My Art
Making things comes after seeing things
After learning things and after the muscles and mind
Line up together.
It starts with wonder at what I am seeing;
The proverbial child in the arroyo, plays with sticks and rocks;
Stares at bumblebees on thistle stalks, well; on thistle flowers
and dandelions, actually, buzzing around; yellow, black, purple; texture ruling
the sun drenched day, sweat on the brow, everything kind of achingly beautiful.
Things to ponder like acorns and those wings on the pine nuts; did
you know they have wings? And how they
taste? How hard they are, and how prickly are the spines on the cones, and
which cone goes with which tree and what the tree is like to climb and what it
smells like as the sun hits it and you are climbing it and what strength is in
what branch.
What lives in what; what hole holds what surprise! What creature stimulated
that growthy thing.
After working with milled wood for a long time, the beauty is a
little like the beauty inside a broken heart; I mean a real one that has been
sliced as a section. Beautiful, no?;Well…..yes
and no. And that oil that not only
penetrates into the wood to bring out the color, but also penetrates into my
skin. All for clean, crisp beauty.
After working that way for many years, there develops a different
perspective about all this. What is
beautiful and what is not, what is violent and what is not.
My cousin saw my sculpture show on canyon road the other day and
tried to help me with presentation, which I was grateful of….and he spoke of
arrangement and appeal, first impressions, etc.
When he got around to talking about cobwebs on a piece of work, I was
mildly embarrassed , of course, at first; how unkempt and neglected.
Then, as I was watching a really not so good movie last night I
began to respond to that image in my mind of a cobweb on my bronze sculptures;
stick sculptures with perfect grain, a meteorite and a viper, a timeless donkey
eating grass and the raven with a birds nest in it’s rear cavity, with a bird’s
egg perhaps still there; the time I made that fabulous bronze balustrade and
the very next day a spider crawled out of a small cavity in the metal, a niche
(and how I pointed it out to the new owner of the house and how she said she
was arachnophobic…..ooopps), and what wabi sabi means and what a cobweb might
mean in the context of my art.
I realized that perhaps the most beautiful and interesting thing
that my cousin saw that hot day, despite his fastidious impression, was……the
cobweb on my stick guy! And, perhaps,
the person who actually decided to purchase my art from the gallery will begin
to see what I think.
-Thor Sigstedt, June 30, 2012, Spirit Valley
