Retrospective

Glance over the shoulder from whence we came

Bottle, wood, 7" x 8" x 1.25", 2008

As I mentioned before, there were many steps leading to the genesis of BrokenLineStudio. One of those steps was a brief exploration into the possibilities of using wood to create images working directly from life studies. I first considered this while I worked at Walker Creek Furniture, but the time was not available to act on the idea. Later, after going to California for the summer and returning in the fall, I found the time.

That fall I took a painting class at Montserrat College of Art. What I learned in class about color and line I employed in the workshop. I used wood that I had collected at my new job, sub-contracting for Ebersole Construction. The wood came from a number of different sites and it provided me with an adequate palate. These are examples of pieces I made that fall.

Other Bottle, wood, 8" x 9" x 1.25", 2008

Percolator, wood, 10" x 11.25" x 1.25", 2008

Three Bottles, wood, 14.5" x 18.5" x 1.25", 2009

I enjoyed making these pieces a great deal. It was rewarding to use a limited palate and achieve such image quality with wood as my medium. I looked at these pieces for a few months, brought them with me as I moved back to my parents house, and watched them as I began to create some of the first pieces in the Broken Line series. During this time I recognized a weakness in the mosaics I made from life studies.

My medium is wood. Nearly all of it was architectural at one point or another. This being the case, there seemed to me something disingenuous about creating an image of some other thing like a bottle or a kettle using wood that had a history unrelated to these objects. It reminded me of a passage in Tobias Wolff's Old School. The author depicts Robert Frost visiting a boy's school to lecture on poetry. Frost's character says this: "Would you honor your own friend by putting words down anyhow, just as they come to you--with no thought for the sound they make, the meaning of their sound, the sound of their meaning?" The meaning of their sound and the sound of their meaning.

How do I account for the history of the wood I use? How do I account for the wood itself in a piece that depicts a glass bottle? Sure, the wood is there. It is visible as wood. You can see the paint on the wood. You can see the paint is old. There are holes where nails pierced the wood. But the mosaic itself is trying to be that which the medium is not. The meaning of its sound, the sound of its meaning.

Wood is architectural. It has structure. It is living. Bear witness to these things. Allow the wood to be itself first, then you have something to work with, something to cooperate with in a work of art. I hope to develop this sensitivity further with the BrokenLine series.

Initial Public Offering

Broken Line #1, wood, 8" x 9" x 1.25", 2009

BrokenLineStudio does not have a single moment, point or place of genesis. Rather, it has grown out of my own searching, reflection, creativity and most importantly out of my interactions with the people who are dearest to me. I have been building objects with wood for a couple of years now and they have taken many forms. Furniture dominated the first two years while I was employed at Walker Creek Furniture in Essex, MA. Recently, mosaics have taken the center stage.

I began building mosaics as table tops and they were received with a positive reaction from nearly every audience. This reaction encouraged me to continue making mosaics and I began creating them as objects rather than functional pieces of furniture. As I progressed, there was a hesitation in me that challenged these mosaics and asked "Well, nice image, nice object, but what does it mean?"

There are many layers of meaning in a piece of wood. First and foremost, it is itself. Wood. Tree. Structure. Purpose. All these things combine into a history, whether we consider a sapling in it's first year or a 12 inch beam cut for a house in the 17th century, itself already a century old. When wood is touched by the hand of man, it becomes a player in a history much longer than its own life or the life of one who touches it. And as these histories collide and compound upon one another, wood, a medium, passes through my hands and I am offered the opportunity to tell a chapter in this (hi)story.

But I am a man. How do my wooden objects bear witness to a human narrative?

My father called me on the phone last fall and he told me a story about walking in the woods. This is what I wrote in my journal after I hung up the phone:
Today I spoke with my father, yes, my earthly one. What he told me was this, that he'd had a revelation about my work. He spoke of my use of lines, ceasing and restarting again elsewhere but perhaps at an odd angle; something that follows from the first line but also deviates. It changes in its continuity. And he said that this was like man coming to know God. We get glimpses here then there at another angle and only after years are we able to construct it all into a cohesive image, if we are ever able to.

With this in mind I began the BrokenLine Series.

BrokenLine #2, wood, 8" x 9" x 1.25", 2009


BrokenLine #3, wood, 8" x 9" x 1.25"

BrokenLine #4, wood, 8" x 9" x 1.25"