recent sculpture

The tall cedar piece I just finished for a friend who had experimented with growing wheat; she asked for a vertical sculpture to fit a space in front of her house. All the grasses were just coming up when I started, so my model was a very early stage of growth when the first leaves are just unfurling. I started w/out drawings, which meant that when I needed a second look, the grasses had advanced to a completely different stage, and I had to work from memory and imagination. The piece of cedar was probably cut from an old snag by a local homesteader, sometime in the early 1900s, and split into a post that held up a barn. When the homesteader’s grandson repaired the barn, he took a couple of old posts out, and I got lucky. There was an old square nail embedded in the wood, which shows up about 1/3 of the way up, as a dark bruise and a scar. I finished it with a torch and oil.