Back the early eighties I was sculpting in many mediums to see what I would like vs what I didn’t like. I didn’t like fiberglass. I loved carving wood. I was getting educated in going from clay to bronze and at the time enjoyed the process.

The people at Modern Art Foundry in New York were very good and giving as they taught me how to chase and patina my pieces. I got pretty good at it… which brings up this story.

As you may know, adding various patinas to bronze is done by a combination of heat and chemistry. I began to wonder what would happen to a piece of wood sculpture if similar chemistry, in this case iron oxide, and heat with a blow torch were added to the surface of a piece of maple.

The first few attempts proved that the process would indeed change the surface of the wood but the trick was learning how to apply the heat so the wood wouldn’t burn. There was a very narrow window where I could get enough heat for the chemistry to work but one step beyond that and I’d be getting smoke and scorching.

Eventually I got the touch and timing of what I was trying to do and I began to use it on some smaller pieces .  As I expected a piece of maple would take on a beautiful dark brown color. What I didn’t expect was the chemical result would completely seal the wood with a hard shinny coat that didn’t even need waxing. The piece no longer looked like wood at all.

I sent this piece to New York for a juried show and received a merit award for coming up with something totally new in wood sculpture. It has been in my own permanent collection since then.

C-3 Maple w/patina 25"x22"x12"

If you want to try it be my guest but practice on scrap until you get the hang of it, The process is touchy. Mix the iron oxide in water. Brush the solution onto the sculpture. With a constantly moving torch go over the piece applying heat… just enough heat . Too little it won’t work. Too much and you’ll have a piece of burnt wood.  Have fun.

I remember visiting some friends in St Croix, Virgin Islands one winter in the early 70’s. They told me there was this ”hippie type guy” out on the end of the island who had exotic woods native to the island laying all over the place. That was enough for me to rent a car and drive out there to find him.

What I found left me feeling like a kid in a candy store without a penny to buy a piece. I had never seen wood like that with strange names like Kiabacca and others I can’t remember . Beautiful colors , Interesting grain … and fairly large..

I told the “not a hippie guy” who I was and that I’d love to have some of these but I was going home by plane and the weight was out of the question.

He then told me to pick out what I wanted and let him know what plane I’d be on. He would see that I have them on board. I asked how he was going to do that and he told me he knows everybody on the island and is friends with most of them, There was not much he couldn’t get done on St Croix.

I picked out several pieces, one almost 4 feet long, and paid the man.

He showed up at the airport with all of the wood on a dolly, asked to borrow my ticket and disappeared into the bowels of the lobby. A short while latter he came back, returned my ticket and told me everything was taken care of. I figured he had put the wood on the plane as freight and didn’t think anymore about it until I arrived at Bradley in Hartford . I began to wonder where I had to go to pick up freight as I waited at the carousel for my luggage.

Imagine my surprise, and that of the other passengers standing there, when the first log popped out of the curtain with a claim check tied to it.  All of the wood arrived that way… My “not a hippie” friend had managed to get everything on the plane as luggage.

From a piece of wood I got in St Croix . Location unknown.

I lost track of this piece. I refer you to a previous post because this proves the point once again… I wish I had kept it. It’s not as bad as I thought it was over 35 years ago.

When I purchased the 18th Century house in Chester, VT it required a total restoration. The first thing I had to attend to was the Maple tree that was too large and too close to the building. When it was planted almost 200 years before the proportions might have grown into something that looked well but now it overpowered everything and had to go.

There is an interesting process involved in taking one of these large trees down safely. We saved as much as we could for fire wood but the stem intrigued me as a sculptor. I had them cut it square at the butt and we moved a very large section across the road and into the field where I would work on it one day.

Once again I had something very large to play with and had no idea what I was going to do with it.  It sat there while we restored the building and the seasons changed.

One winter, after a very heavy snowfall, I looked across the road and saw what I had been waiting for. The way the show capped the wood it had the look of an oriental warrior in battle mode.  I made drawings immediately to capture the image before the snow melted.  When the weather warmed up I began to cut into the tree.

It turned out to be a rather abstract representation of what I originally saw but it worked for me. Once it was completed I moved in up to a ledge overlooking the property and there it stood for for several years until the bugs got to it.

Rather than let it decay, I took it apart. The tree was planted there 200 years ago and it was returned to the ground.

The next step was to create something like it in marble. That would last forever.

I made this maquette in clay . Then we cut a block of Imperial white out of the quarry in Danby and I carved “Musashi”. He watched over my place in Vermont and has held center stage in the gallery.

                                                     Musashi   Vermont Marble  30″x 14″x 10″

I could write another post about Musashi but if you are interested check out “The Book of the Five Rings ” by Miyamoto Musashi . He was a Warrior, Poet , Artist: the Renaissance man of Japan.

I wonder how many artists out there do what I used to do.

For many years I would throw away my preliminary sketches and quite often I’d trash a drawing after it had been committed to a painting because I figured it had no more value. I was wrong.

When this painting was done I put the drawing aside and lost track of it. I wish now that I had kept it as it had a life of it’s own.

Ecuadorian Girl

Many years ago one of my good friends in Vermont was an artist in her 80’s. I used to love talking to her and one day I mentioned that I had just junked a painting because It wasn’t good enough. She gave me a lecture on the creative process. One of her points was the fact that when we create something it is right and innovative for us at that particular time. For that moment it is an honest statement and should not be discarded. You can look at it a year later with an unbiased eye and then make your decision on whether to keep it or not.

Since then I have tried to follow her advise and there have been many occasions when the piece I though wasn’t good enough turned out to have some merit. If not in itself then as a stepping stone to something new.  Much to my surprise some of my original sketches done years ago turned out to be good enough to be framed.

On the other hand, here is an example of something waiting to happen.

It’s a piece of my pallet that caught my eye while working on another painting. It’s not my style so why have I kept it for several years? For some reason it has stayed pinned to my studio wall so maybe I’ll take a shot at it some day. it’s  worth keeping.

When it comes to our work the test of time allows us to see what we may have missed when we first created the piece. Don’t be in a rush to judge your own work. Put it aside.

Something that may prove the point . Look at some of the rough sketches produced by artists of the 20^th century and check their auction prices.

How many time have you said, “If that were mine I would have junked it.”

I did some paintings in the 50’s that were good enough to give away but I never thought about selling them. Painting in those years was only a hobby. I was making my living with a camera.  If a friend said they liked a painting it was theirs. I don’t even know where those paintings are today.

When I look back at that work it is easy for me to see the first instances of what I ended up creating in sculpture and today’s paintings. I rarely used a brush. Most of the work was done with heavy oils and a pallet knife. In retrospect I loved texture then as I do now. I liked the “accidents” that happened with color when the paint was smeared with a knife. or my hands, or some tool I found in a hardware store. That part has not changed.

I’ve said before that until the last 15 years I hadn’t done a painting in oil since 1957. I discovered sculpture in 1958 and didn’t paint seriously again for 30 years.

I kept the last 2 paintings. This one and the one of the boys were actually stuck away in a closet and they didn’t get framed until I moved to VA. Both are on canvas and it’s amazing that they never got damaged.

Joe Miron Oil 18"x 29"

. I first met Capt Joe when I stayed at his inn on the beach at Cape Cod in MA. He had a great gimmick. At 3PM he would go out on the deck with a bull horn and yell “ Cocktail spree at 3”. By the time the sound reached the beach it sounded like “ Cocktails FREE at 3” and his bar would get loaded. We became friends over a period of time and he asked me to stop in at his bar in Nassau, Bahamas next time I was on the island.

That turned out to be an “interesting” visit. The Junkanoo Club, then on Bay Street, was something I had never seen before, I was there every night and It was there I met Peanuts Taylor who later became a legend on the island. The band featured Peanuts on the bongo drums. Before I left Peanuts had taught me how to play. Not well.. but enough to have fun with them when I got back to New York .

The Brothers Oil 24"x 48"

This was one of my many photographs taken In the Bahamas. I remember painting it. The bicycle basket and the stone column are literally sculpted in paint. There’s not much I can say about the boys . i never talked to them but I was captured by the younger brothers expression and the way they whole thing came together.

As a photographer I was more of a realist in those days. When I started painting again I realized that I could create realism better with a camera than I could with a paint brush and I moved into abstract, form and color.

I’ve never shown either painting. They are a part of my history.

This sale brought to my attention the fact that the internet may work after all. [:-)

Rodrigo oil 24"x 30"

When you consider that I cut my teeth in print during the 50’s and 60’s this electronic world is relatively new to me. Although I sometimes come into it kicking and screaming my sons are slowly convincing me that there is a whole world out there that can be reached with the click of a mouse.

Although most of the people who are following my website are within a day trip drive of the gallery the stats are showing me that I have viewers throughout North America, in the UK and Europe.  Yes. I’m surprised. Welcome all.

I have always had collectors across the county but they have found their way to my gallery in Virginia; some by accident for this is an unusual place to have a gallery of this size, and some by intent because they have been collecting my work for years.

What I haven’t paid enough attention to is all of you who are out there who cannot make the trip but who might want to have one of my pieces in your collection.

Enter the internet from stage right.

If you see anything on the site that catches your eye and you would like more information and a larger photo send me an email to  sculpture@edjaffe.com. and we can begin a conversation. Fed EX can and has delivered my work anywhere.

Thank you for following the site.

Back in the 80’s I was working on a series of sculpture that was based on broken sea shells . What I produced then still has an influence on my work. I’ve always had an interest in the symmetry of shells but I was never interested in producing that perfection.

The search for new material gave me a very good excuse to travel to places that were known for beautiful sea shells. Places like Islamorada in the Florida Keys and Ixtapa on the west coast of Mexico.  I preferred Ixtapa once I figured the place out.

I’m not one for fancy beachfront hotels but there is little choice here. Before they developed this resort the Mexican government did a lot of research . Where were the best beaches on their coast, clean ocean, lot’s of sun and then they went at it with a vengeance. They created a Miami shoreline that was so pristine that there are literally crews out every morning sweeping the beaches. There was not a shell or a piece of seaweed to be seen.. Not good for what I wanted.

I decided to stay at the end of “Miami row” in a hotel that bordered on the undeveloped shoreline. Each morning I would walk along the beach, what there was of it, and collect all kinds of shells. The perfect ones I would bring back to the “Blue hairs” at the hotel so they could have a souvenir of their “exotic trip” to Mexico but I kept all of the broken shells for myself.

This routine was a very relaxing, The ocean was on my left and the beach was only a few yards wide before the land shot up into a cliff. It was me the ocean and the sky. After I had been doing this for several days the word must have gotten out because the manager of the hotel came over to me and told me I had to stay on the hotel grounds.

When I asked him why he told me because it wasn’t safe where I was going.. There were bandits in that area… that’s what he said, ”Bandits”. I thought he was kidding. I continued my walks but now I kept an eye on the cliffs. I guess if any bandits showed up I’d have to give them my shells.

Here’s what I did with them.

Because they were broken they had an interesting combination of beautiful curves and very sharp edges. As a photographer I knew light. I’d set a fragment on a white piece of paper and light it so it showed strong highlights and shadows. I wouldn’t draw the shells but I ‘d draw the highlights and shadows they produced and eventually those drawings would convert into a piece of sculpture.  There was always some character of a shell in the final pieces but mostly they were abstract. The interesting thing about the series was the fact that all of the pieces still had an aquatic look to them due to the source.

Here are two from the series

. Shell Painted cherry wood 18″x 9″x7″

Shell 19 Portuguese Marble 23″x 21″x 13″

I’m re-posting my earliest blog so people new to the site can have the introduction.

For those of you who are new to this site and my work there are 3 of my interviews elsewhere on this site. They should give you all of the history that you need. It all began here.

First time around I was doing advertising photography in NYC.

Big changes have taken place in the past few years. The main one is the fact that I had to stop carving marble. Using power tools for over 30 years brought on a vascular problem in my hands that hurt enough to make me stop. What’s left in inventory is probably the last of it. If I miss anything in my life it’s the noise, dust and physical joy of cutting stone but … I’m on to other things and the creative juices are still flowing.

I’ve been painting on a regular basis and in those paintings I’m constantly looking for ways to get more texture and a three dimensional quality on a two dimensional plane. In the last several months the work has taken a major jump conceptually and I am now creating three dimensional wall sculpture and then using that as a base for a painting. Complicated, challenging and something I think is very new. It takes about a month to do each piece so I’m not ready for a show yet.

If you want a preview you can see where this is going by coming over to my Facebook page. Click the Facebook button at the top of the page .

One day when I was living in Vermont I remember driving through Putney on my way to Brattleboro. As I drove down the Putney Road I passed a crew taking down a very large Elm tree. I was carving wood in those days and that looked very interesting.

I flipped around, approached the foreman and asked if I could have a section of the stem. He said, “Sure. How big?” This was a beautiful straight tree and I said, “How about an 8 foot section.”  He mentioned that he could cut it but it would have some serious weight to it so how was I going to move it. I told him to leave it by the side of the road and I would get it out of there as soon as I could make a phone call and return.

A friend of mine was a logger and we drove his logging truck with the crane and rigging down the next day to pick it up. When we got back to Chester we placed it horizontally on a couple of supports to keep it off the ground.

The elm tree in position to be worked on.. someday.

I didn’t have the vaguest idea of what I was gong to put in it but I had a chance to look at it every day when I came out of my house.

I must have been there over a year untouched. At least it was getting a chance to dry out.

One day a friend of mine who was very pregnant came over to visit and when she left I almost said it out .  “That’s it!.. A pregnant woman,

Shortly after I began carving the piece. It was a good summer project and I love working outside.

The piece is well roughed out but far from finished.

I wasn’t able to finish it then because the snows came and in Vermont the snow can be serious. I began again in the spring after “mud season”. When it was done the question was what was I going to do with it. In the end I decided to keep it and I had someone with a backhoe come over .

We moved the "Pregnant Woman" to the high meadow

We moved it up to the high meadow where it could be seen from my kitchen window and where I could drive my tractor around and around it when I cut the high grass in the fields.

When I sold that place and moved to Virginia I left the piece there as it was too big to move.  It may have rotted by now… or she could still be watching over the farm.

Right after we placed her. Later the grass came up and she blended right into the meadow.