by Brad Cloepfil of Allied Form Works of Portland, Oregon; this was an early project for Cloepfil and AFW, who have gone on to structural design projects for Wieden + Kennedy, Caldera Arts Center, and the Seattle Art Museum, to name just a few. Just southeast of the main building, Brushing (2009), by Mike Suri, playfully illustrates the effect of powerful winds that move through the Columbia River Gorge. Mike is not only a talented metal sculptor, but he has also helped many NWSSA members install their works in the outdoor exhibit Gallery Without Walls in Lake Oswego, Oregon. Just a short distance to the northwest of the main building, a tranquil green space includes about half of the outdoor artworks. There, I found the granite and steel sculpture Moon Temple (2006) - created by none other than long-time NWSSA member Leon White. 
“When the World Dissolves” by MJ Anderson. An example of using paint on an alabaster sculpture.
For 27 years the City of Round Rock, Texas, has held the three day SculptFest event. Along with 60 other artists, I was invited to display my sculpture at SculptFest 2019, and to leave my large bear sculpture “Pause” on display for one year. Special thanks to Candyce Garrett for making it happen for me.
Being at SculptFest was a great way to meet other sculptors and see a lot of sculpture. There were large and small bronzes, cloth and fiber constructions, wood, and of course stone. I have to admit, I was so involved with the initial setup, talking to the public, and getting to know the other artists that I did not take many pictures of the sculpture. SculptFest the previous year had 24 of Alan Houser’s large bronze pieces, which made for a surreal occurrence of his work being moved out while Candyce and Jason moved in their stone work.
The final leg of the return trip took me about 100 miles east of Salt Lake City to Rick and Jean’s honeycomb calcite yard, the Shamrock Mining Association in Hanna Utah. Honeycomb Calcite is what happens when a limestone cave is pushed down into the earth and the calcium from the limestone is leached, fills the cave, is baked for millions of years, pushed back up, and then some folks quarry and bring it down the mountain for us to carve. I'd characterize the workability of this stone as a medium to soft marble. The weakest places can be, but not always, the large white seams between the solid yellow and orange areas. Dark red lines in some of the stones are very solid fractures that have healed. Rick calls them dinosaur blood seams.
Very early on a Saturday back in June, 2017, we loaded my pick-up with a generator and lots of supplies and headed to the Ravensdale gravel quarry to make this successful boulder split.
“We don’t make mistakes, we just make happy accidents.” - 
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Harriet Hosmer (1830-1908) 
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We all learned some things to consider the next time around - take account of surface weathering, consider carefully how both the mass and the form of the stone will constrain (or not!) the splitting plane, take plenty of time between rounds of hammering…. We might have intentionally taken off a corner at the start, to get a more oblong shape, and to tell us more about the grain direction of the stone. I’d say our first split line was running somewhat perpendicular to the bedding plane. It’s worth noting that the grain direction of the boulder became much more obvious to me recently when I began doing some final pointing by hand on one of the split faces. As with wood, hand tools tell you things about a stone that power tools simply don’t!
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We often hear it 
