My Story
My lifelong artistic urge was eclipsed by following the societal push towards a so-called “proper” career in business.
30 years as an executive coach, author, speaker, instructor became my life. That in addition to raising kids and being a slave to materialistic things like remodeling, restoring and maintaining houses, yards and boats took all my energy.
Yet there was a deep, lifelong creative and artistic itch that I never fully recognized and expressed...
Throughout my life, when not working, I was often searching for, collecting and dabbling in the creation stuff. Natural artifacts like shells, rocks, feathers, animal bones, and driftwood were irresistible even though I didn’t really know what to do with them. I now know such collecting was all part of the divine plan in store for me.
As a kid I built tree houses, boats, go carts, bicycles, zip lines and graduated to chicken coops, cabinets, etc.. But I never seemed satisfied and continued to experiment with different materials and projects only when I had the time, which wasn’t much. Though drawn to creating unique things with my hands, I never took it seriously. Little did I know I was learning a ton about material properties, particularly of wood, stone and metal to be repurposed later in life.
I was also looking for sensory stimulation through outdoor sports like windsurfing, skiing, rollerblading, mountain biking and fishing.
Then in 2013 I experienced (and what I later learned was) a rare and profound, repressed trauma induced spontaneous Kundalini awakening.
With an intense flood of energy and love throughout my body, my whole life and worldview changed in that very instant. The following ego death, heart opening and psychic restructuring forced me to shift everything that wasn’t truly serving me including relationships, work, living situation and lifestyle in order to align with my truest, most authentic soul self.
As brutal and shocking as it was to wake up from the collective consciousness of conditioned self, immeasurable awarenesses, rewards and gifts unfolded.
One of them was embracing and cultivating my dormant and now heightened artistic gifts which suddenly seemed to simply flow out of my hands with no thought.
It started out with granite carving of spiritual symbolisms. Upon entering my first real sculpture in a prestigious art show and winning honorable mention, there was no turning back.
Adding to that big impetus was receiving a call from an accomplished sculptor who saw that piece and said she was retiring from the art and wanted to give me all of her stone and wood carving tools along with exotic allabaster imported from Italy.
She said my gift was worthy of it. If that wasn’t a cosmic affirmation that I had to immerse in my art, I don’t know was. I was nervous about learning how to use the 100 or so chisels, rasps and tools on a stone unfamiliar to me.
It soon flowed and I my first creation was of a whale tail which many people considered to be a masterpiece.
After a year of stone carving I began to lose interest in that medium, doubting that I was really cut out for this work as a pro.
However, discovering a wild shaped driftwood piece and transforming it over 100 hours into Expression, the creative juices flowed again.
A critical part of the process is finding the perfect piece, worthy of 80 +/- hours of sculpting. Scouring shorelines in Cape Ann and Madison CT. and examining 1000s of pieces for the approximately one-in-500 piece is joyful and challenging.
Revealing the heartwood and pure essence of select driftwood pieces captured me.
The process of chiseling, rasping, carving, sanding and burnishing became my spiritual practice. I surrender to each piece and ask what it wants as it teaches me to force my will out of the equation.
My part is only to expose and accentuate the natural curves and dimensions according to my inner sense of sacred geometry. The idea of transforming an ugly, soggy, sandy, silty, bug/worm infested rotting piece of overlooked driftwood into a thing of beauty captivates me. It feels akin to the purification process raging within me.
Each wildly different piece in the midst of decomposition hides unique shape, grains, multiple hardnesses, cracks, worm holes, sap content and even embedded sand and stones which force me to start from scratch.
Preconceived notions about how it should be done and what it should look like have to be thrown out the window. Unlike any other form of wood sculpting the endless variables with driftwood require constant learning and adapting my approach.
On any given piece, 100s of unconscious decisions are made about which tools to use, the angle and amount of pressure applied with each tool. A fine line is held between the preservation of its natural beauty and the extent of artistic license sculpting involved.
My approach is primarily the manual use of a about fifty different chisels and rasps, often removing upwards of 50% of the wood’s mass.
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I found that power tools used these days by most sculptors to be too aggressive, significantly detracting from the piece’s delicate beauty.
However, that means well over 10,000 passes with chisel or rasp are required per piece to gently reveal the heartwood essence.After many years of over working my hands and the physical demands of this kind of art, osteoarthritis recently set in.At first I was mortified that my life dream was dashed by the affliction.
But I couldn’t stop.So I learned to be hyper aware of the ergonomics and physics of every sculpting motion. Slowly, I became more efficient and conscious of energy used by more frequently switching tools and even customizing them for greater ease of use.
This evolution feels like transitioning from being a caveman to being a modern surgeon.
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THE MAKING OF DRIFTWOOD
SCULPTURES
My work, guided by grace, is also a rare blend of restoration and sculpting/carving so that natural aspects and curvatures are simply (actually no so simply) enhanced according to my intuition of sacred geometry like that of a “French curve”. Other driftwood sculptors often just sand blast the piece and lather it with synthetic polyurethane. Some make heavy use of power tools, forcing their will upon the piece resulting in a design that looks nothing like the raw piece.
I never would have imagined how challenging and rewarding driftwood sculpting could be. Because each piece is so unique it requires a totally different approach. They all are so wildly different that to me it’s a surprise like opening a present.
Before
After
Other sculpting forms with stone or wood typically involve conceptual and design ideation, planning and following some kind of pattern or template. But driftwood sculpting is totally different, forcing me to let go of any preconceived notion about how to work on it and what I want it to look like.
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The approach that flows through me is to apply a delicate balance of artistic license to enhance and accentuate the natural shapes and curves while preserving piece’s pure and natural essence. As well as the highly time consuming, arduous, adventurous, and even dangerous process of searching and selecting perfect pieces.
The experience feels much like an archeological process of discovering, unearthing and restoring the heartwood of each piece.
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