I've just finished with the details of my very first complete sculpture here during my residency. It felt good that it came on the last few days of May, barely a week after the open studios at Governor's Island and a few days since my wife left for home. I have an exhibit opening on Saturday, June 1st, and I will be supplementing, no, replacing the main object of the show with this one that Ive just finished. Perhaps it was the combined emotions of anxiety to make a new work, of the sense of affirmation from responses to my work in the Studio, and of the feeling of being alone again after my wife left that I felt compelled to accomplish something. In my world that means making an artwork, a sculpture. It feels good to possess that sense of release and relief after all that struggle within and without. I mean, I have again a few scars - but its just another day at the office for a woodcarver like me.
It is hot in New York: the mercury says 90F. Still a little cooler than summer in Manila, but it was warm enough for me to go out walking in flipflops and shorts along 2nd Avenue. It felt strange as several weeks ago I was shivering from the same streets and now, with the warm sun easing my muscles, I feel quite at home. I am a child of the Sun, after all. I always long for the enchantment of summer.
The sculpture now sits on top of the writing desk at the foot of my bed. Ive placed a lamp on it for illumination and in the dark it looks like a sentinel. Ive used leather for the first time with this work, and like all my processes I discovered it by accident. Thus the work "flowed" effortlessly and constructed itself, guided by decisions and promptings of someone within or beside me. When I make works this way (with unseen guidance) I know my work is "right". How can I explain this? As an art history writer I can identify several artists and traditions that use this method. I am only beginning to understand this process, and it feels like something of either a haunting or a possession, or if Ilocanos have it, a communication between one's alteregos from other planes. Or other universes in hyperspace?
It is hot in New York: the mercury says 90F. Still a little cooler than summer in Manila, but it was warm enough for me to go out walking in flipflops and shorts along 2nd Avenue. It felt strange as several weeks ago I was shivering from the same streets and now, with the warm sun easing my muscles, I feel quite at home. I am a child of the Sun, after all. I always long for the enchantment of summer.
The sculpture now sits on top of the writing desk at the foot of my bed. Ive placed a lamp on it for illumination and in the dark it looks like a sentinel. Ive used leather for the first time with this work, and like all my processes I discovered it by accident. Thus the work "flowed" effortlessly and constructed itself, guided by decisions and promptings of someone within or beside me. When I make works this way (with unseen guidance) I know my work is "right". How can I explain this? As an art history writer I can identify several artists and traditions that use this method. I am only beginning to understand this process, and it feels like something of either a haunting or a possession, or if Ilocanos have it, a communication between one's alteregos from other planes. Or other universes in hyperspace?
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