Caril Chasens
Sculpture in Wood
Klicken für
deutch./ Click for German
version.
Wood carving as a 21st century art, original sculpture and ideas, digital collage,
artist's portfolio, writings, woodcarving tutorials for
woodcarvers
and artists, visual arts and woodcarving links, links to new
movements and new directions in the visual arts...
... Ghost in the Library
Paddleball Head - the animation..
Hominidium birch burl
It was interesting combining chimp and human features.... More
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I use wood as a medium for original one-of-a-kind sculpture.
Wood, containing and reflecting the complexity of nature, is,
I feel, a medium deeply suited to this time in history.
Many of my carvings show animals within environment, the
environment abstracted (a different abstraction) in the
unique nature of wood. And, I have been experimenting with digital collage...
Molten Wood-digital collage with wood sculpture
Digididdles - More digital collage
Horsey Face pine burl, 26"
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All works are original and one-of-a-kind.
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Artifact, birch, 21"
The bird is a yellowbellied sapsucker, larger than life.
- Floating Horses birch, 36"
- This piece inspired Horsey Face, above. Horses are rather alien to me; I did not grow up drawing horses. ...see the sculpture..
- Sound in Water (Orcas) birch, 36"
- ...see the sculpture..
- Treehugger birch, 17"
- It is possible for a modern person to feel a deep
connection
to nature. Below that, one is likely to feel a gulf, a sense
that the connection is just pretend. And of course, below that
the connection is absolute, we are part of it. I don't know
how
sad a story this is. It is too soon to be sure.
...see the sculpture..
- Entseed, 2004, birch burl, 7"
- Not an illustration, but I do thank the fantasy writer Tolkein for coining the word ent (a walking sentient tree).
...see the sculpture..
- Mother Nature, 2003, birch burl, 24"
- Contains surprises.... ...see the sculpture..
- Consider Mouse, 2004, steamed pear, gold leaf, 14" ...see the sculpture..
- Runners 1996, birch, 40"
- The coyote does catch the hare, and also the hare does
escape.
I unified the piece by hand joinery from curved rough birch
planks
that were milled to make sleigh runners. One impulse in the
composition is a sense of the immediate space of the running
creatures.
(By "immediate space", I mean the root feeling of what we
humans
interpret culturally as personal space.)
...see the sculpture..
- The Minotaur (Portrait of Pablo Picasso) 2000,
birch, red cedar, 31"
- This started from a picture of Picasso's face. The
environment might not be part of a wave-cross-section of the
20th century. In Picasso's painting Guernica, the bull looks
as
agonized as everything else, at the horror of war. But, in
some
sketches for the painting, the bull, or sometimes the minotaur,
was so indifferent, so calm....
...see the sculpture..
- Pterodactyl 1999, alder, 39"
- Counting only the Earth's speed of revolution in the
galaxy,
leaving out all the rest, the time when I first learned about
pterodactyls happened on the order of 150 thousand million
miles
from here. And when the past is very near....
...see the sculpture..
- Stellars Jays 1996,pacific yew, 18"
- The seed might have germinated two centuries ago, judging
roughly
because the tight rings are hard to count. The wood is unified
from
slabs of a block of yew wood. So, what do these jay-birds eat
when
there is no dogfood available?
...see the sculpture..
- Couple of Wolves 1996, butternut, 20"
- I imagine a stuck couple of wolves, no longer nearly as
taken
with
what they are doing as they were a bit earlier, unable to leave
without
discussing the matter, intensely alert to every sound.
...see the sculpture..
- Passage 1996, birch, cottonwood? knot, 24"
- Reflections on our direct descent from a wormish critter,
that swam
or crawled on the order of 1 000 000 000 years ago. We are
still
the same
basic structure. A tube: stuff goes in one end
and comes out the other. Evolution is many falls of chance -
or decision- each building on the ones before. Building a work
of art
is a similar process. I made the handprint by pressing my palm
in the
still-molten wood.
...see the sculpture..
- System With Frogs, 1999, myrtle, 24"
- I cut away the (?water) to reveal the froggy in float
mode.
I was seriously messing with surface, depth and up.
...see the sculpture..
- Food Chain 1997, birch, willow, 28"
- The fox's space is birch, the mouse's, willow. The mirror
brings in
another space; look to see what the fox is after.
...see the sculpture..
- Moose at the Garden Fence 1995, butternut, 4ft. x
4ft.
- The animals are a moose with her two calves, at the
boundary
between wild
and cultivated land, at a garden fence. I chose to make the
fence not-
quite-a-fence, barely recognizable, unnaturally rectangular in
its lack
of perspective or realistic detail. This because, what is a
fence
to a
Moose? An odd thing, different from naturally occurring
forms.
She
can step over it easily, but her calves can't. A small amount
of detail
in the landscape is influenced by the carved acanthus leaf, the
stylized
vegetation that is typical of traditional European carving.
Although I
understand that the acanthus styles are based on an actual
plant,
the
traditional acanthus impresses me as being a loving abstraction
of
vegetation, of the form and growth of plants. In this context,
the detail
inspired by acanthus is pretty, but feels out of place. I am
playing with
the idea of garden on the border of wild land.
...see the sculpture..
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Molten Wood-digital collage with wood sculpture
Digididdles - More digital collage
Links to writings
The book .. Molten Wood and Feral Ideas - Art and Words from Outside the Outside
Professional portfolio
Artists Statement - Casting molten wood
Curriculum vitae
Green New Art
Woodcarving and Sculpture Tutorials
Cutting and Sanding
How to do Original Woodcarving
Displaying Wood Carving As
Art
Composition For Woodcarvers
A Fine Line: Working with the
Fragility of Wood
Wood Carving for Artists
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About myself
Filosophy
Links to other websites
New
directions in art -
Links to new movements, new directions, new ideas, what is
happening in the visual arts
Links to artists' websites
Links to woodcarvers' websites
Visual arts and carving links
I welcome comments and feedback... please include your email
address if you would like a reply
