I Wish I Had Done That…

Lauding a sculpture by Arliss Newcomb

I’ve said it before in these pages—there have been many sculptures produced by my
friends/colleagues in NWSSA whence I could justly apply the title line and eventually I’ll write ‘Wish I had dunnits’ about them —but my current infatuation is this captivating owl by everybody’s friend, dear Arliss.

She found the stone on a beach with two holes already worn through the rock, put there by what
force she does not know. (A likely speculation is that it could have been burrowing clams, about which Wikipedia tells all. For the clams to do their work, it probably had to be more likely a hardened limestone than granite. ) For Arliss, turning this found stone into an artwork clearly had to evolve around turning those holes to account— and therein lies the source of my envy for what she has done: With luck, I think I could have created an artwork around them; but knowing myself, I can see me working the whole thing to death, carving some clever, probably convoluted, figure into the entire stone and in the process changing it into something it is not. I would have lost forever the ‘found stone’ attribute that nature had provided.

As we stoners know, every unworked stone is a problem waiting for a solution. What Arliss did was exemplary of a mind that must be far less cluttered than mine, for she saw the problem in the simplest possible terms. She resolved it by simply incising two judicious cuts with a turbo blade, nothing more—yet the two cuts transformed the stone into an artwork that is near to heart-stopping. She correctly assessed that there was no way to improve the already porridgy stone surface so she left everything else as found. The result is an owl that is all at once whimsical, powerful and charming. In this, the impact of simplicity is illustrated masterfully.
Yes, I wish I had done it; but even if I had had first crack at that stone, I don’t think it was in me to create what Arliss did. What I did do was to learn from it—learned to smack down my hand, curb my impulse to show off my carving prowess and resolve to seek the simple solution in all new creative works. The Arliss solution.
Critique? The offset posting is brilliant. I feel an incipient tension when I look at it, like maybe the owl will fly away. But—could be a pedestal of lighter scale would be à propos. Nothing more.

I’ve gratefully received Arliss’s acquiescence to ‘copy’ her fine little owl. Oh, I didn’t copy it exactly, but took her lesson, hammering out a derivative that gives great pleasure as it sits on my own lawn. You can see that I followed her lead in the two-sawcut eye treatment—but I couldn’t help going wild with the sawcuts on the body, this to tailor up the rough black granite slab from which it was carved. Whatever, the derivative was so popular at our October Art Crawl that I received two commissions from it whence I proudly proclaimed the Arliss influence. Thank you Arliss . . .