Conjuring Art from Nature

On View: May 20, 2002 – May 25, 2002
Friday, May 24, 2002 from 6:30 pm – 9:00 pm

Artist Statement, Mayend 1997: In all my years of artistic poustinia on behalf of the wild creatures’ relics, people have asked me, “Why bones?” It is no surprise our bones and those of our fellow creatures have held wonder since before human habits of naming. Classically, from ancient times, they have been held as representative of sterility, aridity and death. For me, beyond the physical fact of death, bones are portals, thresholden estuaries unto exaltation. The bones seem to verily sing, they hum with resonate mystery. Mostly hidden within while being used, when the garment of flesh falls away, there they are! Hiking and discovering the skeletons of wild creatures, I become heavy with an eery inkling of the meteoric impact which scatters the bones out from the place of deathly departure.

My experience with bones goes back to age six and a half, when I first met the wee, porcelainesque skull of rodent among reeds on shores of Pokegama Lake near Grand Rapids, Minnesota. During growing years, bones sustained my curiosity. Then in summertide of 1965, I fully began engaging relics. Searching forth, oftentimes, I found and gathered boxes of these treasures from the fields, forests and lakeshores surrounding property of Benedictine abbey in Southern Wisconsin where I worked in the abbey printshop. At the same time, during what were four years of quasi-eremitical life style, I taught myself to draw and have never stopped.