Reflecting on not reflecting

Hi every last one of you,

Just returning to the studio after a fabulous two shows on the west coast. Seattle, as usual, kept a group of my new pieces and San Francisco pretty much took the rest. I returned home with one piece and commissions to keep me more than busy. Merci, gracias, and thank you.

Attached to this missive are images of brand spanky new wood sculptures, pieces that reflect years' of my focus on wood as a visual medium. Almost antithetical to the intangibility of my light sculpture work, these pieces are a fixation of the organic time inherent in the grain of wood. Wood grain is time manifest. Air, sun, water and years and years grew these Douglas firs which were then milled by the Rasco Wood Products Company of Clarks Grove, Minnesota (says so in stenciled faded black lettering) into laminated curved beams which have been holding up a barn in Vermont for ninety years or so. I dismantled said barn seventeen years ago.

These sculpture are generated by slicing the beams on the three different axes, X, Y, and Z and then reassembling. They are all the same material: pink in one, blackened by leaching iron nails in another, rock solid here, decaying and faded grey there, raggedy and fuzzy from time relentless...

They are not stained, by me anyway. One has a little oil rubbed in. One, a bit of wax. They are rugged chronicles and they are smooth in places; they are rhythmic and history fixed. They feel old and grown and a little bit fresh and unpeeled. Trees have souls. There. I said it.

So, thanks for looking. It's nice for me to stretch and share.

Hope August has been full of sun and vegetables, hammocks and beaches, cool drinks and many hugs.