My Art

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