LPKaster Reviews and Observations

It’s not easy to describe how many decisions have to be made before I feel like I’ve done anything good with the beautiful wood I find.  The wave action on the surface and the total transformation of the structure of the wood itself through bacterial action makes it almost an intrusion into the natural process.  My minimal drawing style with a torch or hot metal does, I feel, complete a process that started many years ago when the tree dropped a limb that wound up in water, floated across the lake and then came to rest at the shore before my feet.  I eagerly search the shore as I walk along, but it is only when I stop for a very long time -and wait-  that I actually see anything.

My current form of personal meditation is aided by the sound and sight of waves.  They are never the same.  The sound is a kind of music, but not composed music.  It is wild music; untrained music.  The solidity of this music is trapped in the wood, and when I draw on it the musical score that is in my head, I feel like I’ve at last expressed something that can’t be put into words.

My approach to sculpture is inevitably connected to my pottery and claywork of the 70′s.  What I always admire in clay is the close relationship between the local terrain (under the ground is always some kind of clay) and the forests above -wood turning to ash transforms the clay into glass.  Ash, then, can become a kind of glaze, and part of the clay.  It’s a cycle that begins with water, of course.  That’s why wood, for me, is closely related to clay.  It’s also why gazing at moving water is related to wood.

It is the Chinese five-element system that I realized one day while sitting out on the site of a brush fire.  The local clay had turned an orangey-red around the edges of the burn, but at the center, where the carbon collected, there were dark bluish bands, and then nearly black.  The black is simply the presence of ink-like carbon, but the blues are the unmistakable alchemical properties of iron.   Iron is the secret ingredient of most pottery glazes, including the beautiful celadons of infinite variety, and the many kinds of of iron glazes that range from rich blue-blacks to warmer reddish blacks to a persimmon color.  As important as color, the textures of iron glazes is a result of the stages of melting silica into glass while the iron itself is transformed by the atmosphere of the fire.  Unless the materials have already been melted into glass, then pulverized and reduced to powder already, the chemical interactions create many stages of bubbles and flow. The exquisite textures of many traditional glazes are the result of the interaction of the elements of glass; silica, alumina and flux.

When it comes to savoring the qualities of wood, it is as important to be aware of the process of growth and decay.  When wood that was once part of a living tree falls to the ground, a lot of things can happen.  It can be eaten, and slowly disintegrate.  A lot of microscopic activity can transform wood in complex ways.  When a particularly beautiful effect is discovered, it is possible to remove the wood from the original process and work with it.  In this way the process is continued in another direction.

The grain of a piece of wood reveals the process of growth, then to re-present it is a deliberate act of creation.  How much to interfere with something already wonderful is a challenge.  How to present what has been found is an act of revelation.

The best treatment that I have found to interact successfully is to return to fire as a process of transformation.  Pyrography is the deliberate burning of the wood in certain ways to create a sense of human interaction in a minimal way.  I like to use several kinds of torches and branding tools to create marks that are not just added to the surface, but combine with the substance intimately.  I like to use beeswax as a finish- it (temporarily!) stops the process of disintegration and often reveals things I see in the wood when it is wet, but as it dries out the surface seems to die, too.  Using such a basic finish seems to bring back that life without covering too much, or just sitting on the surface.  With the judicious application of heat, the wax can melt deep into the pores of the wood and become part of it.

It is similar to the sense of what to me is a good glaze on pottery; it does not sit just on the surface of the clay, but becomes a deep aspect of the clay itself.  When the clay sits slowly transforming in the fire the glaze combines with it and they become one.

There is no real difference between clay and glass, except refinement.  Clay is a little more resistant to melting, but my  favorite thing is to break down that difference until there is only enough difference to keep the form of a vessel from collapsing.  In a Japanese Anagama kiln, pottery is fired for several days until the ash collects and melts into the clay; the pot often becomes so soft the shape of the pot itself is transformed. In a similar sense, the difference between picking up a rotting chunk of wood and presenting it as an art object is only a slight difference, one that could also collapse but for certain deliberate factors.

These factors have something to do with the dynamic interplay of conscious transformation of the wood into something nearly something else.  It may be this delicacy of intent or collapse that keeps me occupied with spalted wood.

I’m reminded of some conversations I’ve had with people in the framing industry. The conversation goes “I don’t like abstract art.” says the guy (a sort of carpenter, specializing in art presentation furniture) He is making 200 frames for the art bought by a hotel chain that will be the centerpiece for a room. The room will have a bed, a TV with 57 channels, a lamp and a big window with a thick drapery and one big work of art above the bed for which he built the frames. Maybe a couple of smaller pieces to one side to balance it.. Of course there’s a small bath adjoining the room with another small etching and a mirror.

The picture framer is thinking, perhaps (Emperor’s New Clothes!) But not- because he is unfamiliar with the tale or the possible application of the allegory’s illustratiion of alternate points of view! He never got that lecture, even in a High School class ’cause the teacher was a “Phys Ed” coach who never got it himself.

Now if this guy goes on a trip and needs to settle into a hotel he will probably glance above the bed, and if the art is a landscape he will give it a once-over and think to himself “That’s nice… I like blubonnets.” But he will lie on the bed and stare at the TV for hours, and exclaim aloud “57 channels, and nothing’s on.” The weekly football game is tomorrow, so he thinks. I’m wondering if TV channels will ever need “test patterns” again. I should design those, I think.

The last time this fellow went to an art museum he walked past some of the most groundbreaking examples of 20th century art and went straight for the portrait gallery, then to the gallery of Barbizon School paintings and then to the Turner’s, the Hudson River School and other American Impressionists. Then perhaps a quick scan of French Impressionists nearby, not realizing what a scandal this kind of painting caused, not an inkling of what came next… And this trip to the museum was 10 years ago.

So then when he confides to me, “I don’t like abstract art,” do I dare talk to him about music?

It has been recently observed that there are no completely objective ways to judge the exactitude of art. Much of Science, too, is an art that begins with observation colored by certain personal factors that are not as objective as we are led to believe in school. Charles Darwin began his theories with pure observation, lacking the exact measurement of genes and chromosomes… and even the molecular beginnings of genetic research will fall into the nature of art if you look long and hard enough. Still, (most of us) find his conclusions very conclusive today. Observation is an inexact process and can be wildly different from one position to another, so there will always be a few who trust traditional poetic insight over keen observation (cf. “the Bible”) or read this essay “Art and Artifice”:

This effect was part of the subject matter of a recent episode of “Bones” (The Doctor in the Photo) and it reminded me of how much our experience is colored by the very ground of our everyday “seat of the self.” The “self” is a composite not only of accumulated knowledge and experience, but of just how we are feeling at the moment. In this case, the main character identifies with the victim of murder that she is certain that the photographs and recordings of the victim are _exactly_ like her. It is only later, when she fully comprehends the events leading to the death, that she realizes there are only coincidental similarities. Her immediate experiences change due to the depth of her new understanding.

There are art experts whose job is to decide whether a work is actually the product of a particular artist. What they rely on is a huge body of referential material that is generally accepted as ‘genuine’ and using their own judgement of the details of these will determine if the work in question is one of a series by the same person. Handwriting analysis, for example, is not a science, but a technique of keen observation and good guesses. Art experts employ the same kind of judgements, but a casual observer or listener- or smeller, in the case of perfume perhaps, will accept a counterfeit because their casual experience is all they need. They call in the experts when the stakes seem higher, but I ask “Isn’t the richness of their experience just as important?” So let’s get serious about this.

When it becomes an issue of worth and exchange, the art experts are brought in. Then the casual response goes immediately deeper. Nothing has changed, except the experience. (The casual observer is very gradually seduced into becoming an “art expert.”)

Some might insist that it is all ‘chemical’ in nature and certainly changes in body chemistry can make radical differences in our personal experience. It is also demonstrable that we can change our own chemistry, even using just our own minds. And sometimes the effect can be so slight that we don’t recognise it. We may never know for certain which phenomena leads the way to our somatic reference, the way our bodies affect our minds and ‘tother way round. If we know this to be true, then only time can reveal some certainties we can rely on.

This, and the impressions of a collective, like our families and friends (our own ‘art experts’) make a huge difference in our experiences. And once we are aware of how our response can vary with circumstance it is possible to have a truly aesthetic experience of a drawing, a painting, or of a musical work. It seems to me the personal response to artwork has to be a balance of an immediate impression, yet supported by cultural expectations, our previous experiences. It starts in a particular momentary impression, then stretches to the boundaries of culture.

I simply doubt that objective measurements can be used in art, or in science in any reliable way. I have electronic tuners that work much more slowly and precisely than my hearing, and I trust them more if I want to know what C sounds like. Yet art is all about illusion, isn’t it? By the time I play a note, the reference wanders again.

This is a pyrographic drawing with colored dyes done in the style I have been developing for many years I refer sometimes as “taichi” drawings as the movements of the line are based on my visceral sense of push/pull as in Taichi Pushhands movements.

The pyrograhic element is the inverse element bounded by the dotted boundary. I discovered years ago how the dotting effect I observed in traditional Australian art will activate a line or a space. I used it to outline some flower images several years ago with great success.

There was at that time a strong interest in images of flowers. Commercial spaces like hotels and hospitals preferred the neutrality of them, I think. The active nature of the pyrographic drawing comes out of the combination of the dotting from these earlier images combined with a drawing style that actually pre-existed these images. I was creating maze-like pencil drawings before the ’80s, even applied them to canvas. But I believe they were too sophisticated for a commercial space.

Always intend to show what I am thinking about. This is one of a series that can be seen on my website; http://lpkaster.com/encaustic.html

The circles are drawn with a soft graphite over the brushwork, a contrapuntally different way of making marks. The color overlays are meant to be colored beeswax with an impressed woodgrain pattern. Just now they exist as digital concepts, but isn’t that all I can show until someone has a wall to hang them on anyway? The “waves” portion below the primary image are an entirely separate approach, but I think also a kind of underlining feature.