by Ted Gerhart
Gerhart Studios – Lancaster, Pennsylvania
I have always avoided shows, and guilds, thinking them a waste of time. I was probably wrong. The only good thing about mistakes is to learning something, but it took a long time for me to learn the lesson of this mistake, missing on a valuable way to connect with the public. Lucky for me that word of mouth enabled me to expand the market for my custom sign work – East to Philadelphia, and south to Washington D.C.
But I was obsessed with technique, the endless pursuit of mastery, and the sources of inspiration needed to create a good piece. One never knows where inspiration might come from. I am blessed to work with a raw material of great beauty, a beauty that is always suggestive and subtly changing. However, I quickly discovered that working with a beautiful material demands something beautiful be done with it, to do less would be an insult, a failure. This fact can easily lead to an excessive focus on “technique’ which then becomes the only thing that the finished work is about. Good art is always about something “other” than the sum of the beauty and execution of the piece. Good art is like a catalyst for thought and feeling, so that more than being beautifully made, it has personal meaning.
Turning a beautiful piece of wood into an object which enhances that beauty does require technical prowess and skilled design. Maintaining contact with the beauty of the material often requires immediate in process revision of the design, and unique characteristics of the wood exert an influence on the process. Working as I do with hand tools, carving gouges, rasps, files, spokeshaves and edge tools I’ve had to make myself, places my hands and eyes in constant proximity to both the material I’m working, and the vision I have of what it will become. It is a very intimate process, not possible with machinery or grinding burrs.
One of my favorite sculptors is an Italian from the Baroque era: Gian Lorenzo Bernini. He spent his entire life making marble sculptures for two Popes of the Medici family, and for royalty to whom he was “lent” to show papal favor. By 1650, he ran a huge atelier, but carved all the busts of rulers with his own hands – because it was felt then, that a perfect likeness could house the soul of the model… Bernini knew this as he was carving those pieces – his patrons had seen to his education, in Theology as well as Art and Architecture. We can only guess what it meant to him as he fashioned – godlike – a housing for visits from a living soul. As a good son of the Church, he doubtless believed that God worked through him.
Bernini made great art, rather a lot of it, and very little that was mediocre. But marble is cold – and while compelling interaction, it doesn’t want to be touched. Wood is much more friendly; it is warm, it is happy to be touched – or even sat upon or made to uphold the evening meal. It is better suited for the making of good or average artwork, rather than great art. I have always appreciated wood for its spiritual qualities as a continuing record of a long life – and its physical properties – the many useful products of civilization that are best made from it, and have been for centuries. I make sculpture and “artiture” (art furniture) to preserve wood’s beauty in an interesting way, as reach toward immortality. The Roma people say: “Your not truly dead, until the last person who remembers you has died.” My task is to fashion the material into something that will be remembered, and live on.
