Do you ever get a small burn on your hands from the kitchen or anything else?.

Since I’ve been working with a hot glue gun on these new pieces I occasionally get careless and a drop of 400 degrees glue will drop onto my hand. Let me tell you that gets your attention. If I don’t get it off quick enough it can make a 3rd degree burn and it starts to cool almost immediately so it sticks to the skin.

That happened recently just before i walked up the block to have lunch. I figured that those kind of burns happen often in a commercial kitchen so i asked the chef what they do when they get a burn.

He said they put mustard on it. Before I could respond he went into the freezer and came out with a small container of plain yellow mustard. After putting a little on the burn and telling me to rub it in he gave me the bottle and told me to keep it in the studio.

Plain yellow mustard! It relieves the pain instantly and even stopped the skin from peeling off.

Tricks you ought to know.

The last post got me thinking about how the current series of painted wall sculpture came about. As I looked back on it I was surprised to see a definite evolution that proved there is rarely anything new out there. Everything we do in art is based on something that we or someone else has done before.

I have to admit that I don’t remember what lead to this but over 20 years ago I began to play around with constructing wall sculpture. The first pieces were based on a series of African Masks that I was painting in those days. This is the first to be completed as an experiment and I still have it hanging on the studio wall.

Mask #1 27"x 40"

After this first white piece I began staining them to make them look more like wood or bronze. I did several after that and tried a few pieces when I moved over to the Mayan Series. Then, for some reason I stopped making them.

Flash forward to 8 or 9 years ago. At that time a friend of mine was working in one of my studios a few days a week, She was an excellent portrait painter but her style was rather tight (in my opinion). For the fun of it I suggested that we have a competition where she could experiment with a non objective painting just to see what it felt like. We picked out one of my paintings to copy and went into separate rooms. I didn’t want to do the same thing over again so I photographed it, cut the print up, pasted it back together and painted the results. I ended up with this painting which I called “The Challenge.”

The Challenge Oil Pastel 20"x 24"

I haven’t done anything like it since…..Until 8 months ago.

The first 3D wall painting began with cutting up a photograph of one of my paintings and gluing it back together. Then I made a drawing of the montage. From the drawing I constructed a 3 dimensional maquette to figure out how it might be built in a larger version. When I began constructing the larger piece I was suddenly in familiar territory. I knew how to do this because I had done it before.

It took many years of not thinking about it or planning it but it turns out that the new series has been germinating behind the scenes for years. It just took the right time and place for it to gel. I’ve been working on these pieces for eight months now and see no end it. I wonder where it will lead because I‘m sure that this is a stepping stone to something I haven’t thought of yet.,

Creating sculpture has always seemed a natural thing to do. Taking stone away from a block of marble and allowing a form to come alive just seemed to happen once I started carving. I should say used to happen as I had to stop carving marble a few years ago. Using power tools for 40 years raised hell with my hands so now that part of my life is over. As usual when I reach the end of one project another starts so it was quite natural to say OK what do I do now.

Painting full time is much harder for me than cutting stone. I have to think about and analyze every step. Some artists can just lay the paint on and know where they are going. With me every turn reveals a road I haven’t been on before.

The color goes on. Some of it gets rubbed off. Some of it gets painted over. Colors change and every change influences another .. then I walk back to see what has happened. I’ll return to the painting to rebalance it after seeing it from a different perspective and then walk away again to see if what I did worked. I walk a lot when I’m painting   After about 2 hours on a piece I begin to get mind blocked so I’ll move on to something else .

That’s where the 3D paintings came into being. I had been thinking of doing something like this for quite a while and one day the whole concept came together.

Twins 32"x 32"x 4"

They start as sculpture but the wall pieces could not be more different in style, form or technique from the marble sculpture. The construction process involves a lot of concentration and math which lets it grow from a flat drawing into this new form. There is an interesting dynamics in working on these pieces . When I know where I want to go for a small piece of the project it seems to flow without interruption but when I reach the point where I’m not sure of the next move I walk away from it until another day.

Eventually I’ll  have a form that needs painting and another part of the project begins. It combines all of the elements . None of this comes easy to me but when it works…that is the sweet spot and a nice place to be.

…and that reminds me of a story.

When I was a photographer in NY I had a great assistant who helped me set up the shots and stood by me during a live shoot. We would often take 100s of photos but there were only 12 or 36 shots in the camera, Eric would take count of what I was doing and at the right time he would hand me a freshly loaded camera so neither the subject or I would have to interrupt what we were doing. At a certain point he would not hand me anything because he knew I had what I wanted. I once asked him how he knew that exact moment when I “had the shot”. He said he used to watch my face and when that perfect moment appeared in the camera frame I got this “silly” grin on my face and he knew I was done.

The other day when I finished scaling up the latest 3D drawing I felt myself go into the same grin because I had found what I was looking for. Some habits stay with you.

( Sorry About the multiple emails you may have received. I was having trouble with my server.)

I went to Guatemala the first time in search for exotic hard woods. I had been sculpting with them for years but the sources dried up as the third world countries began to realize that the money was in veneering .They kept the logs at home and set embargoes against shipping anything bigger than 5/4 thick off shore.

Some of the practices made no sense. For example: Brazilian Rosewood is a beautiful wood and it would be in great demand around the world if it was available. Problem is you will go to jail if you cut down a rosewood tree … unless you are a rancher in the Amazon basin .They are allowed to cut down acres of these trees to make room for cattle grazing. That sounds like a good solution but they are forced to burn them because there is an embargo that won’t let them be shipped out of the country. It’s ridiculous…

My logging friends in Guatemala told me they could probably get me some large pieces of Lignum Vitae but they would have to cut it in Mexico, ship it down rivers and exported it out of Belize. No thank you. Some how I could see some trouble in doing that.

Back to Guatemala. In a previous post I made it clear that I became infatuated with this place. After my first trip I carved a life sized abstract figure out of cherry wood .The average full grown woman in the hills only comes to the middle of my chest. I kept this piece for some time as you see it.

Guatemala Lady #2 Cherry wood 51"

After a later trip I was captured by the colorful wardrobe that these women wore every day .The cherry wood just wasn’t telling the story so I decided to paint it. If the Chinese and Egyptians could paint wood sculpture why couldn’t I. It felt pretty risky when the first brush stroke hit the piece . I could really screw it up if it didn’t go right and I was working without any preliminary drawings. I just started at the top and worked down . Like most of my work I was approaching the problem with the premise of “I wonder what would happen if….”.  It took a while to get it right and I ended up with this piece.

Guatemala Lady #2 Painted

I’ve haven’t done anything like it since so this piece has been in my personal collection since it was completed 25 years ago .

Years ago in Vermont and here in Orange I realized that if I choose to operate a metropolitan art gallery in a small town in the country I have to be open at the convenience of the collector. Most of the people who come to the gallery are on the road in one way or the other and coming into my space is their gift to me. In return since my studios are in the back of the building and I live in the connected townhouse I am here for them at almost any time. They may have to ring the gallery bell or in some cases call ahead but the gallery is open whenever anyone wants to enter. That’s what it’s here for.

Most people from out of town have no problem with the system. You can’t get into a street level gallery in Manhattan without ringing a bell so it is not unusual. Of course they have different reasons for that in NYC.. My reason is simple.

When I first came here I was open most days from 10AM to 5PM. Sitting the gallery meant I was not in the studio working. Orange is not a high traffic town and it became clear that it was only necessary to open when the traffic was there.That meant Saturdays. During the week a ringing door bell and my Shih Tzu’s alert get the lights on and the door open fast. It seems to work for everyone.

This sign is on the front door.

I have collectors across the country. Some of them have been following me for years. Some stop by once in a while, other just order a new piece by email. Some new collectors trip over me when they are in the area for an event or visiting a son at the Woodbury Forrest School and others were heading here when they decided to take a pleasant day trip from Northern Virginia, the coast or Maryland. Thank you all for making it work.  Stop by next time you are in town.

Call ahead and the lights will be on when you get here.

I’ve been giving some thought to how I moved from what I used to paint to what I’m doing now. As usual with me there was a slow unplanned process.

All of my drawings and some paintings were initially done as preliminary studies for sculpture. From a painters point of view I found the sculpture paintings rather boring so I began to put geometric overlays in them. First behind the subject and then on top of them to see what would happen.

I liked it. The next step was to add shadowing to the overlays. That added another dimension to the piece. Depth. Thus a new painting technique (for me) was born.

Tangiers Mixed Media 36":x 48"

For a long time after that I used this concept for everything. First I would do a “normal” paintings and then..using key directional lines.. I would extend them and create the geometric patterns that sat on top of and married to the base. Both elements homogenized into a finish piece which kept your eye moving around the painting rather than seeing only what you thought you saw.

In the next step the sculptor in me came forward and I began to add texture to the overall mix. Enter another aspect. Light. The painting then looked different depending on the time of day and the way the light hit the painting. What was happening turned out to be something that pleased me. Every inch of the painting became as interesting as the whole painting so the viewer would see something in there that they had not seen before. That was a lot better to me than not seeing the painting as you walked by because it had been hanging there for a long time.

Rest Stop. This painting was done after a trip to Ecuador.

One day I wondered what might happen if I eliminated the basic drawing that everything was building upon and just work with the geometrics that I had been adding after the fact.…and that began all that I am working on now.

Abstract #43 Mixed Media 24"x30"

I’ll do a somewhat realistic painting once in a while just to prove that I can still do it but I can do realism better with a camera. To me the fun is in the abstracts . I’m not through exploring the variations of that.

Which leads to the next step. Combining sculpture and painting. I’m not ready to show any of the new work yet but you can follow the progress on my Facebook page if you are interested . https://www.facebook.com/edjaffegallery. Click the “like” button and you’ll have new postings show up on your news feed or come back here and click the Facebook button at the top of the page once in a while.

I am often asked what made me move from Vermont to Virginia. The short answer is this, I blew my knees and couldn’t ski anymore. The long answer is a little more complicated.

A few years before it happened I began to think of where I might go if I did leave Vermont. I didn’t want to go back to New York as my life had changed since my days in the city. I had been reading about the rapid growth of the corporate world in the triangle of North Carolina and I began to make a few trips a year to Chapel Hill to search out that area. It was warmer climate, still relatively small towns but a potentially strong art market.

Driving from my home in Vermont to NC put Fredericksburg in the right spot to split the trip and a nice overnight. I made the trip so often that I began to make friends there. On one trip someone said “Why are you going to North Carolina, have you considered moving to Virginia?” I had not but since nothing was showing up in NC I began to use Fredericksburg as a base and I drove most of the state. I think I have the only map of Virginia that is inked out except for the corridor from Charlottesville and Gainesville. It is there that I zeroed in my search or a suitable property.

I found what appeared to be the right place in Culpeper. I put my property on the market and serious negotiations began.  In the end the Culpeper deal fell through but I had a contract on my place in Vermont and I had 2 months to get out.

Now I’m back to searching NC and I found a farm in Winston Salem that I wanted to see. Driving from Fredericksburg to pick up RT 81 I passed through Orange. On Main Street I saw this huge empty building. It wasn’t what I was looking for but it was big and I had a lot of sculpture to move out of Vermont. If nothing else it would be a place to store everything. I stopped into the real-estate office in the next block and asked if the building was for sale. It was not. Did they know who owned it. They did. Would they call him and see if he wanted to sell it. We walked the building on a Tuesday and that Thursday I had made an offer on it subject to the town allowing me to rebuild the inside and to also include my residence in there.

My first view of the building interior.

After taking all of the measurements I drove back to Vermont and waited for a call from the town. The call was positive and I owned a building in Orange. Now the question was what was I going to do with it.

When I left Vermont it took two trailers to move all of the art and furniture. We put what we could carry into the basement of my new building and left the rest of the large sculpture outside in the parking lot. I moved into the second floor space, had a temporary shower and kitchen installed and began making the blueprints for the reconstruction. It was November 1993.

I acted as the general contractor and soon found the crew that I wanted to work with. I have to admit I wasn’t so sure about how the crew wanted to work with me. As far as they knew I was this Yankee from New York so what did I know about construction. We began the job on 3 January 1994. It didn’t take long before they found out that I knew what I was doing and we became a good team.

When we had 141 day left in my schedule I told them I wanted to have my opening in the gallery that June. They all said it was impossible to rebuild this whole building in that time. Having done it before I was confident it could be done. As an incentive I had a large flip chart made and put it in one of the front windows. It was a count down from the 141 days we had until my opening. Each day I would tear off a page. It got to a point where strangers on the street would ask me how many days we had left. The crew thought it was a joke until we crossed through 100 then the contest began. We beat the schedule by 3 days.

The gallery... ready to go.

….and now you are up to date.

The archived posts can give you all of the background leading up to here if you like. If you don’t want to go digging I’ll do a repost one once in a while..

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.